Gillian Welch has made albums rather than singles, and almost all of them with the guitarist and singer David Rawlings, whom she met at Berklee College of Music in Boston. After moving to Nashville in 1992 the pair signed with Almo Sounds. Her first two albums, Revival (April 1996) and Hell Among the Yearlings (July 1998), were produced by T Bone Burnett. Revival was recorded in Hollywood studios and at Woodland in Nashville.
When Universal Music Group bought Almo Sounds, Welch started her own label, Acony Records, named after the wildflower in her song “Acony Bell.” Its first release was Time (The Revelator) in July 2001, produced by Rawlings and recorded almost entirely at RCA Studio B. That same year the couple bought Woodland Sound Studios, and it has been their base since. The Harrow & the Harvest (2011) was made there. So was All the Good Times (Are Past & Gone), an album of covers and traditional songs recorded during the 2020 lockdowns and the first credited to Welch and Rawlings jointly. A tornado tore the roof off the building in March 2020. After it was rebuilt, the pair named their 2024 album Woodland after it and issued “Empty Trainload of Sky” as its first single.
Her one stand-alone single grew out of film work. With Rawlings she wrote “When a Cowboy Trades His Spurs for Wings” for Joel and Ethan Coen’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018). In the film it closes the opening story and is sung by Tim Blake Nelson and Willie Watson. After the song was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song, Welch and Rawlings released their own recording on Acony on 12 February 2019, twelve days before the ceremony.
Session details drawn in part from the Bluegrass Discography.
Tracklist
- 1 When a Cowboy Trades His Spurs for Wings alt version 3:03
