Boney Earnest's Suburban Hilltop Tent Revue

Wednesday, January 30, 2008 ... 4:04 PM

"Throw Me a Rope" Guest Entries #7, #8, and #9

Sorry I've been remiss about these. Here are some more. Dan writes:

I saw Gillian Welch for the first time after a Cardinals game at a club in St. Louis a couple of months back. My friend had gotten the tickets and was really juiced to go but, I wasn't really sure who she was. It wasn't until I saw her live in concert that I realized that I have enjoyed her voice many times before on the "O Brother Where Art Thou" soundtrack and her duets with Ryan Adams. Since the concert I have been in love with her voice and have purchased many of her Cds. I had never heard this new song, "Throw Me a Rope," until last night when I was watch her concert at St. Luke's in London and now I can't get it out of my head.

Emma generously shares with us this terrific coming of age vignette:

I guess I'll fall for your ruse--I'll swap you my Gillian Welch writing for your recording of a song which I have only heard through the grapevine is a must-have. Gladly. I'm in the library of my college at a tiny wooden carrel with the window open and freezing Maryland air blowing in on me but I can't bring myself to close the window and I
have a half hour or so to kill before I really need to get down to homework business.

HOW I FOUND GILLIAN WELCH [AND, SOMEWHAT, MYSELF] or TRYING TO PUT OFF HOMEWORK FOR THE SAKE OF ONE DARN MP3

I don't know when I first heard of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. For brevity's sake, I'll say it was about 4 years ago, when I was 14, though I think it was earlier. I started taking guitar lessons from a woman named Toy. Toy was from Louisiana and had a sweet singing voice with a twang I now covet and loved music with that same twang.

I was 14 and though I'd lived my whole life in the south, wanted nothing to do with it. I'd implore my parents to turn off anything that, to me, sounded "too country". My father listened alternately to dry, sarcastic indie rock and classic- and alt-country like George Jones, Whiskeytown and Lucinda Williams. I hated it. I hated southern accents, I hated hot summers, I hated sweet tea and I hated that I lived in North Carolina. Even the 'north' filled me with anger--why couldn't we be a stand alone state instead some god-forsaken redneck place that was really just a sad-sack half of Carolina?

In any case, Toy loved Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. I seem to remember her traveling a great distance to see them in concert and how wowed she was the next guitar lesson, which I did not understand at all. She made me a CD of her favorite songs which I listened to once and then discarded [how I wish I could find that CD now]. Too country was my refrain all the time. I associated it all with Tim McGraw and Faith Hill and had no idea of the finer shades of this sweet southern music--old time, bluegrass, creole music, whatever. It was all "too country". Toy tried to find some "not so country" songs to teach me but in the last few lessons she snuck a Gillian Welch song in there. I don't even remember what it was, now, but I can still half play it, unrecognizable to me.

I got older. I started to look at colleges, growing less and less certain that I wanted to leave the state. My friends and I slowly fell into an allegiance with our hometown, just before we were to leave it, which grew into love for our state and soon enough the southeastern US and everything it entailed. I learned to love sweet tea and all of a sudden, the only thing that was "too country" was Tim McGraw. I took up the banjo and we wasted countless hours trying to figure out Old Crow Medicine Show lyrics. I checked out the Smithsonian Anthology of American Folk music from the library and forced myself to listen to all 6 discs until I understood a little better where it all was coming from. Hearing it leak from my headphones, my roommates here at school dismissed it all as 'too country' for their tastes. I simply turned it up louder and and shook my head.

I kept reading about and hearing about Gillian Welch, kept putting her on my list of things to buy, eventually, when I wasn't such a poor high school student. I've never been that crazy about female vocalists, but I loved the snippets I had heard, and everything else I listened to seemed to lead back to Gillian and David--David produced an album I liked or Gillian Welch and David appeared on my favorite Ryan Adams records, whatever. I began my hunt in earnest [and oh, how this embarrasses me to say] when I heard in a radio interview a few weeks ago that Jill Andrews of The Everybodyfields, a band I love, say that she counted her as a big inspiration. I figured I should get will versed and downloaded a smattering of eight songs.

For three weeks now, I have listened to nothing else. I asked some friends which songs I should get next, with no car and no easy way to a record store. One said Throw Me a Rope, so here I am. As soon as I can, though, it will be my first purchase, even though I now already have many of her songs.

I could go on and on, about the Gillian Welch concert I missed to attend a horrific senior prom, or the way my friend and I puzzled over the hard G/soft G pronounciation of Gillian, or the time we watched Old Crow Medicine Show's Wagon Wheel video again and again just to see David Rawlings, but I think this is more than enough. Sorry.

