Week 17: My First Lover



Gillian Welch

The Duo

Gillian Welch is the stage name of an acoustic duo consisting of Gillian Welch on lead vocals and guitar/banjo and Dave Rawlings on lead guitar. Together they have released 5 critically acclaimed albums (and another under the name Dave Rawlings Machine), three of which were nominated for Grammy awards.

Gillian Howard Welch was born on the 2nd of October 1967 in New York and was adopted on the same day. Her biological mother was a 17 year old freshman in college and her father was a travelling musician. Her adoptive parents were the musical comedy team Ken and Mitzie Welch, who moved to Los Angeles when Gillian was three to write music for the Carol Burnett show.

Gillian played piano and drums as a child, but preferred the guitar. She attended a school that gathered to sing folk songs on the weekend. She learnt guitar from books, playing and singing by herself in her bedroom. In high school she loved ceramics and became a decent cross country runner. ON graduation, she was accepted into Princeton University, but opted to attend the University of California in Santa Cruz to study photography.

In college, Gillian performed in a variety of bands – playing bass in a goth band playing Pixies covers, drums in a psychedelic surf band, bass and guitar in a 70’s cover band. Housemates played in a bluegrass band and she recalls hearing a Stanley Brother’s album: “The first song came on and I just stood up and I kind of walked into the other room as if I was in a tractor beam and stood there in front of the stereo. It was just as powerful as the electric stuff, and it was songs I’d grown up singing. All of a sudden I’d found my music”.

College also brought experimentation with drugs and alcohol and after a terrifying experience in the 1989 earthquake, Gillian and a friend headed off to Wales for a few months, a trip that ended up in Amsterdam. Her parents were concerned with where she was heading, and after questioning her about it, Gillian decided to focus on music and enrolled in songwriting at Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she met aspiring guitarist Dave Rawlings.

David Todd Rawlings was born in 1970 in Slatersville, Rhode Island. At 15 he got his first guitar and took to it like a natural. His first lessons were from another teen that played, then from that boy’s father. He enrolled in the guitar course at Berklee, taught by the female guitar teacher, Lauren Passarelli. He met Gillian in a hallway when they were the only two to turn up for auditions for a country band. The two started playing together, and in 1992, after graduation, they headed to Nashville where all Gillian’s favourite records had been made.

The duo found a sound that consists of vocal harmonies reminiscent of bluegrass duos from the 1950s, combined with Appalachian styled music and song writing themes. Their music has been described as ‘Americana’, dealing with dark themes and using the modal voices of hill country blues.

They paid their dues for a few years, and stayed together despite Gillian receiving a lot of ‘advice’ to ‘lose the guitar player’. In 1995 they teams up with produced T-Bone Burnett and recorded their debut album “Revival”, released the following year and nominated for the 1997 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album.

In 1998 their second album ‘Hell Among the Yearlings’ was released, and two years later Gillian performed two songs, wrote lyrics for, and served as associate producer for the Grammy winning soundtrack for the Coen Brother’s film “O Brother Where art Thou?”. She even had a small role in the film.

2001 saw the release of their landmark album, ‘Time (The Revelator)’ which fused their traditional style with more autobiographical song themes. Two years later and “Soul Journey” was released, which continued the autobiographical evolution of the song writing.

An eight year lull followed, attributed to inconsistent and below quality song craft, before the 2011 release of “The Harrow and the Harvest”, their most successful album reaching number 20 on the Billboard charts and receiving two Grammy nominations.

The duo performs regularly across the US, and they are reportedly working on songs for a new album.



The Song

“My First Lover” is a duet played on banjo and guitar. The banjo performs the ‘lead’ role, with the guitar playing chord based rhythms and providing the rhythmic riffs. It is in the key of B, the banjo capoed on the 4th fret and the guitar on the second, and follows a progression more familiar to rock music than traditional forms of blues.

The arrangement here is for one guitar, in standard tuning and capoed on the second fret.

