Rachel Harrington & Rod Clements, The Bell
Posted on 15th August 2010
Rachel Harrington & Rod Clements
The Bell, Bath
Sunday August 15
Rachel Harrington played Bath a little over a year ago and was an extremely pleasant surprise. Radio 2's Bob Harris would not have been surprised, he has long been a supporter of Rachel and it was his recommendation that no doubt brought so many to see her last time.
Rachel Harrington is American by birth and, to some degree, by profession. She sings with a true American country voice, knows a lot about the tradition of American country music, but she is first and foremost a singer-songwriter, and her songs have the ring of authenticity. Without straining, they seem as though they'd been written long before she was born.
The pairing of Rachel with Rod Clements is a match made in heaven. Rod plays slide guitar, a dobro to be exact, though he plays it like a guitar, not flat on his lap as most do. He is a wonderful player, remarkably deft but very gentle with gorgeous little solos and perfect accompaniments. And he sings very nice harmonies to Rachel. His solo numbers, often in a fingerpicked blues style, were equally fetching, never twee the way some ragtime blues fingerpickers strike me.
They began their first set amidst the usual Bell roar of conversation filling the room – which at least it means the room was full. It can be unnerving, though, and there are various ways to vanquish the roar. One is simply to play louder, another is to play relentless party/dance music. But the most admirable way is to simply be so good that everyone stops talking and starts listening. This was the Rachel way.
The first couple of songs kind of disappeared into the roar, though there was significant applause. Rod played a couple of his songs which slightly dissipated the roar. Then Rachel came back with a very quiet and beautiful song, “Goodbye,” one of the very few non-originals, written by Steve Earle, and the audience just shut up and listened and pretty much stayed that way through the set.
That song was followed by an original that was a good example of what Rachel is all about. She mentioned that she had been raised in an ultra-right wing Pentecostal family in rural Oregon (that she thanked God to have escaped from) and went on to say she had visited her grandparents in a care home after a long absence. Her grandfather said to her that he wasn't in good shape and that he knew “they're building my mansion in Heaven right now.” The songwriter alert rang in Rachel's mind and she sang “He Started Building My Mansion in Heaven Today,” the song she wrote from that visit. It sounded as though it could have been written any time in the last 100 years and it encapsulated Rachel Harrington: a storyteller, an authentic successor to American country tradition who has mastered the art of writing song in that vein, and a hell of a good singer.
She and Rod are returning twice to Bath a month from now, notably for a Sunday afternoon performance at the American Museum in Claverton (http://www.americanmuseum.org/default.cfm/loadindex.104), where there will be no roar to overcome.
Charley Dunlap
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