GILLIAN WELCH & DAVID RAWLINGS ANNOUNCE THE RELEASE OF
BOOTS NO. 3: THE HICKORY SHOW ON FEBRUARY 12, 2027
VIA ACONY RECORDS
ESSENTIAL BOOTLEG FROM 1997 HICKORY, NC SHOW AVAILABLE FOR THE FIRST TIME AS PART OF THE WELCH AND RAWLINGS OFFICIAL CATALOG
SHARE FIRST TWO TRACKS FROM THE ALBUM “TEAR MY STILLHOUSE DOWN” AND THEIR COVER OF TOWNES VAN ZANDT’S “PANCHO & LEFTY”
“There’s that harmony blend that no-one else can achieve besides these two.
They are so influential…”
-NPR Music
“Modern masters of American folk.
– Pitchfork
Today, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, whom the New York Times has hailed as “American folk masters,” announce the release of Boots 3: The Hickory Show (February 12, Acony Records) a live album from Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, taped by Bill Bost & David Rawlings on September 27, 1997 at Hickory, NC’s Acoustic Stage at the Arts and Science Center Auditorium. This legendary performance, initially a famous bootleg circulated among fans of Welch and Rawlings’s music, captures the duo at a pivotal moment in their artistic evolution, one year after the release of their debut album Revival and a full year before their acclaimed follow up Hell Among The Yearlings. The Hickory Show now takes its rightful place as an essential document in the Welch and Rawlings catalogue, a foundational record of two up-and-coming songwriting masters. Pre-order Boots 3: The Hickory Show on all formats here.
Gillian Welch shares about the live album, “our singing and our playing on that recording is razor focused, whereas now, I hear a greater breadth of what we’ve done for years. It makes me a tiny bit wistful, I hear it and I’m like ‘oh, I remember that. That’s all we could do.’ But I love it, and we did it with every ounce of our being.” David Rawlings adds, “it’s only at truly great shows that you’re relaxed enough, and that the sound is good enough, that you can actually be exploring stuff that you’re working on in real time in front of an audience.”
Today, Welch and Rawlings share their first two tracks from the album, “Tear My Stillhouse Down” and their cover of Townes Van Zandt’s “Pancho & Lefty.” Welch shares about their version of “Pancho & Lefty,” “One of the most extraordinary things about the Hickory show, and it’s present in the version of “Pancho and Lefty,” is, even though we play that song and we’ve never played it and we don’t know what we’re doing, I don’t really detect any fear. We’re very comfortable and, alright, this solo is gonna be really long because we don’t know how else to get out of it, and we just do it, there’s a strange maturity that in some ways were only just coming back around to.”
Listen to “Tear My Stillhouse Down” and “Pancho & Lefty” here.
Boots 3: The Hickory Show captures the September night in 1997, in the hushed 400 seat theater, where Welch and Rawlings—with nothing more than their two guitars, two voices, and four microphones—begin to carve out their sonic identity in real time. This recording is a precious early snapshot of the pair, laying the groundwork for their preferred live presentation—two sets, intermission, several encores, no opener—a format they settled on and has become beloved by fans lucky enough to have experience the duo perform live.
The duo has previously announced both headlining and “Grateful Dead Acoustic Reckoning” shows in the US as well as a tour of Australia and New Zealand in early 2027 (full dates below). Tickets for these dates are on sale now here.
Gillian Welch & David Rawlings- Boots No. 3: The Hickory Show Track Listing
Volume 1
1 Tear My Stillhouse Down (The Hickory Show)
2 Saginaw Way (The Hickory Show)
3 Ben Dewberry’s Final Run (The Hickory Show)
4 Barroom Girls (The Hickory Show)
5 Wichita (The Hickory Show)
6 Pancho And Lefty (The Hickory Show)
7 One More Dollar (The Hickory Show)
8 My Morphine (The Hickory Show)
9 Red Clay Halo (The Hickory Show)
10 Bright Morning Star (The Hickory Show)
11 Leaving Train (The Hickory Show)
12 Annabelle (The Hickory Show)
Volume 2
13 Tennessee Stud (The Hickory Show)
14 Paper Wings (The Hickory Show)
15 By The Mark (The Hickory Show)
16 Dusty Boxcar Wall (The Hickory Show)
17 Only One And Only (The Hickory Show)
18 Diamond Joe (The Hickory Show)
19 Acony Bell (The Hickory Show)
20 Caleb Meyer (The Hickory Show)
21 Orphan Girl (The Hickory Show)
22 Albuquerque (The Hickory Show)
23 White Freightliner Blues (The Hickory Show)
GILLIAN WELCH & DAVID RAWLINGS TOUR DATES
Sat, Dec 12, 2026 – Port Chester, NY – The Capitol Theatre*
Sun, Dec 13, 2026 – Port Chester, NY – The Capitol Theatre*
Tue, Dec 15, 2026 – Woodstock, NY – Bearsville Theater*
Wed, Dec 16, 2026 – Woodstock, NY – Bearsville Theater*
Thu, Dec 17, 2026 – Ithaca, NY – State Theatre*
Fri, Dec 18, 2026 – Port Chester, NY – The Capitol Theatre*
Sun, Jan 17,2027 – Orlando, FL – The Plaza Live
Mon, Jan 18,2027 – Fort Lauderdale, FL – The Parker
