Gillian Welch

She was born in New York in 1967 and grew up in Los Angeles, where her parents, Ken and Mitzie Welch, moved when she was three to write music for The Carol Burnett Show. At the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she graduated in 1990 with an art degree and senior work in photography, a roommate’s Stanley Brothers record turned her toward bluegrass; she has named the Stanley Brothers, Norman and Nancy Blake, the Delmore Brothers and the Blue Sky Boys among the music she took in. She then studied songwriting at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, and there, auditioning for the school’s only country ensemble, she met Rawlings, a guitar student.

After both graduated in 1992 they moved to Nashville, where she worked songwriter contests and open-mic nights and performed under her own name, always with Rawlings beside her on guitar and harmony. In 1993 she won the Chris Austin Songwriting Contest at the Merle Watson Memorial Festival in Wilkesboro, North Carolina. Tim and Mollie O’Brien recorded “Orphan Girl” and “Wichita” on Away Out on the Mountain (1994), the first of her songs to be issued; the Nashville Bluegrass Band also recorded her songs, and Emmylou Harris put “Orphan Girl” on Wrecking Ball (1995).

T Bone Burnett, who heard the pair at the Station Inn, produced her first two albums for Almo Sounds. Revival, released in April 1996, kept the sound close to the duo, with songs such as “Orphan Girl,” “Annabelle” and “Tear My Stillhouse Down,” and was nominated for the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album. Hell Among the Yearlings (1998), named for an old fiddle tune, was sparer still, usually just Rawlings’s guitar with Welch on guitar or clawhammer banjo. That year she also sang the Carter Family’s “Gold Watch and Chain” with Ralph Stanley on his Clinch Mountain Country, and she was among the singers on his Clinch Mountain Sweethearts (2001), the IBMA’s Recorded Event of the Year in 2002.

For the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack (2000) she was associate producer and sang “I’ll Fly Away” with Alison Krauss, the IBMA’s Gospel Recorded Performance of the Year in 2001, and “Didn’t Leave Nobody but the Baby” with Krauss and Emmylou Harris, for which she and Burnett wrote additional lyrics; the album won the Grammy for Album of the Year in 2002. When Universal bought Almo Sounds, she and Rawlings started their own label, Acony Records, in 2001. Its first release, Time (The Revelator), produced by Rawlings and recorded mostly at RCA Studio B in Nashville, was nominated for the same folk Grammy as Revival, and Soul Journey (2003) added Dobro, fiddle, electric bass and drums to the sound. The Harrow & the Harvest, released on 28 June 2011 after an eight-year gap, reached No. 20 on the Billboard 200.

The partnership also produced records under Rawlings’s name, beginning with Dave Rawlings Machine’s A Friend of a Friend (2009), on which Welch co-wrote five songs and played in the band, and in 2016 Acony marked twenty years of her debut with Boots No. 1: The Official Revival Bootleg. In 2015 the Americana Music Association gave her and Rawlings its Lifetime Achievement Award for Songwriting, and 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,” from the Coen brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. All the Good Times (2020), covers and traditional songs recorded at home and the first album billed to both of them, won the Grammy for Best Folk Album in March 2021, and Woodland (Acony, 23 August 2024), their first album of new songs since 2011, won it again in 2025.