David Rawlings

David Rawlings began his significant musical career after meeting Gillian Welch at the Berklee College of Music. This meeting led to a longstanding musical partnership that shaped the sound of Americana music. Rawlings and Welch moved to Nashville, Tennessee in 1992, where they quickly realized their voices harmonized effectively, leading to their performances as a duo. Rawlings is a skilled guitarist known for his inventive playing style on his 1935 Epiphone Olympic Guitar, which has been described as making daring melodic leaps. He has collaborated extensively with Gillian Welch, co-writing songs and producing many of her critically acclaimed albums, and releasing several albums under his own name or with the Dave Rawlings Machine.

Over his career, Rawlings has been instrumental in producing records for other notable artists, including Ryan Adams and Old Crow Medicine Show. His work on Gillian Welch’s albums, such as “Revival” (1996), “Time (The Revelator)” (2001), and “The Harrow & the Harvest” (2011), has earned Grammy nominations and critical praise for its sparse, dark, and rooted sound. Beyond his direct collaborations with Welch, Rawlings has also released albums under his own name, including “A Friend of a Friend” (2009), “Nashville Obsolete” (2015), and “Poor David’s Almanack” (2017). The song “Cumberland Gap” from “Poor David’s Almanack” was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best American Roots Song in 2018 and featured in the 2019 film “The Gentlemen.”

Rawlings and Welch continued their collaborative success, releasing “All the Good Times (Are Past & Gone)” in 2020, which won the 2021 Grammy Award for Best Folk Album. In 2024, they released “Woodland,” which secured the 2025 Grammy Award for Best Folk Album, making them the only duo to win this award more than once. The album “Woodland” was critically shaped by their experience of a devastating tornado in Nashville in 2020 which severely damaged their Woodland Studios. Rawlings and Welch were honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award for Songwriting by the Americana Music Association in 2015, highlighting their lasting impact on the music industry.