Gillian Welch

The songwriter who, with her partner David Rawlings, wrote Orphan Girl, made Time (The Revelator) and won the Grammy for Best Folk Album twice.

Origin
New York City, United States
Years active
1996-present
Genres
folk, Americana, alternative country, bluegrass
Labels
Almo Sounds, Acony

Los Angeles and Berklee

Gillian Howard Welch was born in New York City on 2 October 1967 and adopted by Ken and Mitzie Welch, a pair of comedy and music entertainers. Her birth mother was a college freshman and her birth father a musician passing through New York, whom she later learned was a drummer. The family moved to Los Angeles when she was three. She took a photography degree at the University of California, Santa Cruz, playing bass in a goth band and drums in a psychedelic surf band, and then spent two years studying songwriting at Berklee College of Music in Boston. She has said that hearing the Stanley Brothers changed the course of her life.

At Berklee she met David Rawlings, a guitarist from Rhode Island, when both auditioned for the school's only country band. For the next two decades the pair recorded and toured under her name alone, though the work was shared. Welch has called Rawlings a true editor: she usually starts a song by herself, they trade ideas, and in the studio he plays most of the picking and sings the harmonies. His signature sound comes from a flatpicked 1935 Epiphone Olympic archtop found in a friend's garage.

Nashville and Revival

Welch moved to Nashville in 1992 and Rawlings followed. Her songs reached record before she did. Tim and Mollie O'Brien recorded Orphan Girl and Wichita in 1994, and Emmylou Harris, who had been handed a cassette of Orphan Girl, put it on Wrecking Ball in 1995.

T Bone Burnett produced her debut, Revival (1996), for Almo Sounds. He wanted the bare sound of the duo's live shows, and the first week of sessions was only Burnett, the engineer and the two of them, before James Burton, Jim Keltner and other session players were added. It was nominated for the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album. Hell Among the Yearlings (1998), again with Burnett, was made almost entirely by Welch and Rawlings alone.

Time (The Revelator)

In 1999 and 2000, while writing most of a new album, they bought their own recording equipment, then heard that Almo Sounds was to be sold. Two attempts to make the record in Los Angeles, first with Burnett and then at Jon Brion's studio, fell apart. After Universal bought Almo, Welch founded Acony Records, named after the Acony Bell wildflower. In 2000 she was associate producer of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, sang on it and appeared in the film. The soundtrack won Album of the Year at the 2002 Grammys.

Rawlings came across RCA Studio B in Nashville by chance, and there, paying for it themselves with Rawlings producing, they cut Time (The Revelator) live with no overdubs. The first Acony release, in July 2001, it opens with Revelator and includes Everything Is Free, her response to the arrival of Napster. Welch later called it pre-apocalyptic art. Rolling Stone placed it at 348 among the 500 greatest albums in 2020, and Pitchfork gave it 9.6 in a 2023 retrospective.

Woodland

Soul Journey (2003) brought in a fuller band. Eight years then passed before The Harrow & the Harvest (2011), a gap in which Welch described a slump in her songwriting, and Rawlings led his own records as Dave Rawlings Machine. The Harrow & the Harvest reached 20 in the US. Boots No. 1 (2016) gathered demos and alternate takes from the Revival era, and the pair's song When a Cowboy Trades His Spurs for Wings, from The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, was nominated for an Academy Award in 2019.

In March 2020 a tornado tore the roof off Woodland Sound Studios, their Nashville base since 2001, and they carried out instruments, equipment and boxes of tape. That year they released Boots No. 2: The Lost Songs, 48 songs written mostly to meet a publishing deadline, and All the Good Times (Are Past & Gone), a lockdown album of covers that was the first billed to both of them. It won the Grammy for Best Folk Album. Woodland (2024), made in the rebuilt studio, won the same award, making them the only two people to win it more than once. In 2026 they took a Grateful Dead tribute, the Acoustic Reckoning tour, on the road.

Members

Records

Songs

Emmylou Harris, The Stanley Brothers, Low, Phoebe Bridgers, Courtney Barnett

Where to go next

Official

Reference

Discography and data

  • MusicBrainz Release and song data, including demos and alternate takes.
  • Discogs Every pressing, with the catalogue numbers of the move from Almo to Acony.

Writing and criticism

Interviews

Live performance archives

Film and video

Sources

  1. Gillian Welch, Wikipedia
  2. David Rawlings, Wikipedia
  3. Gillian Welch and David Rawlings on Time (The Revelator) at 20, Rolling Stone (2021-07-30)
  4. Time reveals all for Gillian Welch, Country Standard Time (2001-09)
  5. A timely windfall: the story behind Gillian Welch's Boots No. 2, No Depression (2020-11-16)
  6. Woodland (Gillian Welch and David Rawlings album), Wikipedia