The features of the song are the driving beat courtesy of the thumb hitting on the beat (in the original it only plays every second beat but still imparts a sense of momentum) and the tones unique to the banjo. To try to imitate these, really pluck the melody notes, as opposed to the normal softer style of finger picking.

The main melody note is the D played on the 1st fret after the capo on the B string. Whenever this note is played it needs to be bent a quarter note to really produce that ‘blue’ note feeling. The picking is fast, and it doesn’t matter if it’s a little dirty – you are aiming for a rollicking Delta like feel.

The measure labelled “Interlude” in the original consists of the banjo playing the melody while the guitar just hits the bass notes of the chords. To play it on one instrument is a challenge, because the banjo uses pull offs and hammerons that are impossible (well, impossible for me!) to execute in standard while fingering the bass notes required for the overall feel. So it needs to be played as cleanly and quickly as possible, and louder than the rest of the piece.

The entire arrangement contains off the beat high E notes that are relatively quiet. Indeed, the piece requires a high level of attention to detail to differentiate between rhythm and melodic lines – volume is a major part of this: be soft and pick and strum when you need to and attack the plucks when you want to make a statement, such as the D note bends on the B string.

All tabs are relative to the capo.



The Lyrics

B (Intro) B D E D My first lover My first lover B D B D B He was tall and breezy with his long hair down But he gets a little hazy when I think of him now B D E D My first lover My first lover B D B D B He was always talking tryin' to bring me down But I was not waiting for a white wedding gown B D E D From my first lover B D E D (Interlude) B B/A B/G# B/G I do not remember any goin' wrong Just a record playin' that old Steve Miller song B Quicksilver girl Quicksilver girl B D B D B At a surfer party with the whiskey pourin' And the bottle rollin' I was on the floor B D E D With my first lover My first lover B D E D (Interlude) B D B D B I do not remember any fights or fits Just a shaky morning after callin' it quits B D E D With my first lover B Quicksilver girl Quicksilver girl Quicksilver girl and she's free B D E D (Interlude)

The Chords

Note: these are the chord shapes relative to the capo, the actual pitch of the chords is a whole tone higher, as seen in the Lyrics.

Chorus

/ A C D C / Verse

/ A C A / Interlude

/ A C D C / Verse (descending): is just an A shape, but you walk the bass line down from the open A string, to G (3rd fret), then F# (2nd), then F (1st) on the low E string.

/ A A/G A/F# A/F / A quick note on the chords here. The song is pretty simple in terms of chords, it’s the picking that makes it very difficult to play. I’ll put the chords here so you can strum along with it until you start to try the finger picking.these are the chord shapes relative to the capo, the actual pitch of the chords is a whole tone higher, as seen in the Lyrics.ChorusVerseInterludeVerse (descending): is just an A shape, but you walk the bass line down from the open A string, to G (3rd fret), then F# (2nd), then F (1st) on the low E string.

The Intro



$5.0.$4.2.$3.2.$2.2.$1.0 0 | $5.0.$4.2 $3.0 2.$4.2 $3.2.$2.2.$1.0 $3.2 $1.0 $2.1 $3.2 $3.2.$2.2.$1.0 $4.2 $3.2 0 | $5.0.$4.2 $3.2.$2.2.$1.0 $2.1 $3.2 $2.1 $5.0.$3.2 $3.2.$2.2.$1.0 $3.2 $1.0 $3.0 | $5.0.$4.2 $3.2.$2.2.$1.0 $2.1 $3.2 $2.1 $5.0.$3.2 $3.2.$2.2.$1.0 $4.2 $1.0 $6.3 | The intro sets up the groove for the song – all the 1st fret B string notes are bent a quarter step. Make it twangy! The first two bars have weird implied timing, but it settles down in the third. On beats one and three you hit the bass then the chord on the ‘and’ beat; beats two and four it’s the thumb then some riffing.

The Progression