Writing partners Gillian Welch and David Rawlings write and perform songs under the name Gillian Welch (as if that was an eponymous band name). The Harrow & The Harvest released earlier in the year (2011) provides yet again a glimpse into a time both forgotten and yearned for. The tone, as her previous album releases captures rural Appalachia, the Ozarks, Okie plains, and the deep country South.
The Harrow & The Harvest opens with the rhythmic guitar plunk of Scarlet Town. A song about heading to a corrupt town and becoming...well...corrupted, finding love to lose it and finding sin that will damn you. Welch constantly seeks the dark side of rural life with bleak stories of characters who have no redemption or hope. It's no different with The Way That It Goes which opens with the lyric "Becky Johnson bought the farm and put a needle in her arm, that's the way it goes." Although modern in language it hearkens back to early 20th century folk music, operating in that amoral gloom of poverty or depression and murder ballads. It's that black and white understanding of how hard life can be. There's no judgement really, nor right or wrong...it's just the way that it goes.
Most of the songs are Welch's and Rawlings' otherworldly harmonies, two guitars or guitar and banjo. The segue into Six White Horses is old time banjo accompanied by muted, sluggish hand claps with a simple harmonica taking the music chorus. Welch takes a solo outing on the sparse Hard Times. It's just banjo and her hauntingly sweet voice except for some light harmonies on the choruses. The song is about a "Camptown man" and the love he shares with his work mule. Of the songs on this album, even though the Camptown man loses his mule, the lyric to the chorus "hard times ain't gonna rule my mind" is a bittersweet understanding that a person has to go on in the face of loss, death, or loneliness - that the alternative to those penalties of living are somehow better.
This album is not much different than the rest of her catalog. All her albums are great ciphers of a different time. The Harrow & The Harvest is no exception. Powerful, dark, literate, with no judgement of the character or actions of the uncomplicated souls that inhabit this fine set of songs.
The Harrow & The Harvest opens with the rhythmic guitar plunk of Scarlet Town. A song about heading to a corrupt town and becoming...well...corrupted, finding love to lose it and finding sin that will damn you. Welch constantly seeks the dark side of rural life with bleak stories of characters who have no redemption or hope. It's no different with The Way That It Goes which opens with the lyric "Becky Johnson bought the farm and put a needle in her arm, that's the way it goes." Although modern in language it hearkens back to early 20th century folk music, operating in that amoral gloom of poverty or depression and murder ballads. It's that black and white understanding of how hard life can be. There's no judgement really, nor right or wrong...it's just the way that it goes.
Most of the songs are Welch's and Rawlings' otherworldly harmonies, two guitars or guitar and banjo. The segue into Six White Horses is old time banjo accompanied by muted, sluggish hand claps with a simple harmonica taking the music chorus. Welch takes a solo outing on the sparse Hard Times. It's just banjo and her hauntingly sweet voice except for some light harmonies on the choruses. The song is about a "Camptown man" and the love he shares with his work mule. Of the songs on this album, even though the Camptown man loses his mule, the lyric to the chorus "hard times ain't gonna rule my mind" is a bittersweet understanding that a person has to go on in the face of loss, death, or loneliness - that the alternative to those penalties of living are somehow better.
This album is not much different than the rest of her catalog. All her albums are great ciphers of a different time. The Harrow & The Harvest is no exception. Powerful, dark, literate, with no judgement of the character or actions of the uncomplicated souls that inhabit this fine set of songs.
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