Epiphone Black Beauty

Gillian Welch sings that rock n roll to Winston-Salem crowd

And Welch has another 10 songs entered into her well-appointed catalog of work built on old-time idioms that the Cali-born-and-bred Welch seems to channel from another lifetime. She may never stray from her own conventions, but it feels like a new work of art in its own right is created every time Welch and her steadfast songwriting and performing partner David Rawlings step on stage together. The pair’s performance at the Millennium Center last Thursday was no different.

 

There’s a rapport between Welch and Rawlings that suggests both should have existed decades ago in some Appalachian hamlet where social mores are preserved like jars of dewberry and pectin. The buttoned-up smart- ness of Rawlings’ jacket and Stetson is always in slight contrast to the modesty of Welch’s homespun dress and flat red hair. With their vintage instruments in hand— Rawlings’ 1935 Epiphone Olympic and Welch with a ’56 Gibson — both stand as the personification of the music they create together.

White curtains hung all around the venue as dampeners to the occasionally invasive reverb that affects louder shows there, but they were also a chaste garnish to Welch and Rawlings’ Spartan presence. Their set opened not with a selection from The Harrow & The Harvest, but with “Orphan Girl,” whose unaffected sincerity shows Welch communicating her heart and soul in their rawest form. The set did feature plenty of the new material — eight of the album’s 10 songs to be exact — though not all have that enduring, focused quality of Welch’s many truly great works. “The Way That It Goes” comes off as a confused patchwork of missives loosely strung together by Rawlings’ chromatic fingerpick runs. It’s a respectable song in its own right, but too typical of lesser songwriters.

There are a few on The Harrow & The Harvest that fit that description — “Silver Dagger” and “Tennessee” fill the murder and drinking song quota respectively — but there are others imbued with Welch’s exceptionalism that transcend topicality. When she sings the line, “They gonna rule my mind,” “Hard Times” feels faintly like Welch laying her own troubles out rather than serving as the spiritual medium for a part generation. She later turned handclaps into hoof clops and clogged through the instrumental passages to the pastoral “Six White Horses” while Rawlings bore the harmonica and banjo burden.