Authenticity can be a shield or a cudgel, and no art form has gone to war over it (and with it) like country music. Johnny Cash didn’t shoot a man just to watch him die, Merle Haggard wasn’t an Okie from Muskogee, the Chicks (probably) didn’t poison anyone with black-eyed peas. But for the entire history of the genre and all its red-headed stepchildren, a core requirement for success was to pretend like you belonged or show requisite shame and reverence. So, what happened when two Yankees delivered an album that seemed to have been unearthed from 1920s Appalachia?
Gillian Welch was born in New York but raised in California. Her steadfast musical partner, David Rawlings, was from Rhode Island. The pair met while studying at Berklee College of Music when both auditioned for a country band. Welch would later say that hearing 1950s bluegrass duo the Stanley Brothers changed the course of her life. Rawlings’ famed guitar is a 1935 Epiphone Olympic he scavenged from a garage when it didn’t have any strings. Two past-worshipping music school nerds calling their debut album Revival might’ve felt a bit on the nose, but it made sense in the strange setting of the 1990s.
George Strait had been the genre’s defining juggernaut for over a decade, and Garth Brooks was bigger than most pop stars. Meanwhile a swath of female artists had fused pop and country to outsell Biggie, Nas, Weezer, and nearly any other major artist outside of country. Then the rootsier, less-polished side was worshipping at the altar of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska. The Boss’s haunting, four-track recordings would become a template for bedroom songwriters and the nascent alt-country scene for the next two decades. Strait’s behemoth breakout Strait from the Heart coming out the same year as Nebraska feels like a sort of kismet, presenting two paths for the wider country/Americana sound.
But Welch and Rawlings tunneled into the past instead of moving further down the road. Revival was long before Joanna Newsom or Fleet Foxes recast indie-folk. Before Revival, Richard Thompson and Comus mutated British rock music with misremembered, ancient traditions. It was also the precursor to O Brother, Where Art Thou?,whose unexpected success can be thanked (or blamed) for the explosion of interest in American folk music around Y2K, and the later stomp-clamp dumbassery of the early 2010s. Legendary producer T Bone Burnett’s uncanny knack for knowing what was about to pop off led him to a Welch and Rawlings gig, and he agreed to be as hands-off as possible while recording them. Revival is not a hi-fi album by any means, especially next to the poppy gloss that was dominating the charts, but it bears a cleaner sound than, say, Silver Jews’ The Natural Bridge, which came out six months later.
Some of Revival’s songs would’ve slotted nicely into the Chicks’ discography, especially the hardscrabble blues of “One More Dollar.” But much of the album rejects modernity, reaching instead into something older, darker. Appalachia has the greatest ghost stories in the United States for a reason. From the crimes of chattel slavery to the devastating poverty that ground the populace into bone and dust, the region is haunted. Opening with “Orphan Girl” sets the tone for the rest of the record—and Welch’s career. The warm hum of the bass and guitar creates a comforting hammock beneath her lilting, wailing lament. “Blessed savior make me willing / And walk beside me until I’m with them,” she closes, barely clinging to hope. One of the greatest joys in music is walking into a bar and seeing a bluegrass or folk jam that makes you stay, nursing a beer for hours just to hear one more song. Turning on Revival and hearing “Orphan Girl” is exactly that, every time.
The tight, perfect harmonies of “Annabelle” trace the grief of sharecroppers and Dust Bowl farmers, the yoke of capitalism and the rage of nature wearing them down to the nub. Revival’s prayers act as an anchoring point, the last refuge in a world as harsh as Lonesome Dove. But they usually go unanswered. “Anna’s in the churchyard, she’s got no life at all / She’s only got these words on a stone,” Welch sings, the epitaph giving her no relief, only a reminder of what she’s lost.
The electric guitar and clacking bass on “Pass You By” is the first hint of the present, and Revival does indulge in some surreality at the edges. Setting a precedent for records like Neko Case’s Fox Confessor Brings the Flood ten years later, the straightforward country tunes on Revival are warped and unhinged by flickering spirits playing with the amps. There are the ping-ponging harmonies on “By the Mark,” with Welch dueting with herself, and the Twin Peaks reverb of “Paper Wings” that brings a sense of the uncanny to the shuffling tune. There’s a tinge of “Blue Velvet” to Welch’s delivery, like she’s delivering the lines while doped up on painkillers. Even “Orphan Girl” has a strange, whirring morass at the very back of the song, thanks to Jay Joyce (before he was dominating the Country Music Awards as a producer) fiddling around with an E-bow, filling the space with warmth.
