Orphan Girl

Welch wrote it alone. Its narrator has no family and asks God to gather her to her kin in Heaven. Welch, who was adopted, said she did not realize when she wrote it that it was autobiographical, adding that she is not an orphan, only adopted, and that the song is something like a dream.

Other singers got there first. Tim and Mollie O'Brien recorded it in 1994, and Welch gave Emmylou Harris a cassette of it, probably at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival; Harris put it on Wrecking Ball in 1995, produced by Daniel Lanois. Welch's own version opens Revival (1996), with a warm bass and guitar under her voice and Jay Joyce's E-Bow whirring near the end. Boots No. 1 (2016) added an alternate take and her earliest four-track home demo.

Live

It has stayed in the duo's sets since their first tours in 1996, and setlist.fm logs more than 600 performances of it by 30 artists, led by Harris, Over the Rhine and Robert Plant's Saving Grace. The upload in the hypersongs web is a live version from the Newport Folk Festival on 3 August 2008, where Welch and Rawlings played it late in a set that also included three brand-new songs.