Release Date: 12 June, 2001
Audio CD
Tracks
- Orphan Girl
- Annabelle
- Pass You By
- Barroom Girls
- One More Dollar
- By the Mark
- Paper Wings
- Tear My Stillhouse Down
- Acony Bell
- Only One and Only
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Rating 5.0
Walker Evans set to music.When I first heard "Revival" in 1996, I was driving from my home in Torrington, Connecticut, to North Adams, Massachusetts. It's a two-hour trip through the hilltowns of the Berkshires, one of the most intensely rural areas of New England. I had just bought the CD after reading a review, and I decided to give it a spin on my trip.
Why was I driving to North Adams? To begin the process of writing a book (Steeples) about the little city, once a milltown, and now struggling to revive itself by the installation of a major art museum in an old factory site. The songs on this CD, the spare sound of the arrangements, and the unaffected, sad voice of Gillian Welch provided a perfect background for the long, winding journey. It set the tone for my first visit, and after that, I played it every time I drove to North Adams. Gillian and David evoke, in a musical context, the great depression-era photographs of Walker Evans. And even though North Adams sits in the most northern region of the Appalachians, the songs created in me the very essence of the American struggle, and they colored every word I wrote.
A few years later, while was working on my second book about North Adams, called Disappearing Into North Adams (see www.sevensteeples.com), I decided to include the lyrics to some of the songs on "Revival," because they had become so associated with my view of the city. I just had to let readers understand how they inspired my writing. It turned out that they fit perfectly into the narrative, almost like some sort of movie soundtrack. I am so grateful that Gillian's publisher gave me permission to use them.
I now live in Massachusetts, about an hour away from North Adams, and I visit the city at least once a week. And on my CD player, "Revival" still accompanies me on that trip through the hilltowns. This amazing recording has been, in part, responsible for MY "revival," and I will never let it out of my sight.So She's From Southern California....and Your Point Is??One of the stupider criticisms floating in the ether about Gillian Welch is that she somehow has no business singing in her Appalachian back country style because she hasn't lived it. Is Flannery O'Connor disqualified from writing A Good Man is Hard to Find because she spent most of her life sickly and living with her mother? But I digress...
Revival is Welch's first CD and outstanding promise of what was -- and surely still is -- to come. It fires the mold of her work -- spare vocals in lovely harmony with her partner David Rawlings and strumming dual acoustic guiters. This quiet approach forces attention to her stories and, generally, her writing is strong enough to make those stories memorable. Faith is a constant, rock core element to her music and underlines two of the best cuts on Revival, Orphan Girl and By the Mark. Recurring too are an appreciation of the beauty and demands of nature (Annabelle and Acony Bell) and sympathetic accounts of souls clinging to the fringes of the American dream (Barroom Girls and One More Dollar). Pass You By is one of only a couple cuts here that revs up the basic sound and it's well-chosen, making the song throb like the V-8 engine it lauds. Welch's relative weakness, I think, is the occasional foray into a lost love song (on Revival that would be Paper Wings and Only One and Only) where she is not nearly so distinctive.
Revival also lacks the expanded vision of her later CDs where she begins constructing her own take on American mythology (think Miss Ohio, April the 14th or Elvis Presley Blues). Still, this was a fine starting point to her career and is worth owning.
I Can't Live Without - REVIVALI bought Revival without knowing much about Gillian
Welch. I am now a convert. It has been several years
and I can stop listening to this album. There is just
something about her voice and the folk music on this
album that touches my soul. I would recommend it to
anyone interested in folk music. I now own all of
Gillian's albums, but this one is the best by far. |
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