Poor Lazarus and the Mark Death Made

Love, homesickness, wanderlust, and ruination in Gillian Welch's "I Dream a Highway"

The canon of American folk music can be mapped on a spectrum between two poles: homesickness and wanderlust. For every road that leads home, there’s a highway that promises escape. Gillian Welch, an artist so deeply embedded in the tradition that it’s easy to forget she’s currently touring and producing new music, knows that better than anyone.

Today, I listened to Welch’s early-career masterpiece, “I Dream a Highway,” for five hours straight. Along the way, I became convinced that she is doing more than channeling these classic themes and oscillating nimbly between them. She is also making an implicit argument for their unity. Welch has always been a songwriter of life’s implacable contradictions and those who try to navigate them. In “I Dream a Highway,” she takes on that role herself, reckoning with her predecessors and reimagining her heritage so that she can move beyond them.

When dealing seriously with a songwriter like Welch, who is always one step ahead of the critic and one record deeper down the rabbit hole, we can’t really begin without recounting the history she takes as her medium.

The paradigm for homesickness was set for better or worse by Stephen Foster, who penned the 19th-century mega-hits “My Old Kentucky Home” and “Swanee River” for performance in antebellum minstrel shows. Foster was a white man from Pennsylvania who had spent minimal time in the South, but he wrote the former after being deeply moved by Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The original lyrics were written in the voice of Tom, who was sold “down the river” from his childhood plantation and separated from his family when his owner came on “hard times.” Frederick Douglass actually praised the song in 1855 for placing deep feelings in the mouths of Black characters, a gesture that could “awaken sympathies” in white listeners.

After the Civil War, the character of Tom and Foster’s song were co-opted from their well-intentioned but questionable politics-of-sympathy, and redeployed by reactionaries as nostalgic figures. In the Jim Crow South, Tom no longer longs for his own family, his own home up the river, but for an imagined time before the War when slaves lived happily with their slavers. Homesickness may be a universal human emotion, but its pairing with white nostalgia in the American canon has persisted and infected it. The decontextualized version of Foster’s song that spawned countless imitations, of which “Sweet Home Alabama” is only the most egregious, and “Take Me Home Country Roads” the pinnacle of pop-achievement.

Nonetheless, against Foster’s hegemonic minstrel tradition of homesickness, we can oppose an authentically Black American lineage, that of the Sorrow Songs collected by W. E. B. Du Bois. These are traditionals and religious songs without known authors, though Du Bois shows his own early tendency towards nostalgia in The Souls of Black Folk, when he traces them back to “primitive African origins.” The most famous is “Swing Low Sweet Chariot,” where the speaker is carried off by a host of angels and the prophet Elijah. Across these songs, the only true home is heaven (which may or may not resemble Africa), and the only way there is death. Their existential depth is paired with a fatalism that Du Bois ultimately recognizes as a great aesthetic achievement but diagnoses as a political dead end. He exchanges the Sorrow Songs thirty years later in his book Black Reconstruction for the apocalyptic and collectivist strains of “John Brown’s Body,” a call for liberation in this life which he presents as proto-Marxist.

These two distinctly American forms of homesickness occupy the center of a larger ecosystem that includes the soldier-song (often the plaint of a troop abroad for his lover at home, in the lineage of the Revolutionary War era tune “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” sung in both the Redcoat and and Continental Army camps), the prison-song (Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” is the example closest at hand), and all varieties of the mournful parting-song, an address to the beloved in their last moments together loaded with the anticipation of homesickness. To stretch the category a bit further, we can also include the song of unhappy return so popular in the blues tradition—the return to a home that is no longer home. Jimi Hendrix’s “Red House,” which is so deeply embedded in that tradition that it’s to forget it’s a Hendrix original, sums up the latter: “Wait a minute something’s wrong here, / the key won’t unlock this door. / I have a bad, bad feeling / my baby don’t live here no more.”

For every road that leads home, there’s a highway that promises escape. When I talk about the American song of wandering, I’m emphatically not referring to the song of Manifest Destiny, the frontier-song, which I read as expressing another distorted form of homesickness (though in this case for a home that’s been promised but yet to be found). The utopian promise of “Home on the Range” for a lush and depopulated West is nearly identical to the nostalgic fantasy of “My Old Kentucky Home” for a harmonious plantation, except the “possum and coon” of the latter are exchanged for the “deer and the antelope” of the former, and the contented slaves singing in the cabin are swapped with the (white) cowboys around the fire. The wander-song, I think, is a genre that only really came into its own after the frontier had “closed,” when those who may have dreamed of journeying further and further West exchanged that urge for a circular journey around the country’s vast interior. I’m talking about the tramp-songs, the hobo-songs proliferated by the Wobblies at the turn of the century and Woody Guthrie in the Dust Bowl.

