“If any of y’all wanna give me shit about my twang, you can just do it,” Gillian Welch once told a chatty San Francisco crowd in 1994. It was two years before Welch would release her debut Revival, but the California-bred daughter of two entertainers was already anticipating the skepticism that would greet her when she rose to prominence in the mid-to-late ’90s singing about destitute coal miners and Depression-era whiskey runners with an unsettling familiarity for someone born in New York City, raised in Los Angeles, and who found their lifetime musical partner at a conservatory in Boston.
In 1994, Welch’s repertoire consisted largely of a number of songs that would never find their way onto a record, a handful of traditional tunes, and some John Prine covers. For an artist with an aesthetic as carefully and consistently rendered as Gillian Welch, it’s strange to think of a time when she wasn’t producing or reproducing that aesthetic, but was, rather, searching for it herself.
That sense of fresh discovery and wide-eyed experimentation can be heard plainly on Boots No. 1, Welch’s first archival release that serves as a 20th anniversary expanded release for her debut LP. The two-disc collection is comprised of outtakes, demos, and alternate takes culled from the Revival sessions, a time when Welch and guitarist Dave Rawlings were first honing in on their precise sound, mood, and style. “There really was no me. The artist Gillian Welch didn’t really exist,” Welch has said of the sessions, “And then after that, I did.”
Welch’s spectral country music has always felt otherworldly in its ability to evoke feelings, memories and atmosphere on command. “Sound [that] holds moods the way humid air holds smells,” is how writer Jedediah Purdy has described it. Part of the revelation of Boots No. 1, then, is witnessing Welch’s music made mortal, to hear her navigating her many influences with a young artist’s enlightened uncertainty, and to hear imperfect recordings that may not necessarily conjure universes on their own accord so much as they recall old-fashioned country music that’d sound at home on the radio.
Some of the most thrilling moments on this 21-song release are just that: hit records. “455 Rocket” is a hand-clapping muscle car ode in which Welch deadpans goofy lines likes like, “Whose junk pile piece of sh….Chevelle is this?” “Dry Town” is a talking country-blues Johnny Cash pastiche about craving a six-pack for the road. The former became a hit for country singer Kathy Mattea in 1997, while the latter ended up, a decade later, on Miranda Lambert’s chart-topping Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.
Boots No. 1 takes a more subtle approach than landmark archival releases like Dylan’s Bootleg Series. With dozens of songs remaining unreleased from this period, many of which, like “Birds of a Feather” and “Unfinished Business,” are even more telling examples of the diverse country traditions Welch was soaking up at the time, this collection is definitively more interested in tracing Revival’s process and evolution than in presenting any sort of radically alternate history of Welch’s mid-90’s artistry.
Nevertheless, witnessing gradual transformation can be revelatory, and several early takes lay bare the process of refining Gillian Welch into “Gillian Welch” with staggering clarity. The version of “Paper Wings” that made its way to the final album is much slower, sparser, and jazz-leaning than the honky-tonk demo. Moments like this show how greatly producer T Bone Burnett’s subtle aesthetics helped sculpt Welch’s sound.
Listening to the original Revival now, it’s astounding to hear all the constructed artifices and delicate contemporary flourishes that were so easy to overlook when the album first came out. The closing moments of “Orphan Girl,” Welch’s first signature tune, reveal a shocking swirl of grungy guitar feedback and tape distortion. “One More Dollar” is just one of several songs with a crisp, full rhythm section, a reminder that Welch and Rawlings wouldn’t settle into their now-famous acoustic duo format until 1998’s follow up Hell Among the Yearlings.
As several of these new songs also affirm, Welch’s third-person storylines often point inwards at moving autobiography. Like so much of Revival, “Wichita” and “Riverboat Song” are stories of movement and motion that trace both the thrill of fleeing home and the lonely alienation of being a stranger in the big city. Both songs were written just a year after Welch and Rawlings had moved to Nashville, a period when the two singers lived a ghostly existence spent largely recording music in the middle of the night by themselves.
Part of Welch and Rawlings’ aura is the sense that their music exists out of time, so it’s illuminating to hear the two artists conversing so intimately with contemporary genres and artists. They cover Robert Earl Keen and later, respond to him in song with “I Don’t Want to Go Downtown.” Lyrically, “Barroom Girls” is an equal-rights-to-party anthem that would’ve sounded at home on a Lilith Fair mainstage. On the other hand, “Pass You by” is strikingly loud, just a full drum-kit away from sounding like an outtake on Wilco’s roots-grunge opus Being There, released six months after Revival.
All of which goes to show that the authenticity scare that surrounded Welch upon her arrival feels, twenty years later, almost unrecognizably dated. Perhaps it’s because Welch herself, who would go on to play an integral role in Americana’s big-bang O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack just a few years later, has since become the very aesthetic and artistic paradigm for 21st-century roots singer-songwriters. Or, perhaps, it’s because the anxieties about Welch’s authentic credentials were so misguided in the first place.
