Writing and performing with her longtime partner, David Rawlings, they present their haunting songs like rock and roll chamber music, with two acoustic guitars and two voices welded together. Their tunes have been covered by such American legends as Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris, and Solomon Burke. Their music defies easy categorization - it embraces, and is in turn embraced by, the pre-eminent ambassadors of folk, bluegrass, R & B, punk, and rock and roll.
'The Harrow & The Harvest', “is a new Southern sound,” writes Colin Meloy of The Decemberists, “with the sort of songs you wouldn’t be surprised to hear issuing from some verdant, wooded hollow in Appalachia; Songs you’d expect to hear hollered from an Asheville grange hall, all too late in the evening. Songs with the wry humour of the back porch. Listen to this record with the lights low. Listen to it on an old radio, cradled next to your ear.”
Uncut Magazine’s ‘Album of the Month’ review calls ‘The Harrow & The Harvest’ a "timeless country classic, this is Welch's most ruggedly traditional work yet." And closes by lamenting, "The only thing wrong with a Gillian Welch album is that she makes so damn few of them.”