I am in college in Maryland and have been here for only 2 months. I'm growing increasingly sure that it is not the right place for me and as the seasons grow colder, I only get more and more homesick for the home I once maligned. I don't have much of a drawl, not as much of one as I'd like, anyways, but get teased for the slight accent I have and southern phrases I have held fast to. In Gillian's sweet voice, despite her California Girl roots, I hear echoes of my home and a rich tradition of music I always rejected. I guess that's all there is to say... just that when I hear these songs I think to myself that "But I missed those hills with the windy pines/for their song seemed to suit me..."

And Tommy tells a story of meeting Gil & Dave that legitimizes the song title "Throw Me a Rope" ... and the Tent Revue's speakeasy distribution of the MP3.

So my story with Gillian goes like this:

I was familiar with her only by name and her work in "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" That is, until I visited my sister in Lexington, KY last November. It was then that, as we walked by The Dame (a rockin' awesome venue in downtown Lexington) that my sister suddenly said, "Oh, Dave Rawlings is going to be here this week. It says 'with special guest'...I wonder if Gillian is playing, too?" Well, those might not be her exact words, but that's the gist. So we went to the concert, and much to my delight I was in awe of them during the whole show. But my favorite part of the show was a song that, not knowing the actual name of it, I coined "the pretty unison song." I tried as hard as I could to find out the name of it, but to no avail.

A few days later, I moved back to Birmingham, AL, where the Dave Rawlings Machine was scheduled to play in a couple of weeks. I bought two tickets but ended up going alone to the show. I'm glad I did, though, because I saw some old friends there, and it also kept me free to stay late after the show and talk to Gillian and Dave. Dave, being as humble as he is, was stoked that he had met someone who had come to TWO "Machine" shows on its first tour. After I had them sign the CD I had just purchased, I asked Dave and Gillian what the name of "that pretty unison song" was that they played in Lexington. They said it had two names, "Throw Me a Rope," and "The Way It Would Be." They said that it hadn't been released on any recording, but I might be able to find it on the net somewhere as a bootleg. So I tried, but once again got nothing.

Now it's a year later, and I joined a Facebook group that led me to your blog and offer. I can't tell you how excited I am to hear the song again!

Thanks folks for contributing!

Still more to come.

Labels: Gillian Welch "Throw Me a Rope" Guest Entries

Brendan

0 comments | 7"

Friday, January 04, 2008 ... 3:20 PM

Brendan's 2007 lists

My favorite new albums of 2007, some disappointing new albums of 2007, and a few favorite discoveries from years past. Cross-posted at HickoryWind.org.

Top 8 Albums of 2007

8. Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings: 100 Days, 100 Nights
Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings continue to do that thing they do. I'm the last to catch on as usual, but happy I caught on at all. Now I have to catch up.

7. Mighty Ghosts of Heaven: Mighty Ghosts of Heaven
Mighty Ghosts of Heaven call up Bascom Lamar Lunsford and Moonshine Kate on the Ouija board of an open-back banjo, and take a roll in the hay with Old-Time string band music, and they do it with so much joy and verve it's impossible not to remember that some of our smilingest moon-faced moonshine music came out of a Great Depression.

6. The Sadies: New Seasons
The Sadies zero in on their heretofore neglected deftness with lyric and melody and come up with their first album that doesn't sag or lag between peaks in their instrumental acrobatics. Pure distilled Bigsby-bent energy.

5. PJ Harvey: White Chalk
Polly takes it down a notch and delivers her strongest album since To Bring You My Love.

4. Nina Nastasia & Jim White: You Follow Me
Nina overcomes partner Jim White's Throw-My-Drums-Down-the-Stairs technique to deliver the strongest PJ Harvey album since Rid of Me.

3. Josh Ritter: The Historical Conquests of ...
"The Temptation of Adam" threatens to crack beneath the weight of its cleverness. Each progressively cute couplet creaks the rafters. But that last line is so haunting, so chilling -- both beautiful and horrifying. With that tune and the rollicking first track, Josh reminds us that right up to apocalypse, be it Biblical or nukular (or both, as our case might be), boys and girls will continue to fall in love and sing songs to get each other into bed. That assertion of the essentially carnal human spirit, both gentle and animal, is comforting in this gloomy age of the decline of our empire.

2. Eilen Jewell: Letters From Sinners & Strangers
Eilen, with a voice made of liquor and wildflowers and a band of crack sidemen that would comfortably back either Patsy Cline or Rose Maddox, uncovers an astonishing treasure of melodies from the same three-chord creek in which American songsters have been panning for gold a century or longer.

1. Wilco: Sky Blue Sky
Yeah, it's sort of a boring pick. I didn't mean for it to be my favorite 2007 album. But I put it on the car stereo around Christmastime, for the first time since the early Summer, and I realized that I knew all the words to all the songs, and felt as though I always had. I think it's no coincidence that on the heels of their tour promoting this record, which itself plays like a career retrospective, Wilco have forted up at home in Chicago to play through their entire back catalogue, one album at a time. Sky Blue Sky feels like the end of a decade-long ride, and I'm curious as hell to see where they go next.