Most of Welch’s lyrics are straight out of an Alan Lomax estate sale. But there are moments where the lyricist she would become, deft and devastating, arrive at the forefront. “Oh, the night came undone like a party dress / And fell at her feet in a beautiful mess,” she sings on “Barroom Girls,” leaving Flannery O’Connor smiling someplace beyond the grave. There’s also the righteous military march on “Tear My Still House Down,” which recalls Steve Earle’s “Copperhead Road”: “Go tell all your children that Hell ain’t no dream / ‘Cause Satan, he lives in my whiskey machine,” Welch hollers, tipping her cap to the feverish preaching of The Louvin Brothers.
Despite Revival’s gospel trappings, the greatest moment of peace and resilience comes from nature. “Acony Bell,” the penultimate track, is a brief ray of light in all of Welch and Rawlings’ dusty sorrow. The pair’s rubber-band-tight harmonies sing the praises of the titular flower, so small and fragile yet blooming in the harshest mountain peaks. Considering how much of Revival is preoccupied with individual troubles in the face of incomprehensible forces, having Welch sing from that little flower’s perspective. “And it tells the world, ‘Why should I wait? / This ice and snow is gonna melt away’” is genuinely blissful, moving. “Acony Bell” also features one of Rawlings’ most delightful solos, his notes tumbling and spinning like the horses on a carousel.
Of course, Revival wasn’t going to let any of us escape without a tear. Closer “Only One and Only” is a happy melody but a desperate story. It feels like a spiritual sequel to Blaze Foley’s version of “If Only I Could Fly,” meditating on lost love and what could’ve been as Welch’s voice fades into a whisper and Rawlings plays a loping, lounging solo. Though neither Welch nor Rawlings have much of a connection to Texas, they evoke Townes Van Zandt on “Only One and Only.” Beyond the Carter Family, Welch owes Townes a thing or two for her vocal delivery. Both singers could wail like a funeral procession but also knew how to wring devastation out of understatement and directness. Welch can still do that. Listen back to the original “Pancho and Lefty” and you’ll hear in Townes her ability to turn the screw on the simplest line. You’ll also hear Rawlings fall in and out of meter, his guitar rambling wherever it will.
Strangely, the reaction to Revival at the time was mixed. There was a Grammy nomination in 1997. No Depression, pioneers of the alt-country tag, loved the album and sensed a sea change. Conversely, critic Ann Powers had an uncharacteristically wrongheaded and nasty reaction to Revival. “Gillian Welch doesn’t play rock music, but the determination with which she has cast herself into a role that by no right belongs to her shows pure rock attitude,” she wrote in her review for Rolling Stone, calling Welch’s songwriting “museum-careful invocations.” She oddly dings Welch for writing fiction rather than pull from her own experience. Then there was Robert Christgau, who declared that Welch “just doesn’t have the voice, eye, or way with words to bring her simulation off. Unless you’re highly susceptible to good intentions, a malady some refer to as folkie’s disease, that should be that.” Good thing you never went into the predictions market, Bob. Both reactions are extremelyfunny to hear from a Seattle and New York native, determining what is and what is not authentic country music. There’s a hint of self-loathing in both reviews, revealing a gatekeeper’s guilty conscience.
But in fairness to them, Revival arrived during the most fractured time in country music history. In 1996, the country charts were dominated by a 13-year-old with crossover appeal, perhaps the first sign that the genre’s early-‘90s boom was coming to an end. But not even industry accolades could give some artists true mass appeal. While Welch and Rawlings’ closest peers, Nickel Creek and Alison Krauss, snagged Grammy wins and noms, the Chicks were outselling Alan Jackson and George Strait. It would take the unprecedented success of O Brother Where Art Thou? for this strain of folk and country music to find its commercial potency, with Welch, Rawlings, Burnett, Krauss, Emmylou Harris, and the Stanley Brothers all featured on the soundtrack.
With time, Revival became a path to success for artists uninterested in the rot of mainstream country. Welch and Rawlings certainly followed it on their next album, Hell Among the Yearlings, whichrefined their debut’s formula, doubling down on its most haunting moments (“Caleb Meyer”) and making its modern detours stranger (“Whiskey Girl”). And then there was 2001’s Time (The Revelator),a titanic release that is among the best albums of the 21st century, and whose title track might be the greatest song of the 2000s altogether. If country and Americana music is in a constant struggle of self-realization and authenticity, Revival was a welcome balm touched by sheer excellence: demanding and deserving of a place at the table.
Read our 2024 cover story on Gillian Welch and David Rawlings here.
Nathan Stevens is a musician, archivist, and podcaster whose work has appeared in Spectrum Culture, Stereogum, and Popmatters. He currently runs the music interview website Woodhouse.
Keep scrolling for more great stories.