whether you like it or not (Parsons died at 26 in
1973). If you are Gillian Welch and David Rawlings,
there’s a sense almost of pre destination, as if you
were traveling toward each other all along.
Welch was born in Manhattan and adopted into
a musical family when she was just a few days old.
When she was 3, her family moved to Los Angeles
when her parents took a job writing music for ‘‘The
Carol Burnett Show.’’ ‘‘In my house, everyone sang
all the time,’’ Welch tells me. ‘‘My mother used to
embarrass me. She’d sing in the department store.’’
And then, with a small laugh, she adds, ‘‘and now
I sing in the department store.’’ When she was 7,
Welch asked for a guitar, and she was in luck. Her
sister, who was six years older, had briefl y taken up
guitar and then abandoned it. By the time she was
7, Welch had already tried her hand at piano and
drums, with little interest. ‘‘I had really sensitive
hearing as a kid,’’ she says. ‘‘I didn’t like making
noises that loud. I liked the privacy of silence.
When I was playing guitar, I could be in my room,
and no one would know.’’
When she was 9, she would play through James
Taylor and Simon and Garfunkel songbooks.
When she hit the end of the books, eager for
more songs, she fi gured she could write her own.
At 10, she started in on her fi rst notebook. After
graduating from the University of California,
Santa Cruz, with an arts degree, Welch traveled
to Europe. She thought she would stay abroad for
a while and continue to just play music for her
own enjoyment, but her parents had other plans.
‘‘Well, they thought I was never going to come
home,’’ she says. ‘‘So, partly to get me to come
back — and recognizing that I was a little lost —
they off ered to pay for a year of music school.’’
Welch made her way to Berklee in Boston.
Rawlings grew up in North Smithfi eld, R.I., and
had a slower start to his musical ambitions. Or,
understanding that Welch’s start was extraordi-
nary, it can be said that Rawlings had a normal
start. ‘‘I didn’t pick up a guitar until I was maybe
16,’’ he tells me. ‘‘It was that moment in the ’70s
when, in country music, that urban- cowboy thing
was happening. And so there was stuff like, you
know, Kenny Rogers — some of that stuff had bro-
ken through. Like Jim Croce. And if it was a story
song, I’d memorize the words, and I’d sing them
in my head all of the time.’’ He wanted to get an
instrument to play them. Rawlings and his family
went to a Catholic church where elders ‘‘on the
hippie side of things’’ would play 12-string guitars
during Mass. But when Rawlings fi nally did get his
own guitar, he got good at it quickly because his
fi ngers were so agile from a childhood of obses-
sive video-game playing. ‘‘I was always kind of
systematic about things that I wanted to try to get
good at,’’ Rawlings says. ‘‘And there’d been things I
enjoyed, like playing basketball, where I knew that
no matter how hard I tried to drill it into myself,
there was a ceiling. And I think as soon as I got the
guitar, I realized I maybe didn’t have a ceiling.’’ He,
too, eventually enrolled at Berklee.
In the early ’90s, Berklee wasn’t exactly fl ush
with roots and folk musicians. ‘‘It was always
just 19 dudes on electric guitar and then me,’’
Welch says. ‘‘There was one country- roots
ensemble in the whole school, and we both
auditioned for it and got in.’’
Both Rawlings and Welch talk of a moment
that decided their partnership, a month or two
after leaving Berklee and moving to Nashville
in 1992. They were sitting in Rawlings’s kitch-
en. Knowing they had a shared interest in duets,
they started noodling around on their guitars
and singing the classic ‘‘Long Black Veil.’’ They
instantly sensed the bones of something good,
potential they honed until it was fully realized.
Rawlings tells me, ‘‘If you have the same North
Star as someone, and if you’re trying to walk in
the same direction, something will click.’’
There is the musical defi nition of harmony, but
there is also a part of that defi nition — ‘‘a pleas-
ing arrangement of parts’’ — that can be mapped
onto the emotional, the personal. If a duo has
really dug themselves in, as Welch and Rawlings
have, the stakes are precariously high. So much
can go wrong if one person doesn’t aff ord the
other grace, or generosity, or the ability to be met
halfway, no matter how dark the road. Welch and
Rawlings have a clear understanding of when to
give each other space and when to collide. And
when they do collide, it isn’t as if they’re elbow-
ing each other in a fi ght for land. It sounds, more
often, like two people telling the exact same story
from two diff erent rooms in the same house.
‘‘Duet singing aff ords you incredible freedom
to move around,’’ Welch says. ‘‘It’s confi ning in
some way too, because you can’t hide under a
band. But you have a freedom — and with it comes
incredible responsibility. But it suits us. It’s like
doing a dance in 40 pounds of chains.’’WELCH AND RAWLINGS are certainly not at the
end of their careers — in fact, Welch insisted, ‘‘I
think we’re only just now getting good at what we
do.’’ But there has also been real, tangible loss in the
music world they’ve orbited. The pandemic took
John Prine, an artist the duo covered on ‘‘All the
Good Times.’’ Just a few days before I met them, the
news of the folk singer Justin Townes Earle’s death
at 38 trembled through town.The New York Times Magazine 29(Continued on Page 44)