Gillian Welch & David Rawlings play Grateful Dead Acoustic Reckoning

Gillian Welch is one of the country’s most incisive songwriters, able to make a few lines about Elvis or the Titanic, a tornado or red dirt feel like keys to understanding yourself or the sweep of human history. She and David Rawlings, her musical partner for more than 30 years, are one of music’s most intoxicating duos, his small-body guitar leads and copacetic sense of harmony accentuating the songs in the perfect places. Welch and Rawlings met at Berklee College of Music before decamping to Nashville, drawn by the city’s musical past but wildly separate from its modern country boom in the early ’90s. Their songs steadily spread, infiltrating the folk and old-time worlds and leading to a deal with a Universal subsidiary. The pair’s first four records, from 1996’s Revival to 2003’s Soul Journey, were plainspoken marvels, the pair’s musical chemistry so compelling they needed little or no accompaniment. Time (The Revelator) remains one of the great documents of American folk music, several centuries tucked into 51 brilliant minutes.

But, as is clear from the music they make, Welch and Rawlings are patient people. They went nearly a decade without releasing new music, dissatisfied with the songs they were making in their Nashville studio. Since 2020, though, the two have been on a creative tear, revisiting decades of archival “lost songs,” issuing a spellbinding set of Covid-times covers, and, in 2024, releasing the tender and raw Woodland, a deeply resonant examination of age and loss, hope and suffering. This momentum has carried over to the stage, from a three-piece road show revisiting the Grateful Dead’s songbook to duo sets where they can somehow roar like an ocean and get so close to silence you can almost hear the songs take shape. At Big Ears 2027, bassist Paul Kowert joins them for an evening of Dead.