Live Music (Gillian Welch and David Rawlings)

I first saw Gillian Welch (and David Rawlings) perform in 1998 at the Towne Crier Café, which was then located in Pawling, NY. The capacity there couldn't have been more than 150 or so, and as I remember I was seated with some friends at a table right next to the stage. I had heard at least one of the two records Welch had out at the time, and had liked it well enough to buy a copy, but even so I wasn't prepared for what I heard. Her singing and songwriting were brilliant enough on record, but seeing the two performers up-close, with David chiming in with tight harmonies and the extraordinary sounds he got out of a little Epiphone archtop acoustic guitar, was nothing short of a revelation. (Rawlings doesn't simply play brilliantly; he plays inventively, with wit.)

In time, the couple became too popular for tiny clubs like the Towne Crier, and though I bought most of their subsequent records I didn't have a chance to see them alive again until this week, in a sold-out show at the Portsmouth Music Hall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, a venue that seats almost 900. In the ensuing twenty-eight years their repertoire has grown and broadened (a bit), but they still perform in basically the same manner, with the same or similar instruments and no additional musicians. The only major difference is that Rawlings, who has released a few records under his own name, now takes lead vocals on roughly half the songs, and the couple are billed, as they should be, as a two-person collaboration.

As far as I could tell, the lone song they performed from their first two records, the only one that would have been in the 1998 set, was "One More Dollar." Other than that they performed a mix of new material and songs from their 2001 album Time (The Revelator) through last year's Woodland. There were several songs from the David Rawlings Machine album entitled A Friend of a Friend, and I have to say I enjoyed those a lot more live than I did on that record. There were several encores, notably a rousing sing-along version of "Look at Miss Ohio" from Soul Journey, and, at the very end, a lovely cover of "Long Black Veil" for which the sound system was switched off and Welch and Rawlings stood at the edge of the stage and performed without a mic to a hushed and delighted house. From what I understand they play Portsmouth regularly, and I'll make every effort to catch them next time around.