Gillian Welch wrote “Orphan Girl” in the early 1990s, after she had moved to Nashville and begun singing in a duo with David Rawlings. Its first recording came from someone else. Welch gave Tim O’Brien a homemade tape of her demos, and he and his sister Mollie O’Brien recorded “Orphan Girl” and her “Wichita” in November 1993 at Colorado Sound Recording in Westminster, Colorado, with Tim on bouzouki and Hammond organ and John Magnie on accordion. Their album Away Out on the Mountain came out on Sugar Hill in June 1994, and the two songs became the first of Welch’s to be published.
Emmylou Harris recorded it next, for Wrecking Ball, the album she made with producer Daniel Lanois; Elektra released it on 26 September 1995, and it won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album. Welch’s own recording opened her debut album, Revival, produced by T Bone Burnett and released by Almo Sounds on 9 April 1996, with Rawlings on guitar and harmony vocal. Revival was nominated for the same Grammy the following year. Most of the album’s songs are credited to Welch and Rawlings together; “Orphan Girl” is one of the few Welch wrote alone.
The singer calls herself an orphan on God’s highway: she has no mother, father, sister or brother, and the friendships she has known, however true, are not family ties. In the later verses she looks ahead to being called home, when she will sit down with her family at God’s table and stop being an orphan, and she asks the Savior to walk beside her until then and to stand in for the kin she does not have. Welch has spoken of her early material in the same terms: asked for happy love songs, she replied that she had “songs about orphans and morphine addicts.”
Bluegrass and string-band musicians recorded it over the following decade. Dudley Connell and Don Rigsby recorded it for their 2000 Sugar Hill album Meet Me by the Moonlight, with Connell singing lead. Crooked Still put it on their 2004 album Hop High, with Aoife O’Donovan singing over banjo, cello and bass, and Monroe Crossing recorded it for Into the Fire in 2006.
