Gillian Welch and David Rawlings

Berklee to Nashville

Gillian Howard Welch was born in New York on October 2, 1967; her parents were the entertainers Mitzie and Ken Welch, and the family moved to Los Angeles when she was three so they could write for The Carol Burnett Show. She attended Crossroads School in Santa Monica, played bass in a goth band and drums in a psychedelic surf band at UC Santa Cruz, took a photography degree, and studied songwriting at Berklee for two years, where she met David Todd Rawlings, born December 30, 1969 in North Smithfield, Rhode Island, at an audition for the school's country band. She moved to Nashville in 1992 and Rawlings followed, and they began to perform together, billed as Gillian Welch.

Rawlings plays mostly a 1935 Epiphone Olympic archtop that he found in a friend's garage covered in sawdust, with no strings, and had a new one-piece bridge made for. In 1994 Tim and Mollie O'Brien recorded her "Orphan Girl" and "Wichita" on Away Out on the Mountain, her first published songs. With the manager Denise Stiff, who also managed Alison Krauss, they signed to Almo Sounds, and T Bone Burnett was interested in producing after a Station Inn show.

The records

Revival (April 1996, produced by Burnett) was nominated for a Grammy for best contemporary folk album, and Hell Among the Yearlings followed on July 28, 1998. In 2000 she was associate producer and a performer on the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, with a cameo in the film, singing "I'll Fly Away" with Alison Krauss; the soundtrack won the 2002 Grammy for album of the year. In 2001 they started Acony Records, named for a wildflower, after Universal bought Almo Sounds, and released Time (The Revelator), produced by Rawlings mostly at RCA Studio B, followed by Soul Journey (2003) and The Harrow and the Harvest (June 28, 2011, number 20 on the Billboard 200). Rawlings also made A Friend of a Friend (2009) and Nashville Obsolete (2015) as the Dave Rawlings Machine and Poor David's Almanack (2017), and produced Willie Watson, Dawes and Old Crow Medicine Show.

Boots No. 1: The Official Revival Bootleg came out on November 25, 2016, and in 2018 they co-wrote "When a Cowboy Trades His Spurs for Wings" for The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, which earned an Oscar nomination for best original song. All the Good Times (Are Past and Gone) (2020), recorded at home, was the first album credited to both names and won the 2021 Grammy for best folk album; Woodland (August 23, 2024, on Acony) won it again in 2025, which makes them the only duo to win that award more than once, according to Wikipedia. They played an NPR Tiny Desk concert on July 2, 2025, the Grand Ole Opry on August 6, 2022, and in 2026 a tour of Grateful Dead songs, which Welch called a big old mountain she had been contemplating for something like 40 years.

"Orphan Girl" has been covered by Emmylou Harris, Linda Ronstadt, Patty Griffin and Mindy Smith, among others. Guardian critic John Harris called her one of the decade's greatest talents in 2007, and Time (The Revelator) appears on best-of-decade lists from Rolling Stone, Paste and Uncut. Early critics questioned her authenticity given her Southern California upbringing. They were named Duo/Group of the Year at the Americana awards in 2025.