Welch, especially, has taken guff from critics for what they see as excessive reverence for roots that aren’t her own. (“My first response is “What are they doing reading the bio?’” she says.) But she and Brown are direct descendants of the postwar folk revival, when, as Robert Cantwell writes in his recent history “When We Were Good,” “an alienated, jazz-driven, literary bohemia turned to the simple songs of an old rural America.” Welch’s spare, mountain-sounding, mostly unplugged debut album -called “Revival”-and Brown’s semi-honky-tonk, semi-tongue-in-cheek “Semi-Crazy” (his third CD) may never even be heard by Shania Twain fans. But that doesn’t mean they’re not country-quite the reverse, we’d say, if we wanted to be snippy.
Texas transplant Junior Brown, 42, grew up in places like Annapolis, Md., and Wilton, Conn.; he got hooked watching the Grand Ole Opry on TV. Brown doesn’t agonize about his authenticity: he’s made his living in country bands since 1970, with a genuine blue collar day job now and then. “I’ve hung Sheetrock and done things like that,” he says. “Nothing that would keep me away from the music any longer than it had to.” Brown’s over-the-top virtuosity on his freakish-looking “guit-steel”-a steel guitar Siamese-twinned with a standard electric-gives him a classic five-piece country band with four people in it. And if the Jimi Hendrix quotes and the surf-music medleys wear thin, you’ve still got Brown’s disarming bathtub basso and the sort of dryly self-deprecating songwriting that’s one of country’s music’s lost arts.
Gillian (hard g) Welch, 28, lives-of all the weird places-in Nashville. She relocated in 1992 on a “Yeah I could do this” basis, full of “romantic notions” derived from classic country records. Her epiphany came when she was 19, at UC Santa Cruz, playing in a kitschy cover band. (One fave: the theme from a TV movie about Evel Knievel.) “I was scrubbing the bathtub,” she says, “when my roommate put on ‘The Legendary Stanley Brothers, Vol. 2’.” Why should rough– hewn rural music speak to and through-a young woman from L.A.? “I could say maybe it’s in my blood,” she says. “Because I was adopted. Maybe my biological parents are from Deep Gap. We don’t know. That’s the romantic vision for you. The truth is, this is just what my voice, both my physical voice and my creative voice, sounds like. At least right now.”
That qualifier speaks volumes. What sets Welch and Brown apart from the likes of Ralph Stanley and Ernest Tubb is their awareness of a vast menu of available styles and attitudes. With Brown’s chops, he could cut a passable heavy-metal album; Welch could shuck that Walker Evans housedress, break out her old tube tops and vinyl go-go boots and relearn “Viva Knievel.” But don’t bold your breath. Sure, you could diagnose Welch and Brown as selfconscious postmoderns impersonating country singers. Yet the music latched onto them as surely as they latched onto it. If for reasons of their own they needed the simple pleasures of country music, country music needed them, too.