Guthrie’s road songs fall into two strands that rarely meet: the refugee-songs from the proto-concept album Dust Bowl Ballads (based on Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath) and the happy tramp-tunes of his other work. The long dusty road traveled by the Joad family is a hard one, but they walk it knowing that they can never turn back: “I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.” The hinge on which these two strands of Guthrie’s work turn is the way that his characters relate to that thesis: When there’s nowhere to settle, where can I go and who will I be? For every weary, “Lonesome Hobo” longing for release into a heaven whose main attraction is that is admits no policemen, there’s a “Gypsy Davy” dancing from town to town and activating a longing to wander, to go astray, in women and men alike.

There’s surely a bit of the devilish Pied-Piper in Gypsy Davy, but the latter is a profoundly ambivalent figure—expressing and enacting his own wanderlust, and authorizing it in others. His closest relatives in the American scene might reside closer to literature than prose: Ishmael taking to the sea to drive off the spleen and keep from knocking off people’s hats in the street, Huck Finn rafting up the river with Jim, Whitman singing the praises of the Open Road and heralding a community to come of men and women traveling together into an undetermined future, open to encounters as they may come.

Whitman’s dream of the open road was taken up by the Beat Poets and lefty folk-singers of the ‘60s, and its undisputed masters were Dylan and Joni Mitchell. Between Freewheelin’ and Desire, Dylan explored just about every variety of the parting-song and character, from the lonely rambler (“Down the Highway”) to the rakish tramp (“I Shall Be Free”), from the vicious kiss-off (“Like a Rolling Stone,” “One of Us Must Know,” “Idiot Wind”) to the Irish goodbye (“One Too Many Mournings”), from the desperate plea (“Boots of Spanish Leather,” “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” “Sara”) to the absurdist acceptance of a love run its course (“Girl from North Country,” “Tangled Up in Blue,” “Simple Twist of Faith”). Everyone in Dylan’s world is either walking away or getting left behind, and either way both parties are likely to find themselves back on the road before long. True to character, he’s spent the past 60 years on the Never Ending Tour.

Joni Mitchell came into her own as a self-conscious practitioner of these forms, shuffling along the spectrum from song to song, verse to verse, line to line. On Blue, she’s coming home to California one minute and wishing she had a river to skate away on the next. In the first track, all she wants is to wreck her stockings in a jukebox dive; by the last she’s ventriloquizing a disappointed romantic grown cynical and drunk in the back of a dark café.  On Hejira, she catalogues a decade of motel trysts from the transcendent to the earthly, while analyzing her own inability to take refuge anywhere but the road.

Against Dylan’s superhuman energy and velocity, Mitchell’s corpus models a practice of ruthless self-disclosure, analysis, and forgiveness. To properly inhabit her best albums is to sit inside a diamond, seeing all its faces reflected and reacted. Her motto might be these late lines by Yeats: “Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot! / When such as I cast out remorse / So great a sweetness flows into the breast / We must laugh and we must sing, / We are blest by everything, / Everything we look upon is blest.”

This is the tradition that Gillian Welch inherits and channels on Time (The Revelator). She wrote and recorded the album with her longtime collaborator David Rawlings, who also produced. It was the pair’s third record, following Revival and Hell among the Yearlings. The debut and sophomore efforts leaned hard on their roots, and the songs sound more at home in the 1930s than ‘90s. Welch disappears into character-driven lyrics, drawing on murder ballads, union hymns, drinking dirges, and sorrow songs. Even the cover of Revival features Welch in a Dust Bowl-style dress, posing for a photograph that might have been taken by Walker Evans. Critics praised both early records, but still leveled charges of antiquarianism and inauthenticity against Welch personally.

In an interview, Welch spoke about expanding her artistic ambitions on Time, and compared the record to Dylan going electric. The songs grew longer and more complex, both melodically and thematically, though the instrumentation remained as sparse as ever: the only credited musicians are Welch and Rawlings on acoustic guitar and harmonies. Rawlings proved himself a tasteful and restrained guitar player on the earlier records, but his technical skills take a massive leap forward here as he experiments with dissonant runs against Welch’s steady rhythm and arpeggios up and down the fret-board. Sonically, the pair push the limits of what can be done with two guitars and two voices, while remaining within the familiar verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus form.

