The Ghostly Ones (continued)

More and more, Welch's songs describe her actual life. "No One Knows My Name" is about her birth parents. "My mother was just a girl seventeen," she sings, "and my dad was passing through, doing things a man will do." Her mother was a college student in New York, and her father was a musician. By the time she was delivered, her adoption had been arranged.

Welch was born in New York in 1967. Ken and Mitzie Welch already had a daughter, Julie, who'd been born in 1961. She and Welch are close; she lives in California, is a graphic designer, and also teaches improvisational comedy. Julie's birth had been difficult, and Mitzie wasn't eager to go through another pregnancy. According to Welch, when they approached adoption agencies "the agencies said no dice because they were entertainers." Ken Welch had been a performer since childhood, in Kansas City. He had begun piano lessons at four, but the teacher soon told his parents that she couldn't do more with him until his hands were large enough to span an octave. "I couldn't reach an octave on a piano, but I could on an accordion," he says. By the time he was seven, he was tap dancing and playing the accordion throughout "Missouri, Kansas, and Iowa, the remains of the old RKO circuit," he says. Eventually, he attended Carnegie Tech, now Carnegie Mellon, in Pittsburgh, where he studied painting. He met Mitzie at an audition. They moved to New York separately. She sold handbags at a store on Broadway, and made twenty-five dollars on Sundays singing in the choir at Norman Vincent Peale's church. She auditioned for Benny Goodman and got the job, but she had only a few weeks in which to learn Goodman's repertoire. She ended up writing lyrics on the palms of her hands and on her fingernails.

As the comedy team "Ken and Mitzie Welch," they appeared in clubs where Lenny Bruce also performed. Bob Newhart was once their opening act. They had their most public success on the "Tonight Show," when Jack Paar was the host. They performed a slowed-down version of "I Got Rhythm." Mitzie faced the audience and sang, and Ken stood with his back against hers, playing the accordion. By the time the Welches adopted Gillian, with the help of their doctor, Ken was writing music for television shows, and Mitzie was working in commercials and on Broadway.

When Welch was three, her parents moved to Los Angeles, to write music for "The Carol Burnett Show." As a little girl, Welch came home from school one day weeping because she had been reprimanded in art class for making a black outline around snow in a painting. This led her parents to enroll her in a school called Westland. At Westland, the students gathered every week to sing folk songs and Carter Family songs, with Welch accompanying them on guitar. "On the tapes from the period, she sounds the same as she does now, except that her voice is higher," Rawlings said.

Welch's parents bought songbooks for her, and, sitting by herself in her room, playing guitar, she made her way through them. When she got to the end, she wrote songs of her own, "about ducks and things," Rawlings said. "Like a kid who writes poems, and they go in a drawer." Welch attended a high school called Crossroads, "where I get way into ceramics and art and stay hours after school building things and they let me," she said. "And I run like crazy--cross-country and track." Welch made the all-state team for the mile and was invited to run in the national trials. "But if I'd gone I'd have got my ass kicked," she said. "They were in Texas, and I didn't do well in hot weather. Really, my sport was cross-country. I discovered that the longer the race, the more I moved up in the field. I don't run that fast--I just go, very rhythmic. I'm endurance."

Welch said that her favorite English teacher had gone to Princeton, so she applied, without telling him. But when he heard that she'd been accepted he told her that she wouldn't be happy there, and she went to the University of California at Santa Cruz instead.   continue

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