Exquisite country duo Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings get up close and personal

It may be able to seat more than 5500, but the Opera House’s Concert Hall shrank to the intimacy of a living room when Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings took the stage.

Steve Moffatt

2 min read

January 26, 2025 - 5:21PM

Wentworth Courier

Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings in concert at Sydney Opera House. Picture: Daniel Boud

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It may be able to seat more than 5500, but Sydney Opera House’s Concert Hall shrank to the intimacy of a living room when Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings took the stage for the first of three sold-out performances.

No amps, no pick-ups, smoke haze or light show, just four mics – two for vocals, two for instruments – a pair of vintage guitars, a banjo and harmonica and two of the most perfectly attuned voices you’re likely to hear. Their two sets ranged over 22 songs, mostly originals from their 30-year back catalogue and seven new ones from Woodland – the first album on which they share the billing and which is named after the Nashville studio they bought and that was all but wrecked in 2020 in a tornado.

Also in the mix were a couple of covers and some seasoned classics of their own including Welch’s Orphan Girl – adopted by Emmylou Harris as a favourite for her setlist – Hard Times with Welch on banjo and Revelator, alongside Rawlings’ Cumberland Gap and Ruby.

Welch’s songs have that quality of sounding as if they’ve always been around – instant traditional-style folk songs or jewels from the Carter Family – while Rawlings often evokes the times of the Depression with country-inflected Americana that summons the likes of Woody Guthrie, Cisco Huston, Mississippi John Hurt and Hank Williams, but at the same time bringing something fresh and new.

The Day The Mighty Mississippi Died is a stark message about climate change, and their recent experience with tornadoes seems to be behind the gorgeously wistful What We Had: “All my world is changing, I don’t know where I am going, Apartments rearranging, the beggar winds are blowing”.

But not everything was serious, and the pair have a nice line in humour. They had spent that day at the Botanic Garden among the crowds waiting for the corpse flower to bloom. “A lot of our songs are about botany and death,” Welch said with a chuckle.

And while Rawlings played harmonica and frailed on a banjo, Welch “hamboned” – percussive body slaps – and clog danced to Six White Horses.

I Wanna Sing that Rock and Roll, which was used in the Coen Brothers film O Brother, Where Art Thou? featured one of Rawling’s electrifying guitar solos, his 90-year-old Epiphone Olympic archtop literally rocking as he swayed. Welch, all the while, playing finger style hunched over her 1956 Gibson acoustic flat-top.

Turf The Gambler from the new album has a gentle Caribbean feel to the chords and guitar, with some nice harmonica from Welch, while Hashtag, also from Woodland, has the feeling of an instant classic.

Even after two hours of magnificently crafted music the crowd were eager for more, and they were given a generous helping of three songs – the as yet unrecorded original Midnight Bones, Welch’s old faithful Look At Miss Ohio and some community singing with Rev JM Gates’s classic I’ll Fly Away.

Speaking of which the Nashville couple are famously reluctant to fly, so sadly this might be the last we see them here live for some time to come.