The thematic pallet expands even more than the sonic pallet. A few songs aspire to the condition of the old standards (“My First Lover” comes to mind, as does “Red Clay Halo”), but the centerpieces of Time tend to recall the road-epics of Dylan’s high period. “April 14th Part 1” and “Ruination Day Part 2” form a pair, touching on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the sinking of the Titanic, and the Black Sunday Dust Storm of 1935.

But Welch doesn’t remain in the past here, narrating these scenes from a point of respectful remove as she might have on Revival. Instead, the song returns to contemporary, personal, but un-narrated “ruination day”: “Ruination day / and the sky was red. / I went back to work / and back to bed. / And the iceberg broke / and the Okies fled / and the Great Emancipator / took a bullet in the head.” Clearly, someone has hit bottom, but the details of that fall are lost in a rush of details that evoke a mood without conjuring a scene. What we get instead is the aftermath to a disaster, and the implication of someone’s stubborn need to carry on, weighted with the burden of history but relieved of the dangerous naivety of hope.

The history of folk, country, and rock n’ roll music recurs throughout the record. Welch’s love for the history of her craft is on display, but her relation to that history is thematized in a far more explicit way than it had been previously. The character-song “I Want to Sing That Rock and Roll” looks for a compromise between revivalist Christianity (never practiced by Welch as far as I can tell, but a constant theme of her work) and the lusty teenaged pleasures of the earth. “Elvis Presley Blues” features a speaker closer to Welch herself, trying to square the image of Presley shaking it like a Harlem Queen on the Sullivan show with his lonely death on the toilet. “Everything Is Free,” the closest Welch has ever come to writing a fully autobiographical song, is a ballad about Napster and the seismic shifts in the music business. It’s a sad goodbye to the post-war music industry that made an artistic life possible for Welch’s heroes, and a reaffirmation that the music is worth something—worth everything—whether anyone will pay for it or not. “If there’s something that you wanna hear / you can sing it yourself.”

Welch has called “I Dream a Highway” the coda to Time, a recapitulation of themes and images from the 9 previous songs, and she has assured her fans that we don’t really need to listen to it if we don’t have the patience for it. It proceeds at a snail’s pace—the second slowest song on the record besides the opener—and is built on an endlessly repeated three-chord sequence. Welch’s melody is cyclical, each verse looping back around to the root-note on which it started. Her one-two-one-two strumming pattern falls like waves on a California beach, slow and relentless, occasionally rising and falling in volume but never giving ground rhythmically. Under this, Rawlings plays a constant, quiet accompaniment of every riff and arpeggio he’s ever learned. He weaves in and out of Welch’s vocal line, almost like he’s trying to coax her out of her trance-like singing.

On my fifth of sixth time through the song, I’m struck by the clarity of each note. Welch’s rhythm playing never grows muddy, even as she begins to strike the chords harder around minutes 10 and 11. There’s an integrity to each steel string on the duo’s guitars, ringing out on its own among the others, that one would expect more from the nylon materials favored by classical and flamenco players. Even when Rawlings plays up around the 12th fret on the high end in the outro, his notes never lose their fleshy warmth. He uses some well-placed string-buzz and dissonance to produce tension at key moments, but these gestures never feel out of place. Instead, they weave themselves into the skeleton of the main song, tugging at its body like the moon at the tides, or like a new lover at the hem of your shirt. His occasional solo runs between verse and chorus are tasteful but undeniably seductive, enacting a kind of approach-and-retreat that begins playful, grows desperate, and finally accepts its place in the song’s greater orbit.

“Orbit” might be the best word for the journey that Welch narrates here. From the perspective of each individual verse, she’s following the winding ribbon of the highway, driving just above the speed limit and on the right side that band of gold in its center. One town after another passes out of her rearview, one brief encounter after another slips away as she pursues the lost love she addresses. But at the same time, each verse ends in exactly the same place—back on the road, alone again, restless and breathless after the long-sustained notes that close the refrain. We move from scene to scene and reference to reference (Johnny Cash, John Henry, Jack of Diamonds, Emmylou Harris and Gram Parsons, to name just the first few that emerge) without getting any closer to the lover, and without developing any deeper sense of who the speaker is or what she is pursuing. Each verse is another pass at a massive but absent center, which holds the speaker like the sun holds the earth or the earth holds the moon. We’re circling the drain.

