Gillian Welch

Gillian Howard Welch (born October 2, 1967) is an American singer-songwriter.

She performs with her musical partner, guitarist David Rawlings.

Their sparse and dark musical style, which combines elements of Appalachian music, bluegrass, country and Americana, is described by The New Yorker as "at once innovative and obliquely reminiscent of past rural forms."

Welch and Rawlings have collaborated on nine critically acclaimed albums, five released under her name, three released under Rawlings' name, and one under both of their names.

Welch was born on October 2, 1967, in New York City, and was adopted by Mitzie Welch (née Marilyn Cottle) and Ken Welch, comedy and music entertainers.

Her biological mother was a freshman in college, and her father was a musician visiting New York City.

Welch has speculated that her biological father could have been one of her favorite musicians, and she later discovered from her adoptive parents that he was a drummer.

Alec Wilkinson of The New Yorker stated that "from an address they had been given, it appeared that her mother ... may have grown up in the mountains of North Carolina".

When Welch was three, her adoptive parents moved to Los Angeles to write music for The Carol Burnett Show.

They also appeared on The Tonight Show.

As a child, Welch was introduced to the music of American folk singers Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and the Carter Family.

She performed folk songs with her peers at the Westland Elementary School in Los Angeles.

Welch later attended Crossroads School, a high school in Santa Monica, California.

While in high school, a local television program featured her as a student who "excelled at everything she did."

While a student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Welch played bass in a goth band, and drums in a psychedelic surf band.

In college, a roommate played an album by the bluegrass band The Stanley Brothers, and she had an epiphany:

"The first song came on and I just stood up and I kind of walked into the other room as if I was in a tractor beam and stood there in front of the stereo. It was just as powerful as the electric stuff, and it was songs I'd grown up singing. All of a sudden I'd found my music."

After graduating from UC Santa Cruz with a degree in photography, Welch attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she majored in songwriting.

During her two years studying at Berklee, Welch gained confidence as a performer.

Welch met her music partner David Rawlings at a successful audition for Berklee's only country band.

Upon finishing college in 1992, Welch moved to Nashville, Tennessee.

She recalled, "I looked at my record collection and saw that all the music I loved had been made in Nashville—Bill Monroe, Dylan, the Stanley Brothers, Neil Young—so I moved there. Not ever thinking I was thirty years too late."

Rawlings soon followed.

In Nashville, after singing "Long Black Veil," the two first realized that their voices harmonized well and they started to perform as a duo.

They never considered using a working name, so the duo were simply billed as "Gillian Welch."

A year after moving to Nashville, Welch found a manager, Denise Stiff, who already managed Alison Krauss.

Both Welch and Stiff ignored frequent advice that Welch should stop playing with Rawlings and join a band.

They eventually signed a recording contract with Almo Sounds.

Following a performance opening for Peter Rowan at the Station Inn, producer T-Bone Burnett expressed interest in recording an album.

Burnett did not plan to disturb Welch's and Rawlings' preference for minimal instrumentation, and Welch agreed to take him on as a producer.

For the recording sessions of Welch's debut, Revival, Burnett wanted to recapture the bare sound of Welch's live performance.

Her 1996 debut, Revival, and the 2001 release Time (The Revelator), received nominations for the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album.

Welch was an associate producer and performed on two songs of the soundtrack of the Coen brothers 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a platinum album that won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 2002.

She also appeared in the film attempting to buy a Soggy Bottom Boys record.

Welch, while not one of the principal actors, did sing and provide additional lyrics to the Sirens song "Didn't Leave Nobody but the Baby."

Her 2003 album, Soul Journey, introduced electric guitar, drums, and a more upbeat sound to their body of work.

After a gap of eight years, she released a fifth studio album, The Harrow & the Harvest, in 2011, which was also nominated for a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album.

In 2018 she and Rawlings wrote the song "When a Cowboy Trades His Spurs for Wings" for the Coens' The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, for which they received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Original Song.

Welch has collaborated and recorded with Alison Krauss, Ryan Adams, Jay Farrar, Emmylou Harris, Mark Knopfler, the Decemberists, Sam Phillips, Conor Oberst, Ani DiFranco, Robyn Hitchcock, Barry Gibb and Molly Tuttle.

In 2020, Welch and Rawlings released All the Good Times (Are Past & Gone), which won the 2021 Grammy Award for Best Folk Album.