The 57-year-old Welch stood alongside her long-time musical partner, David Rawlings, 55, on stage at the Majestic Theatre, a venue the pair last played some seven years ago. Saturday’s performance unfolded both as if it had been eons since the duo last stopped by, but also as if no time had passed at all.
Those words, first recorded by Welch 24 years ago, now hit like hindsight instead of playing as prophecy — the world around us all slips more askance with every moment, but the days indeed get straighter, and time lays bare what’s true.
To watch and listen to Welch and Rawlings make music together, so completely in sync as to seem like a single person, is to find a reprieve from the madness, a restorative dip in the long, wide, deep river of American music flowing back decades.
There is folk and there is rock and there are blues and there is jazz and there is gospel and there is soul — synthesizing pain and belief and beauty into something transcending the immediate moment and lifting the spirits of everyone within earshot.
“Howdy, Dallas,” Welch said by way of introduction, greeting a comfortably full room which was rapturous in its reception of the two musicians. “It sure feels like a Saturday, doesn’t it?”
It did — a satisfying reward in the form of a freewheeling showcase, divided between two sets and stretching nearly two hours, and pulling from all corners of Rawlings and Welch’s catalog, up to and including last year’s Woodland.
The night kicked off with an evocative three-song run, from the feisty opener “I Want to Sing That Rock and Roll” into “Midnight Train” followed by the bleak, arresting “Empty Trainload of Sky.”
Throughout, the pair’s voices — Welch’s immaculately tarnished alto and Rawlings’s febrile tenor — were braided as tightly as nautical rope, laced together so snugly that, at times, it was difficult to distinguish one from the other.
The tensile strength, honed over so many decades of performing together, was a marvel — particularly juxtaposed against the physical stillness of Welch, strumming sturdily on her acoustic guitar, as Rawlings indulged wild-ass solos, his fingers performing calisthenics along his fretboard.
Every time Rawlings peeled off a transcendent flourish, the room met his efforts with ferocious applause and cheers. Welch held her own, keeping time with her hands and feet during “Six White Horses,” slapping her thighs and lightly tapdancing as Rawlings played harmonica and banjo. (“You seem like a banjo-loving crowd,” Welch noted.)
The audience was near-reverent in its silence — “It’s so quiet,” Rawlings observed at one point, as he tuned his instrument — but punctuated the night with appreciative whoops, multiple ovations and, spontaneously, clapping along during “Horses,” which put an enormous grin on Welch’s face.
The notion of time, its passage and how inexorably it sweeps us all forward, implicit in a great deal of the material showcased Saturday, was occasionally made explicit: After bringing a rollicking “To Be Young (Is to Be Sad, Is to Be High)” to a close, Rawlings observed it was a song he co-wrote a long time ago; “Two whole houses ago,” Welch cracked.
Elsewhere, the wryly funny “Hashtag,” from last year’s Woodland, prompted a tribute to the late Guy Clark, who took Rawlings and Welch on the road early in their career: “We called it the world tour of Texas,” she remarked. “I feel like we played three shows in Dallas [alone].”
It wasn’t until the encore that the full weight of the evening’s performance slammed home. “We’re going to play a tune we learned from Doc Watson,” Welch began, before the pair’s poignant rendition of “Make Me a Pallet on the Floor.” “He always called us ‘you kids’ — ‘You kids be careful out there.’ We’re gonna do this one for Doc.”
Doc Watson has gone on ahead, as has Guy Clark. The upstarts from 30 years ago are now grayer; eagerness has given way to elder statesmanship. Though their forebears and mentors are now memories, Welch and Rawlings carry on, shouldering the responsibility of keeping this mode of expression alive. Someday, so will artists Welch and Rawlings have in turn inspired.
It is a breathtaking trick of time, how easily one slips from aspirant to archetype.
Watching as Gillian Welch and David Rawlings deftly collapsed the past into the present Saturday night was to behold two masters of their craft walking the road before them, navigating a path of their choosing, the days growing ever straighter.
See more photos from Saturday's show:
The Majestic Theater is the second stop on Welch and Rawlings’ 2025 Texas run of their U.S. Tour.
Abigail Mueller
