Poor David’s Almanack is David Rawlings’ third album or his eighth, depending on how you count. In the last 10 years, he’s made two records as the Dave Rawlings Machine, a loose reference to the old Woody Guthrie slogan, but he’s made five more with his musical partner Gillian Welch under her name. They both play on each other’s record, they both inform the direction each other’s music takes, but they maintain separate musical identities. Yet, their combined catalog comprises perhaps the most ambitious and most peculiar corpus in roots music today, one that digs deep into the past to find neglected song forms and defiantly old-timey notions: new ways of old singing, of just inhabiting the music.
His latest is credited to just David Rawlings, but it features Welch and members of the Machine. He remains the most prominent personality on the album, and he’s a fine singer with a slightly nasal twang, a way of bleating his vowels that belies his New England origins. Listen to Rawlings dive into the chorus of “Lindsey Button,” drawing out each syllable: “A long time ago.” There’s a full decade in each word. He’s an even better guitar player, with a graceful picking style and a full bag of tricks. When he bends his notes on “Airplane,” he adds an earthbound dissonance to its airborne chorus. In his songwriting, Rawlings favors the repetition of the blues and the wily phrasing of folk. He rewrites the old tune “Cumberland Gap,” popularized by Guthrie and Lonnie Donegan, into a third-person tale of lost love and hard times.
Rawlings, Welch, and the backing players use the same instruments available to any roots musician, but very little roots music sounds quite like this. That’s partly due to Rawlings’ production. He’s lent his touch to albums by Ryan Adams, Bright Eyes, and Dawes, and has a notoriously discriminating ear, to the extent that he and Welch are only just now releasing vinyl editions of their albums after 15 years of unsatisfactory test pressings. There’s a crisp intimacy to the record, but also a self-awareness. He and especially Welch were long dogged by criticisms of “inauthenticity,” which might have more to do with her L.A. origins, but they’ve managed to outlast them. Still, there is useful playacting to their music, as though they understand that any 21st century folk singer necessarily has some distance on their subject.
Folk music has traditionally spoken to its present moment, addressing contemporaneous events and circumstances: murders and mining disasters, economic downturns and income inequality. So you might listen to Poor David’s Almanack and wish Rawlings had more to say about 2017. “Yup” is about a woman too strong-willed for the devil to keep in Hell; “Good God a Woman” is about Adam pestering his Creator to hurry up with Eve. They might hint toward contemporary feminist attitudes, but that’s a stretch—and perhaps Rawlings intends it to be a stretch. “Money Is the Meat in the Coconut,” with its carnivalesque tone and tale of monkeys getting married, sounds like an old political cartoon set to music, its inspiring calamity long forgotten even as the monkeys keep stealing kisses.
Despite his obvious debts to Guthrie and Bob Dylan, Rawlings is no protest singer. His truest subject is not really the past—or, not merely the past. Rather, it’s the joy to be found in old songs, in old instruments, in old sounds, in old perspectives. Nearly every tune on Poor David’s Almanack has roots in something or someone specific. “Come on Over My House” is surely meant to echo Robert Johnson’s invitation in “Come on in My Kitchen,” recorded 80 years ago. Rawlings scrambles the scenario, speaking in the voice of a poor man in love with a woman above his station and repeating the refrain, “But I surely love you, surely love you!” Lusty but not leering, the song has a freewheeling pace, a bright and excitable tone grounded as much in the vocal harmonies as in the lyrics themselves. And that’s key to what distinguishes Rawlings from so many of his contemporaries: He manages to convey the same exuberance and spirit in his own music that he hears in his favorite old tunes.
