Gillian Welch
Best known for
Guitar
Songwriter
Gillian Welch is an American singer-songwriter and guitarist whose spare, antique-sounding records with longtime musical partner David Rawlings have made her a defining voice of modern Americana — a co-founder of Acony Records and an Americana Music Association Lifetime Achievement honoree.
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- Born October 2, 1967 in New York City; adopted by television-and-entertainment songwriters Mitzie and Ken Welch and raised in Los Angeles.
- Studied photography at UC Santa Cruz, then songwriting at Berklee College of Music, where she met David Rawlings; the two have worked as an inseparable two-guitar, close-harmony duo ever since.
- Tim and Mollie O'Brien and Emmylou Harris — whose Wrecking Ball cover of "Orphan Girl" reached a wide audience — recorded her songs before her own debut.
- Her T Bone Burnett–produced debut Revival (1996) was nominated for the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album; Time (The Revelator) (2001), the first release on her own Acony Records, is widely considered the duo's masterpiece.
- Further albums include Hell Among the Yearlings (1998), Soul Journey (2003), The Harrow & the Harvest (2011), and Woodland (2024); work credited to Rawlings, as Dave Rawlings Machine and under his own name, is effectively part of the same body of work.
- Sang on and served as associate producer of the Grammy-winning O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack (2000), and co-wrote the Oscar-nominated "When a Cowboy Trades His Spurs for Wings" for The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018).
- Received the Americana Music Association Lifetime Achievement Award for Songwriting in 2015 and won Grammys for Best Folk Album for All the Good Times (2020, with Rawlings) and Woodland (2024).
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Gillian WelchPlayed on recordings with Gillian Welch
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Ralph Stanley and FriendsPlayed on recordings with Ralph Stanley and Friends
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Alison KraussPlayed on recording with Alison Krauss
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Gillian Welch and Alison KraussPlayed on recording with Gillian Welch and Alison Krauss
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Sara WatkinsPlayed on recording with Sara Watkins
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The Punch Brothers with Gillian Welch and Dave RawlingsPlayed on recording with The Punch Brothers with Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings
