Patty Griffin Issue #31

Children Running Through (ATO)

By Annie Anderson
Published: March 1st, 2007 | 12:00am

Not since her debut album, Living with Ghosts, has Patty Griffin so strutted her gospel tendencies. On her fifth full-length, Children Running Through, when she intones, “Oh heavenly day, all the clouds blew away, got no trouble today with anyone,” it’s equal parts Ray Charles and the Edwin Hawkins Singers. Griffin is the rare artist to create altar calls out of broken hearts and kicked-around pride. Thus, Children Running Through’s “Heavenly Day” becomes a sort of “Oh Happy Day,” much like “Moses” from Living with Ghosts, became a revivalist, just-get-me-through, contemporary-folk classic.

Griffin’s songs often conjure up rural clapboard houses with clanging screen doors and fading lace curtains. And though the songs sometimes inhabit these spaces, they mostly hover over them with sorrow and resilience. Griffin’s voice — aided immensely by her extraordinary writing — is her greatest asset, and on Children Running Through, it is pitch-perfect: furious, earnest, and bluesy as ever. She sings a lovely duet, “Trapeze,” with Emmylou Harris; punches out repetition over strident, acoustic strums on “No Bad News”; and, as usual, bears witness to emotional and social stratification in almost every song on Children Running Through. “I don’t ever give up. That’s all I got. That’s my claim to fame,” she sings toward the end of the album. Griffin is a true folkie, and thus a strong humanist.

“Love leaves a mark yeah, love leaves a strain / Don’t know what’s gonna save me from the cold night and these sorrows I’m crying over,” she lilts on “Crying Over.” Her lyrics read like familiar country ballads or R&B standards. When accompanied by a piano, a plugged-in band, or her trademark acoustic guitar, the words become folksy compendiums of everyday people just getting by. On the album’s second song, “Stay on the Ride,” she implores, “Stay on the ride, it’s gonna take you somewhere.” You oblige. You have to.