Dave Rawlings

He grew up in Slatersville, Rhode Island, and began playing guitar in 1985, at fifteen. After a short spell at the University of Richmond he went to the Berklee College of Music in Boston as a guitar performance major, studying with Lauren Passarelli and Jim Kelly. There he met Welch, a songwriting student, at an audition for Berklee’s only country ensemble, and after both graduated in 1992 they moved to Nashville. Although they always appeared as a duo, they kept the name “Gillian Welch” for the act, with Rawlings on guitar and harmony vocals.

His lead guitar is a 1935 Epiphone Olympic, a small archtop that he found, filthy and without strings, in a friend’s garage and first took into the studio for Welch’s debut, Revival (1996). T Bone Burnett produced that album and Hell Among the Yearlings (1998); after the two founded their own label, Acony Records, in 2001, Rawlings produced Time (The Revelator), its first release, and then Soul Journey (2003). The Harrow & the Harvest (2011) brought him a Grammy nomination for Best Engineered Album. He also appears on the Down From the Mountain concert album, which the IBMA named Album of the Year in 2002.

Outside the duo he produced Old Crow Medicine Show’s O.C.M.S. (Nettwerk, 2004), playing guitar on its “Wagon Wheel,” and Willie Watson’s Folk Singer Vol. 1 (Acony, 2014), and he contributed to Ryan Adams’s Heartbreaker, Bright Eyes’ Cassadaga and Robyn Hitchcock’s Spooked. With Adams he wrote “To Be Young (Is to Be Sad, Is to Be High)” and “Touch, Feel and Lose.”

Records under his own name put his voice in front. A Friend of a Friend (Acony, 2009), credited to Dave Rawlings Machine, was produced by Rawlings, with Welch as co-writer on five songs and in the band. Nashville Obsolete followed on 18 September 2015, with a band of Welch, Willie Watson, Paul Kowert and Brittany Haas, and Poor David’s Almanack (Acony, 11 August 2017), the first billed simply to David Rawlings, was recorded at the pair’s Woodland Sound Studios in Nashville; its “Cumberland Gap” was nominated for the 2018 Grammy for Best American Roots Song.

In 2015 the Americana Music Association gave Welch and Rawlings its Lifetime Achievement Award for Songwriting, presented at the Ryman Auditorium on 16 September. They were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song at the 91st Academy Awards for “When a Cowboy Trades His Spurs for Wings,” written for the Coen brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. All the Good Times (2020), an album of covers and traditional songs recorded at home during the 2020 lockdowns and the first issued under both their names, won the Grammy for Best Folk Album in March 2021, and Woodland (Acony, August 2024), their first album of new songs since 2011, won the same award in 2025.