Welch asks the key question herself in the second verse, and offers a cryptic answer: “Which lover are you, Jack of Diamonds? / Now you be Emmylou and I’ll be Gram. / I’ll send a letter, don’t know who I am / I dream a highway back to you.” In the folk lexicon, the Jack of Diamonds is a figure for bad luck, “a hard card to play” as the Civil War era gambling-tune calls him. Play him and you’ll end up on the street without your shoes and shirt, and walking down the road. He always appears before a loss, but you play him anyway because he’s all you have.

Then Welch answers her own question, transforms the lover (or wishes to transform him) from Jack to Emmylou, and casts herself as Gram Parsons. Parsons mentored Harris, featured her on his last record, and probably loved her before dying of a morphine overdose. After 8 or 9 listens I can’t help but hear Welch emphasizing “now” of that line along with the names and pronouns, like she’s calling for a role-reversal. Once, he was Gram and she was Emmylou. As in the sorrow songs and afterwards, death is a homecoming but it’s also a departure. Online the sorrow songs, she won’t let herself imagine meeting him on the other side, but only switching places. The separation remains. We start to question whether the speaker wants to find her lover in the first place, because after all that would end the journey.

If his identity is vague, hers disappears almost entirely—a flood of references exploding onto the world, barely sticking to the objects they reach after. Writing only makes it worse, reminds her that she doesn’t know who she is. What identity she can maintain is the dream, the highway, the fantasy of a relation that would be shattered if she ever really made it home.

What we’re talking about here is a subjectivity defined by not just by loss (which would be a simple act of mourning), but by exile (and its correlate, the world-dissolving experience of melancholia). Welch assumes her exile in good humor: casting herself as as the serpent in the Garden, banned along with Adam and Eve: “I think I’ll move on into Memphis / and thank the hatchet man who forked my tongue.” She assumes the burden and honor of her wound. She puts it on display. But the other is wounded, too. She knows this, and she wants him to know it, too. In another transformation, she turns him into Lazarus risen from the grave, and demands: “Let me see the mark death made.” Let us be wounded together, I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.

This experience shared mutilation reads to me, after 4 hours, as the greatest act of love available in the shifting world of Welch’s odyssey. It is, perhaps, a compromise formation: to find the beloved would be to come home, and to come home would be to dissolve what little identity I’ve managed to form, an identity which is nothing but the journey itself, the orbit of one absence around another absence. But the beloved is as lost, as unstable, as ungrounded, as impossible as I am. He is not home and he cannot be home. Even if I were to find him again he would not even be himself—even “the Grand Ol’ Opry’s got a brand new band,” after all.

As in “Ruination Day,” we glimpse the possibility of a journey without hope but also without the bad naivety that engenders hope, that which not only makes disappointment more painful but turns love to hate. “Step into the light poor Lazarus,” don’t just show me your wound, show it to yourself, assume your wound as I have. Join me, perhaps, on the road, not as my home but as my companion.

The latter half of the song is dominated by images of exhaustion—“porcelain lights” on hungover mornings, a lonely diner staffed by a Biblical angel: “I watch the waitress for a thousand years. / Saw a wheel inside a wheel, / heard a call within a call, / and dream a highway back to you.” The speaker has spent so much time on the road, so long with herself and with her heroic consciousness of loss, that those everyday folk who stay in one place feel as alien as angels, as other. As Rilke said, “Every angel is terrifying.”

Welch closes the song on an image that might have come out of the Sorrow Songs. The speaker has found her love, or maybe she hasn’t, and there’s nothing left to do but ask him to join her on a final journey: “Walk me out into the rain and snow,” let us dissolve together in the winter, let us go home to you-know-where. If we are already mutilated, let us finish the job. Let us become truly nobody, as we always were. And so the song finds its solution to the problem of desire in death, in the same place as so many others have.

We can’t expect a happy ending from Welch. She is a songwriter who refuses romantic compensation as much as she refuses easy answers, but we don’t need to let the final line hold the last word. A song like this could in theory go on forever. Leonard Cohen famously claimed to have written 80 verses for “Hallelujah.” If we take seriously Welch’s thesis throughout the song—that the end remains out of sight even when it’s reached, that our fundamental, existential woundedness must be lived lucidly and courageously—then we cannot but take this easy, fatalist ending as a kind of red herring.

Welch’s question here and elsewhere remains the question asked (perhaps even unconsciously) by the entire American folk-song tradition: not “How to get to my home,” but “How to inhabit my exile?”