Sherry Chandler » April the 14th Part 1/Ruination Day
April the 14th Part 1/Ruination Day
and the great boat sank
and the okies fled
and the great emancipator took a bullet in the head
in the head
took a bullet in the back of the head
it was not december and it was not in may
it was the 14th of april that was ruination day
—Gillian Welch from Time (The Revelator)
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3 Comments
1. JimT replies at 14th April 2005, 8:04 am :
Gillian Welch is incredibly talented, as fine a poet as she is a musician. There was a great article about her and partner, guitarist extraordinaire David Rawlings, about the intimacy of their collaborations, in The New Yorker a few months back.
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040920fa_fact3
Gillian took a rather serpentine life-route to the creative place she is now.
What the article doesn’t say, but I swear is true is that David Rawlings learned to play guitar in the basement of my Slatersville, RI house in the mid-1980’s.
JimT
2. Sherry replies at 14th April 2005, 2:40 pm :
Thanks, Jim. I’ll read that with pleasure.
This song mystified me for a while — I could get the Titanic and Lincoln but I was puzzled by the Okies until I read the Writers Almanac today — it’s the day Grapes of Wrath was released in 1939.
I love the way Rawlings plays guitar. Were you living in the house at the time??
3. JimT replies at 14th April 2005, 3:05 pm :
Yes. Rawlings and my daughter were childhood friends. We had a piano down there, so they and several friends used the basement to hang out and rehearse. My teenage daughter was going to be their band’s business manager…that was the plan. Ten years later, David and Gillian were releasing Time (The Revelator), and my daughter was doing alt. music publicity for major record labels, overseeing publicity for The Dave Matthews Band breakout album, among others.
Hey, that and a dollar won’t get me a small latte at Starbucks, but still…isn’t life just so amazing sometimes, the way it unfolds?
JimT
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