Jaywalkers

This is the second post on the Gillian Welch and David Rawlings song “Caleb Meyer.” Read the first post here. 

In the last post, we heard how Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings’s “Caleb Meyer” successfully embraces trappings of Southern Appalachian musical authenticity to do something innovative through something utterly traditional. “Caleb Meyer” is a classic, incorporating signs and symbols of an earlier age and a particular place, but is a masterful invention of its songwriters nonetheless.

In today’s post, we’re going to listen to artists who have covered the song. Putting a distinctive stamp on this song is a particular challenge, given its recent vintage and close association with Welch and Rawlings. For different reasons, the challenge is more acute for male vocalists; although not impossible, as we’ll hear soon enough.

Dave Rawlings and Gillian Welch

The temptation to place excessive emphasis on a supposed moral of the story is another challenge. Despite the fact that the tale is told in a straightforward way, it rides along the edge of being a “message song.” Some find it a cautionary tale of one sort or another. Too overt a gesture in this direction usually backfires.

Still, putting a song forward convincingly is often a difficult matter, incorporating factors both obvious and incredibly subtle; and the full believability of the song is ultimately going to be a matter of individual judgment. I’ll give my own thoughts here, but you’ll have to make up your own mind, obviously. Wherever we might disagree, I hope we can agree that not all songs are for all singers.

Dark Chords

Joan Baez is the most prominent artist to have covered the song, adding “Caleb Meyer” to her repertoire for her album Dark Chords on a Big Guitar. Although Baez’s performance repertoire has long consisted primarily of folk songs or songs written by other artists, she’s taken several opportunities in her more recent recordings to give special attention to younger generations of songwriters, if only for songs she finds particularly compelling.

Baez adds a distinctively more urban vibe to the song. It’s essentially a rock and roll version.

My take on this performance is that Baez’s technique and vocal quality stand at odds with the minor chord opening of each verse and the first sung note or two you need to attack it. The song needs a dose of “high lonesome” there, and Baez’s current Yankee timbre doesn’t quite get there enough to make me believe the song when she sings it. It’s also difficult to avoid the added weight of moral worthiness Baez can’t help but bring.

More successful, perhaps because of their harmony, are the combined voices of Red Molly.

I presented Alicia McGovern in the previous post in a clip that gave an example of how some people (perhaps not McGovern herself) had been fooled into thinking that “Caleb Meyer” was a traditional song. I think McGovern does a good job of presenting the song in a haunting, slow-tempo arrangement, letting her own intriguing vocals add value to the song. She’s not particularly quick to attribute authorship of the song to Welch and/or Rawlings here, either.

No big dig on McGovern here, either. One measure of the song’s achievement is the extent to which it’s no longer really owned by any one artist. Its popularity means that Welch and Rawlings’s version becomes just that; their version of a song that can no longer belong only to them.

“Meyer” Men

Peter Mulvey‘s performance on his 2002 release Ten Thousand Mornings is a standout for a number of reasons. His arrangement brings a bluesy intensity to the song, his vocals accompanied only by the thoughtful and occasionally acrobatic accents of his guitar. He leads the pack, as far as I’m concerned, of male vocalists interpreting the song. I could only find this track on Spotify.*

“Caleb Meyer’s” close association with Nellie Kane’s first person account of her assault makes the song a challenge for male vocalists to render effectively for the audience. The attempt to do so, however, opens new questions of how the song “functions” for both singer and listener. It offers new possibilities for interpretation. We’ve seen this dynamic most obviously in other murder ballads, where a straightforward female vocalist’s retelling of a man killing a woman raises important and unsettled questions. Consider, for instance, Aoife O’Donovan singing Frank Proffitt’s particularly misogynistic version of “Poor Ellen Smith” in her performance with Crooked Still.

The implicit relationship between the song and what we presume to be the convictions of the singer makes for an evocative imaginative tension. This is not to say, of course, that we assume that male vocalists are on Caleb’s “side” of the story. That would be simplistic and/or ridiculous. Nevertheless, our reflections on the themes in the song play out differently with masculine or feminine voices. Our experience of virtually singing the song along with the artist will vary, inflecting the song with new points of interest and resonance.

The Benders, from Massachusetts, also give us a good option for the song in a male voice–this time, unlike Mulvey, back closer to the song’s mountain music feel.

The YouTube page for this clip apologizes for messing up the lyrics, but to my ear The Benders don’t go so far down the road of the “folk process” with the song–at least not as far as Conor O’Donnell.

O’Donnell gives us a musical peregrination, in more ways than one, in presenting the song. He slips between the first and third person in telling the story, and also leaves out the rich, bloody imagery of the concluding scene of the story. I’m averse to interrogating a choice like that too closely from a psychological perspective, but to my mind, it’s a pretty key piece of the story to bowdlerize.

In the next post, I’ll take up a male artist with a still more distinctive take on the Caleb Meyer tale; one that focuses explicitly on a set of issues and themes not as easily pulled into focus in the original.

“Caleb” in Europe

We featured a terrific performance of “Caleb Meyer” from Welch and Rawlings on the BBC in 2004. The song has taken wing among performers outside the United States, and gone in some new and welcome directions.

Britain’s Jaywalkers give a soulful, acoustic interpretation to the song, with a smoldering vocal delivery and heavy bass. The bass combo with mandolin, violin, and lead vocal make for a smart, although non-traditional, arrangement with some variation of tempo to draw the listener in.

Ireland’s Rattlesnake County, from County Cork, adapted the song, quite easily in fact, to the seisiún context.

The snare drum is a little distracting to my ear, but less jarring than some other options. We don’t get a lot of nuance in the vocal delivery, but that’s in some ways suited to the savagery of the events in the song.

London’s Worry Dolls offer a female duet performance with harmony singing throughout, rather than just on the chorus.

Italy’s Susanna Canessa provides an intriguing English-language version that is more theatrical musically than the original–still more so when embedded in the interpretive video she produces for it. I find that shifting the musical arrangement over to a different idiom works for me here, and I’m particularly won over by the guitar licks added in at tasteful intervals.

Next up

We’ll cap off our current tour of “Caleb Meyer” with a short post on a song that tells some of the rest of the story. Stay tuned. Thanks for reading.

*Please note that wherever possible, I try to provide recordings of the song in multiple formats. If you didn’t see an alternative to a Spotify track, I couldn’t find one. If you found one that I didn’t, please send it our way in the comments.