David Rawlings - Poor David’s Almanack

The Guardian 80

(Acony)
The guitar great delves deep into rural America on his third solo outing

Rankings are for cloth-eared philistines, and listicles are an insult to the craft of musicians. It is, however, timely to note that Time (The Revelator), the great 2001 album by folk stylist Gillian Welch, was ranked 39th in US National Public Radio’s recent list of the 150 greatest albums made by women. Yee, and indeed, haw.

Welch is, of course, the workmate of superlative guitarist Dave Rawlings; they run a label and a vinyl cutting lathe together. He plays on her excellent records and she on his – a relationship that was initially kept more hush-hush, the better to foreground Welch in the gendered snakepit that is creative labour. This third Rawlings LP (two are credited to Dave Rawlings Machine) is their eighth joint outing. The maths and attribution matter – not least because Welch loyalists crave the follow-up to her sensational, Grammy-nominated 2011 album The Harrow & the Harvest, a hungry gap now filled by two Rawlings sets. While you can still hear distant fingers drumming, it would be disrespectful to complain beyond this paragraph – especially since Rawlings is an enlightened soul, happily playing second fiddle to Welch for two decades, and because Poor David’s Almanack is by far the most Welch-like of Rawlings’s releases.

Related: Gillian Welch: 'A lot of the songs are done in one take. Maybe two'