Dave rawlings and gillian welch married

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

Since 1996, when Gillian Welch and her partner, the guitarist David Rawlings, released “Revival,” their début album, they’ve been making tense and eerie acoustic music about desire and devastation, the sacred and the profane, by and by, Lord, by and by. The duo’s music—some of the first to be dubbed “Americana”—often feels both ancient and instinctive, as though these songs have always existed, oozing out of a phonograph horn on some distant astral plane. These days, it seems preposterous that Welch’s provenance—she was adopted and brought up in Los Angeles—was once controversial within the roots-music scene. Though it was honed in the American South, the vernacular music that she and Rawlings pull from is inclusive and yielding by design; to be proprietary about this sort of folk music is to misunderstand its ethos entirely. These songs obliterate notions of time and place, focussing, instead, on the threads of joy and sorrow that make us human.

This month, Welch and Rawlings will release “Woodland,” their seventh collaboration. The record was shaped, in part, by the fallout of a catastrophic tornado that whipped through Nashville in the early-morning hours of March 3, 2020. I recently spoke with Welch and Rawlings from their home on the east side of the city. During our conversation, which has been edited and condensed, I found them thoughtful, open, and prone to finishing each other’s sentences. “Before we started talking to you today, I was actually thinking about the frustrations of trying to give meaningful interviews,” Welch told me. “Art is how I relate to the world; I have to do this to communicate, because I’m not that great at expressing myself outside of it. I try; I’m a decently verbal person. What’s really going on in here, it’s hard for me to tell you—but it goes into the songs.”

Your new record is named after Woodland Studios, in East Nashville, which you bought in 2002. Can you tell me a little about your history there?

GILLIAN WELCH: We w

Gillian Welch is a person, but also a duo, they are Gillian and husband Dave Rawlings, although they aren’t actually married, who occasionally record as Dave as well. Clear? Good, then I’ll continue. This is their 5th album as Gillian Welch and the first to be release on vinyl, and what a release. There are many people who say vinyl is best others who disagree and sometimes either can be right, but in this case the vinyl is perfect. There are a number of reason for this, firstly the music lends itself to the format as it is limited in instrumentation and there is no requirement for many overdubs. Secondly, it was recorded using old analogue equipment, which again lends itself to the format. When I say old analogue this is from the microphone to the amps to the desk to the tape, proper old school, and it shows. My ears are not as good as they used to be but I can still hear the difference.

I’ve mentioned before about a Billy Holiday album I have that was recorded in the 50’s, it sounds amazing, as though we are in the same room, The Harrow and the Harvest has the same feel about it. Another nice touch, for the CD version at least, was that the covers where letter pressed, which is something I’ve tried my hand at (it’s difficult) and individually coffee stained to give them an aged look. It’s small touches like this that makes this album special throughout. That and they released it on their own Acony record label.

I saw them at Warwick Arts Centre on the tour promoting this album and it was captivating, so engrossed was I that it came as a complete surprise to me when it ended as I had lost track of time. Just two people with guitars, no light show, no pyrotechnics and it was amazing. That’s the set list from the night above.

Now I fully understand that a lot of people are turned off at the mere suggestion of Country music, and while you could throw this album into that category I find it sits

American musician (born 1967)

Musical artist

Gillian Howard Welch (; born October 2, 1967) is an American singer-songwriter. She performs with her musical partner, guitarist David Rawlings. Their sparse and dark musical style, which combines elements of Appalachian music, bluegrass, country and Americana, is described by The New Yorker as "at once innovative and obliquely reminiscent of past rural forms."

Welch and Rawlings have collaborated on nine critically acclaimed albums, five released under her name, three released under Rawlings' name, and two under both of their names. Her 1996 debut, Revival, and the 2001 release Time (The Revelator), received nominations for the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album. Her 2003 album, Soul Journey, introduced electric guitar, drums, and a more upbeat sound to their body of work. After a gap of eight years, she released a fifth studio album, The Harrow & the Harvest, in 2011, which was also nominated for a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album. In 2020, Welch and Rawlings released All the Good Times (Are Past & Gone), which won the 2021 Grammy Award for Best Folk Album. In 2024, Welch and Rawlings released Woodland, which would win the 2025 Grammy Award for Best Folk Album, currently making Welch and Rawlings the only duo to win the award more than once.

Welch was an associate producer and performed on two songs of the soundtrack of the Coen brothers 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a platinum album that won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 2002. She also appeared in the film attempting to buy a Soggy Bottom Boys record. Welch, while not one of the principal actors, did sing and provide additional lyrics to the Sirens song "Didn't Leave Nobody but the Baby." In 2018 she and Rawlings wrote the song "When a Cowboy Trades His Spurs for Wings" for the Coens' The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, for which they received a no