One A Day - Gillian Welch's 'Tennessee'
I wrote about ‘Tennessee’ by Gillian Welch on a guest post on the music blog One A Day.
Excerpt:
But the most interesting, most ambiguous, part of the chorus is the last line, ‘sweet heaven when I die’. It’s an important line; the song ends on it, unresolved. And for a song that mentions how ‘dancing with damnation is a ball’, that mentions being kicked out of Sunday school, you’d think that Welch’s narrator is well aware that the life she leads is not going to lead to ‘sweet heaven’ in the religious sense – she’s a whisky-drinking ‘child of sin’ musician. So what is this ’sweet heaven’? Is it denial, a belief that she’ll see ‘sweet heaven’ when she dies despite her unreligious behaviour? Is she planning to die while yielding to some temptation (the ‘sweet heaven’)? Or is it that life is pain, and so sweet heaven is only achievable when life finally stops?
