While working on my Christmas List, I stopped back by Gillian Welch's website to evaluate her albums we don't yet own, and got hooked on a concert video of "Red Clay Halo," which is basically an intensely beautiful and upbeat meditation on death, or "crossing over." Another variant on ashes to ashes. Meaningful art about death is hard for us to swallow. There is no basically secular idiom of death. "Your mom died, oh man, that's really hard."
The gloom and doom of funereal and church iconography don't really quite get it, either. I mean, yes, looking upwards in a gothic church, at the stained glass and all that, does intimate transcendence and permanence, but it's all very cerebral. Does little for the gut.
But bluegrass and other folk traditions celebrating death, really singing it, that's hard to assimilate within daily life. It's a whole other dimension of devotional art, very powerful and disruptive in its own way.
Wednesday, December 01, 2004
Crossover artist
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Hey Joe. Thanks for coming by the blog. I'm sure churches are real for a lot of people, and hell, they can be very moving to me. But excepting ones built by smaller communities (maybe Shakers, Quakers) with restrained aesthetics, you can't call them "folk." The big gothic ones with vaults and whatnot require multi-year project management and big budgets from collections taken up. They're quasi-corporate from way back. Look at St. John the Divine or Templa de la Sagrada Familia in Barcelona: still being built.
As for Gillian Welch, yeah, I hear ya. She does indeed affect the same "woman of the soil" thing that others have played even less convincingly. But she wears it well, and sings well, and Rawlings is a fine guitarist. Some of their Christian stuff is a little creepy.
Or maybe it's just that I buy records so rarely that I'm easily impressed.
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