* * *

Disappointing Albums of 2007

Grant-Lee Phillips's half-baked Strangelet disappointed, too heavy on the rocknroll drums and curiously light on the loving lyrical tangles that made Virginia Creeper Grant-Lee's best album before or after the Buffalo. For its stray moments of melodic invention (listen to the second line of the first track's chorus), and for its bombast that suggests Buffalo nostalgia, I considered tacking Strangelet on for a number 9. I would still follow Phillips's luxurious and raggedy voice over the edge of a waterfall, but comparing Strangelet to similar artist Josh Ritter's pretty amazing Historical Conquests ... they just aren't in the same league. C'mon, G-L, you can do better.

Meanwhile, with At the End of Paths Taken, Cowboy Junkies made a third much-diminished return to their 2001 peak album Open. They do this every six or seven years: one great album and its several receding ripples. Maybe their next record will make the next big splash.

After their deeply affecting previous two albums, Okkervil River's The Stage Names felt flimsy and forced to me, unable to sustain the weight of its own whininess.

And if I may indulge a moment in contrarian blogger snark: The Everybodyfields? Somebody hand these kids a mop. Jesus Christ. I agree that life is full of suffering -- but damp, lacy Victorian bathos like Nothing Is Okay is partly why.

* * *

5 eMusic Explorations

Why top 8? Well I'm sure there'd have been two more new albums I'd have loved this year if I had heard them, but I spent so much time riffling around in eMusic's dusty shelves and drawers and shadowy eaves, I think I ought to spend some space reporting on a few of the nuggets I discovered there this year.

Band of Blacky Ranchette: "Getting It Made"
Howe Gelb's oddball country music side project wobbles in quality across a full album, but Neko Case's gusty melodic contribution to this country-pop tune made it one of my iPod favorites this year.

Alela Diane: "Dry Grass and Shadow"
A hay-flavored slice of New Weird American pie, Diane's honey-sunny apple orchard voice turns her words over and over to taste their consonants and connotations. Her album The Pirate's Gospel wears itself out early thanks to the sameness of its bare-guitar texture, but this fully fleshed single is an expert-cut little gem.

Corrina Repp: "Safe Place in the World"
Somewhere I read that she's a combination Neko Case and Portishead, so, you know -- I was right there. Turns out Repp is more Nico than Neko: cold and alien, though still dampened enough by rainy Northwestern hominess to soften her snooty Mod influences. She tends toward moody more than groovy, but this tune grooves in its spacey way, like Nancy Sinatra heard through Martian underwater radio.

Simon Joyner: "You Don't Know Me"
Soul-scarringly bleak, this Bright Eyes forebear sings like Lou Reed if Lou Reed were an Omaha hobo. The backing band sound like Patti Smith's band on Horses, hard-edged, strung-out and hungry, only with cowboy hats. Oh but there's so much jaw-dropping poetry and honest emotion brimming across the whole despair-dazed record, it's worth plumbing the unremitting grimness. Just don't listen to it if you're already feeling lousy, because it will stifle your last breath of hope. Oh and don't listen to it if you're in a good mood, because its pelt of freezing rain will break up your parade and follow you home and into your bed and beneath your covers and into your dreams. Powerful stuff.

Karen Dalton: "Same Old Man"
The late Middle Weird America matron too late catching a piece of long-owed recognition in 2007, thanks to eMusic's promotion and a spot on Oxford American's Southern Music CD, Dalton worked mainly on pedal steeled-up Memphis soul, to uneven results, ranging from exemplary to what my wife rightly characterized as Bad Karaoke ("When a Man Loves a Woman"). But it's Dalton's pair of banjo tunes on this cult classic album In My Own Time that rappel most deeply the steep misty face of Amerian folk music. The clawhammer "Katie Cruel" and up-picked "Same Old Man" seem to belong to no time period at all, but only to the ground beneath their feet, reminding me most of Washington Irving's supernatural Alleghenia, sowed with the blood of warring Europeans and enslaved Africans and thousands of years of Native Americans, and growing these strange mushrooms, hallucinogenic and bitter.

Brendan

1 comments | 7"

Making Notes: Music of the Carolinas
(Novello Festival Press, April 2008)
includes my essay, "Link Wray"

SITES WHICH THE TENT REVUE RECOMMENDS

MUSIC
Flop Eared Mule
The Celestial Monochord
HickoryWind.org
Dig and Be Dug in Return
Modern Acoustic Magazine / Blog
The Old, Weird America
Honey, Where You Been So Long?

LITERATURE
The Greensboro Review
Mixed Animal
Night Train
Fried Chicken and Coffee
Mungo (This was the blog of my friend, the late Cami Park. Miss you, Cami.)
Staccato Fiction
Wigleaf
PANK Magazine

OTHER
Cat and Girl
Film Freak Central

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