During the intermission at Gillian Welch and David Rawling’s recent performance at Capitol One Hall, I heard an interesting point: Artists like Taylor Swift and Beyonce need “33 trucks” to put on their massive shows, but Welch and Rawlings can command an audience with just their voices and acoustic instruments. Granted, Taylor and Beyonce are playing stadiums, but the point still holds: For their two sets at Capitol One Hill, it was just Gillian and David and bassist Paul Kowart.

This show on Dec. 8 was a long time coming; the duo hasn’t toured since several years before the pandemic. The album they released earlier this, Woodland, named for their studio in Nashville, is their first set of original songs since 2011’s The Harrow and the Harvest, though they did win a Grammy for Best Folk Album for their collection of traditional and cover tunes, All The Good Times. (Rawlings has also been active as a producer and with his project, The Dave Rawlings Machine.)

This was a stripped down show that featured great songs and little wasted time on banter, centered on Welch’s incredible voice and Rawlings’s distinctive guitar playing. (He studied guitar at Boston’s Berklee School of Music.) Dave did talk a little about his guitar, a vintage 1935 archtop. When someone cheered for Gillian strapping on her banjo, she said, “It cheers me up when someone whoops for the banjo.” David followed this with the classic musician’s joke about how, if you leave a car unlocked with a banjo in the backseat, you might end up with two banjos. He noted how, earlier, Gillian had taken the instrument out of their van, and he’d looked for it, thinking, “There’s no way.”

Over two sets, Welch and Rawlings played songs from the work both together and in their various projects, starting with one of Gillian’s early songs, “Tear My Stillhouse Down.” They followed this with one of Dave’s songs, “Midnight Train;” the first set also included Rawling’s “Cumberland Gap” and “Ruby,” a song he did with the Dave Rawlings Machine. They played several songs from the new album: “Empty Trainload of Sky,” “Howdy Howdy,” “Hashtag,” and “North Country.” There was a noticeable cheer for Welch’s “Wayside/Back In Time,” from 2003’s Soul Journey, and they finished the set with “The Way It Goes,” from The Harrow & The Harvest.

Stream “The Way It Goes” by Gillian Welch on YouTube:

The second set began with a couple more new songs, “Lawman” and “What We Had,” and also included “Lazarus.” “The Day the Mississippi Died,” and “Midnight Bones.” While the first set had included much of Rawlings’s material, the second focused on Gillian’s with “Hard Times,” “Time (The Revelator)” (one of the centerpieces of the album with the same name, widely hailed as her masterpiece), and “Red Clay Halo.”

We got not just one, but two encores. For the first, they played “Pilgrim (You Can’t Go Home),” a Dave Rawlings Machine song,  “Look at Miss Ohio,” which may be Gillian’s most popular song, and a cover of Albert E. Brumley’s “I’ll Fly Away.” They stepped off the stage and came back to end the evening with “Everything Is Free,”  a song many hailed, when it came it out in 2001, as a prophetic account of the fate of the music industry.

This was a masterclass in roots music. No one as effectively channels the spirit and sound of old-time folk and country music as well as Welch and Rawlings, and their long overdue return to the stage was more than welcome.

Parklife has two sets of photos for this review! James Todd Miller shot the show at Capital One Hall on Dec. 8, and David LaMason caught Gillian Welch and David Rawlings in concert at The Lyric Baltimore on Dec. 7.

Here are some photos of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings performing at Capital One Hall on Dec. 8, 2024. All pictures copyright and courtesy of James Todd Miller.

Here are some photos of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings performing at The Lyric Baltimore on Dec. 7, 2024. All pictures copyright and courtesy of David LaMason.