Gillian Welch and David Rawlings are pillars of the modern acoustic music world and their rich and remarkable careers span over twenty-five years. They have been hailed by Pitchfork as “modern masters of American folk” and “protectors of the American folk song” by Rolling Stone.
After moving to Nashville in the 1990s, Welch was launched into the public consciousness when Emmylou Harris recorded a cover of Welch’s “Orphan Girl.” Her career continued to flourish as her 1996 debut Revival, produced by T Bone Burnett, was released to critical acclaim. Firmly on the roots music map following the release, Welch and Rawlings followed up that GRAMMY nominated album release with 1998’s Hell Among The Yearlings, a stark duet record that further solidified the duo as a force in the folk music scene.
In 2000, Welch was awarded the Album of the Year GRAMMY for her work as Associate Producer as well as a performer and songwriter on the eight times platinum O Brother, Where Art Thou? Soundtrack. Welch and Rawlings were simultaneously nominated for Time (The Revelator) which Rolling Stone called one of the best albums of the 2000s and is widely considered by critics and fans to be one of the best albums of all time.
Beginning with Time (The Revelator), all of Welch and Rawlings albums have been self- produced and self-released on their own record label, Acony Records, helping to establish the duo’s fierce commitment to independent music.
2003’s Soul Journey was the pair’s first experimentation with a fuller, electric sound, which paved the way for the Dave Rawlings Machine project, and their first release under Rawlings’ name (A Friend of A Friend, 2009), which was accompanied by a time period of heavy touring and headlining major festivals.
The Harrow and The Harvest returned to the duet sound and was nominated for Best Contemporary Folk Album and Best Engineered Album at the 2012 GRAMMYs, and won Artist of the Year (Welch) and Instrumentalist of the Year (Rawlings) at the Americana Honors & Awards. The album garnered glowing reviews and topped multiple year end “Best Of” lists.
Nashville Obsolete, the last project to be released as Dave Rawlings Machine in 2015, showcased Rawlings’ expanding pallet as a producer with more lavish arrangements, strings, and guest musicians. He also produced albums by Willie Watson, Dawes, Old Crow Medicine Show, and Robyn Hitchcock. “Cumberland Gap” from Poor David’s Almanack in 2017 was nominated for Best American Roots Song and was featured in Guy Ritchie’s film The Gentlemen, and has since become one of the duo’s highest streaming songs.
In celebration of the twenty year anniversary of the Welch-Rawlings partnership, the two launched an archival branch of Acony Records, entitled Boots, dedicated to releasing outtakes, demos, bootlegs, and live recordings from their copious vault. Thus far they have released five album’s worth of music with more on the way.
In 2018, Welch was the first musician to receive the Thomas Wolfe Prize for Literature. The award is bestowed by University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s Department of English & Comparative Literature and recognizes contemporary writers with a distinguished body of work. 2019 saw Welch and Rawlings nominated for an Academy Award for “Best Original Song” where they performed their singing cowboy duet live on the Oscars. “When A Cowboy Trades His Spurs For Wings” was written for the Coen brothers’ film The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs. In 2020, the duo released All the Good Times, the first album under both their names, and won the GRAMMY for the Best Folk Album.
Recently, they were crowned with the Berklee American Masters Award and honored by Americana Music Association with a Lifetime Achievement for Songwriting.
