Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of Gillian Welch performing "Orphan Girl".
CD Review
Revival, Gillian Welch, Almo Records, 2001
The Carter Family, Maybelle and Sara Carter, June Carter Cash, Jean Ritchie and so on. What they all have in common is that they form part of the line of our common mountain music heritage. I am sure that there are others whom I could have included without doing an injustice but I wanted to make this point. Just as the folk revivalists of the 1960’s searched for roots musicians (once they knew they were still alive and kicking and waiting, just waiting, for a second chance) to emulate and then extend those musical traditions today there is a need for develop a new generation of mountain music singers. That task has been made infinitely easier by the emergence over the past decade or so of Gilliam Welch in order to keep this mournful mountain music alive. This CD under review, “Revival”, from 1996 is my prima facie case for that last statement.
I do not, honestly, know the details of this singer’s background although I have heard that she is from some upscale background in California. And that is the rub here. Before I knew that information, whether it is true or not, I would have sworn on that proverbial stack of bibles that she was from the hills and hollows of Harlan County, Kentucky or somewhere nearby. That gives her plenty of credibility in my circles. What gives her more, much more is her voice and her song selection as she goes through the mountain women’s litany of troubles: not enough money, two many kids, a hard-drinking, two- fisted man who takes out his frustrations on … well you know the rest. And then there are the songs of lost, like “Orphan Girl” (the first song of Ms. Welch’s that I ever heard), longing and, of course, out in those lonely hills facing an inscrutable god, death. Welcome to the mountain music tradition.
Gillian Welch, Orphan Girl Lyrics
I am an orphan on God's highway
But I'll share my troubles if you go my way
I have no mother no father
No sister no brother
I am an orphan girl
I have had friendships pure and golden
But the ties of kinship I have not known them
I know no mother no father
No sister no brother
I am an orphan girl
But when He calls me I will be able
To meet my family at God's table
I'll meet my mother my father
My sister my brother
No more orphan girl
Blessed Savior make me willing
And walk beside me until I'm with them
Be my mother my father
My sister my brother
I am an orphan girl
Gillian Welch, Annabelle Lyrics
I lease twenty acres and one Jenny mule
From the Alabama trust
Half of the cotton, a third of the corn
Ya get a handful of dust
Chorus:
And we can not have all things to please us
No matter how we try
Until we've all gone to Jesus
We can only wonder why
I had a daughter called her Annabelle
She's the apple of my eye
Tried to give her something like I never had
I didn't want to ever hear her cry
Chorus
When I'm dead and buried I'll take a hard life of tears
For every day I've ever known
Anna's in the churchyard, she's got no life at all
She's only got these words on a stone
Chorus
Until we've all gone to Jesus
We only wonder why
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