“Caleb Meyer” opens Gillian Welch’s second album, Hell Among the Yearlings, released in 1998. Welch wrote it with her musical partner David Rawlings; it was the first song completed for that record.
The song is a hard, vivid murder ballad. Its narrator, a mountain woman named Nellie Kane, is attacked at her isolated home by Caleb Meyer; in the struggle she kills him with a broken bottle and saves herself. What lingers is not triumph but a haunting — Caleb Meyer’s ghost, his voice she cannot get out of her head. Welch deliberately reworked the old murder-ballad form, in which women are almost always the victims, into a story of survival and its cost.
Driven by Rawlings’s slashing guitar, “Caleb Meyer” became a centerpiece of Welch’s live shows and a frequent pick for bands drawn to the darker, older end of the string-band tradition.
