Welch and Rawlings have collaborated on seven critically acclaimed albums, five released under her name, and two released under the name Dave Rawlings Machine. Her 1996 debut, Revival, and the 2001 release Time (The Revelator), received nominations for the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album. Her 2003 album, Soul Journey, introduced electric guitar, drums, and a more upbeat sound to their body of work. After a gap of eight years, she released a fifth studio album, The Harrow & The Harvest, in 2011, which was also nominated for a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album.
Welch was an associate producer and performed on two songs of the soundtrack of the Coen brothers 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a platinum album that won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 2002. She also appeared in the film attempting to buy a Soggy Bottom Boys record. Welch, while not one of the principal actors, did sing and provide additional lyrics to the Sirens song "Didn't Leave Nobody but the Baby." In 2018 she and Rawlings wrote the song "When a Cowboy Trades His Spurs for Wings" for the Coens' The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, for which they received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Original Song. Welch has collaborated and recorded with Alison Krauss, Ryan Adams, Jay Farrar, Emmylou Harris, the Decemberists, Sam Phillips, Conor Oberst, Ani DiFranco, and Robyn Hitchcock.
Gillian Howard Welch was born on October 2, 1967 in New York City, and was adopted by Mitzie Welch (née Marilyn Cottle) and Ken Welch, comedy and music entertainers. Her biological mother was a freshman in college, and her father was a musician visiting New York City. Welch has speculated that her biological father could have been one of her favorite musicians, and she later discovered from her adoptive parents that he was a drummer. Alec Wilkinson of The New Yorker stated that "from an address they had been given, it appeared that her mother ... may have grown up in the mountains of North Carolina". When Welch was three, her adoptive parents moved to Los Angeles to write music for The Carol Burnett Show. They also appeared on The Tonight Show.
As a child, Welch was introduced to the music of American folk singers Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and the Carter Family. She performed folk songs with her peers at the Westland Elementary School in Los Angeles. Welch later attended Crossroads School, a high school in Santa Monica, California. While in high school, a local television program featured her as a student who "excelled at everything she did."
Welch and Rawlings incorporate elements of early twentieth century music such as old time, classic country, gospel and traditional bluegrass with modern elements of rhythm and blues, rock 'n' roll, jazz, and punk rock. The New Yorker's Alec Wilkinson maintained their musical style is "not easily classified—it is at once innovative and obliquely reminiscent of past rural forms".
The instrumentation on their songs is usually a simple arrangement, with Welch and Rawlings accompanying their own vocals with acoustic guitars, banjos, or a mandolin. Welch plays rhythm guitar with a 1956 Gibson J-50 (or banjo), while Rawlings plays lead on a 1935 Epiphone Olympic Guitar.The New Yorker's Wilkinson described Rawlings as a "strikingly inventive guitarist" who plays solos that are "daring melodic leaps". A review in No Depression by Andy Moore observed that Rawlings "squeezes, strokes, chokes and does just about everything but blow into" his guitar.
Many songs performed by Welch and Rawlings contain dark themes about social outcasts struggling against such elements as poverty, drug addiction, death, a disconnection from their family, and an unresponsive God. Despite Welch being the lead singer, several of these characters are male. Welch has commented, "To be commercial, everybody wants happy love songs. People would flat-out ask me, 'Don't you have any happy love songs?' Well, as a matter of fact, I don't. I've got songs about orphans and morphine addicts." To reflect these themes, Welch and Rawlings often employ a slow pace to their songs. Their tempo is compared to a "slow heartbeat", and Cowperthwait of Rolling Stone observed that their songs "can lull you into near-hypnosis and then make your jaw drop with one final revelation".
Six White Horses
Gillian Welch Lyrics
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Six white horses coming two by two
Coming for my mother, no matter how I love her
Six white horses coming two by two
Whoa now horses, easy on the wheels
Whoa now horses, easy on the wheels
So broken-hearted up now they started
See them horses pulling on a rein
See them horses pulling on a rein
Sunshine and sorrow, yesterday, tomorrow
Bedlam and Barlow Billy are their names
Some bright morning what will you see
Some bright morning what will you see
Some bright morning looking on it coming
Some bright morning what will you see
Six white horses coming after me
Six white horses coming after me
Pretty as a picture, certain as a scripture
Six white horses coming after me
The song "Six White Horses" by Gillian Welch is a mournful tale of death and loss told from the perspective of the singer, who is watching six white horses approach. The horses are symbolic of a funeral procession, as they are "coming for my mother," and the repetition of their approaching in pairs reinforces the solemn nature of this imagery. The singer acknowledges the inevitability of this loss: "no matter how I love her," and urges the horses to "easy on the wheels" to show both respect and a hope that the passing will be painless.
The lyrics suggest a duality between the horses - on the one hand they are beautiful and majestic, "pretty as a picture," but on the other hand they are inevitable and ominous, "certain as a scripture." As the horses approach, the singer reflects on their own mortality: "Six white horses coming after me," and asks the listener what they will see when this same inevitability comes for them. The horses represent the uncontrollable nature of death and the recognition of both its beauty and its certainty.
Overall, "Six White Horses" is a haunting and somber reflection on life and death, using vivid and symbolic language to convey the weight of loss and the inescapable nature of the human experience.
Line by Line Meaning
Six white horses coming two by two
Six horses approaching in pairs, a symbolic representation of the inevitability of death.
Coming for my mother, no matter how I love her
Even though the singer loves their mother deeply, death comes for everyone and cannot be avoided.
Whoa now horses, easy on the wheels
A plea to death to show mercy and not take the singer's loved one too soon.
So broken-hearted up now they started
Despite the artist's pleas, the signs of the approaching end are already present and causing immense sadness.
See them horses pulling on a rein
The image of the horses being controlled by an unseen force highlights the feeling of powerlessness in the face of death.
Sunshine and sorrow, yesterday, tomorrow
The horses represent both the good and bad in a person's life, and are a reminder that death comes for everyone regardless of the joys and sorrows they experience.
Bedlam and Barlow Billy are their names
The horses are given names that hint at chaos and destruction, emphasizing the terrifying nature of death.
Some bright morning what will you see
The inevitability of death is emphasized once again, as the artist questions what they will witness when it eventually arrives.
Pretty as a picture, certain as a scripture
Death is described in terms of certainty and beauty, highlighting the powerful and inescapable nature of its arrival.
Six white horses coming after me
The artist must face their own mortality, represented by the six white horses coming to take them away just as they came for their loved ones.
Lyrics © Wixen Music Publishing
Written by: David Todd Rawlings, Gillian Howard Welch
Lyrics Licensed & Provided by LyricFind