Tue, Jan 19,2027 – Clearwater, FL – Bilheimer Capitol Theatre
Sat Jan 16, 2027 – 30A Songwriter’s Festival – Santa Rosa Beach, FL
Mon Feb 8, 2027 – Regal Theatre – Perth, WA, Australia
Tue Feb 9, 2027 – Regal Theatre – Perth, WA, Australia
Thu Feb 11, 2027 – Albert Hall – Launceston, TAS, Australia
Fri Feb 12, 2027 – Forth Pub – Forth, TAS, Australia
Sat Feb 13, 2027 – The Paragon Theatre – Queenstown, TAS, Australia
Sun Feb 14, 2027 – Odeon Theatre – Hobart, TAS, Australia
Mon Feb 15, 2027 – Odeon Theatre – Hobart, TAS, Australia
Wed Feb 17, 2027 – The Civic – Auckland, New Zealand
Thu Feb 18, 2027 – BNZ Theatre – Hamilton, New Zealand
Fri Feb 19, 2027 – TSB Showplace – New Plymouth, New Zealand
Sat Feb 20, 2027 – Michael Fowler Centre – Wellington, New Zealand
Tue Feb 23, 2027 – Christchurch Town Hall – Christchurch, New Zealand
April 1- 4, 2027 – Big Ears Festival – Knoxville, TN*
*Grateful Dead Acoustic Reckoning Tour Dates
About Gillian Welch and David Rawlings:
Gillian Welch and David Rawlings are pillars of the modern acoustic music world and their rich and remarkable careers span nearly thirty years. They have been hailed by Pitchfork as “modern masters of American folk” and “protectors of the American folk song” by Rolling Stone and the New York Times says “their combined voices operate beyond simple sonic harmony. There are emotional inquiries at play. If Welch’s voice delivers the good news or the hard news of the world, Rawlings’s voice comes underneath, asking how much deeper the sadness can go or what fresh heights the ecstatic can climb to.”
Their most recent 10th studio album, Woodland, won the 2025 Best Folk Album GRAMMY. Woodland was named for and recorded at Welch and Rawlings’ own Woodland Sound Studios in Nashville, TN. Of the album and studio, Welch said, “Woodland is at the heart of everything we do and has been for the last twenty some years. The past four years were spent almost entirely within its walls, bringing it back to life after the 2020 tornado and making this record. The music is (songs are) a swirl of contradictions, emptiness, fullness, joy, grief, destruction, permanence. Now.” The 10-song collection mingles full band tracks with intricate duet performances all tied together with the duo’s signature sound and lyricism and cements the pair’s iconoclastic position at the forefront of acoustic music.
After moving to Nashville in the 1990s, Welch was launched into the public consciousness when Emmylou Harris recorded a cover of Welch’s “Orphan Girl.” Her career continued to flourish as her 1996 debut Revival, produced by T Bone Burnett, was released to critical acclaim. Firmly on the roots music map following the release, Welch and Rawlings followed up that GRAMMY nominated album release with 1998’s Hell Among The Yearlings, a stark duet record that further solidified the duo as a force in the folk music scene.
In 2000, Welch was awarded the Album of the Year GRAMMY for her work as Associate Producer as well as a performer and songwriter on the eight times platinum O Brother, Where Art Thou? Soundtrack. Welch and Rawlings were simultaneously nominated for Time (The Revelator) which Rolling Stone called one of the best albums of the 2000s and is widely considered by critics and fans to be one of the best albums of all time. Beginning with Time (The Revelator), all of Welch and Rawlings albums have been self-produced and self-released on their own record label, Acony Records, helping to establish the duo’s fierce commitment to independent music.
2003’s Soul Journey was the pair’s first experimentation with a fuller, electric sound, which paved the way for the Dave Rawlings Machine project, and their first release under Rawlings’ name (A Friend of A Friend, 2009), which was accompanied by a time period of heavy touring and headlining major festivals.
The Harrow and The Harvest returned to the duet sound and was nominated for Best Contemporary Folk Album and Best Engineered Album at the 2012 GRAMMYs, and won Artist of the Year (Welch) and Instrumentalist of the Year (Rawlings) at the Americana Honors & Awards. The album garnered glowing reviews and topped multiple year end “Best Of” lists.
Nashville Obsolete, the last project to be released as Dave Rawlings Machine in 2015, showcased Rawlings’ expanding pallet as a producer with more lavish arrangements, strings, and guest musicians. He also produced albums by Willie Watson, Dawes, Old Crow Medicine Show, and Robyn Hitchcock. “Cumberland Gap” from Poor David’s Almanack in 2017 was nominated for Best American Roots Song and was featured in Guy Ritchie’s film The Gentlemen and and has since become one of the duo’s highest streaming songs.
To celebrate the twenty year anniversary of the Welch-Rawlings partnership in 2016, they launched an archival branch of Acony Records, entitled Boots, dedicated to releasing outtakes, demos, bootlegs, and live recordings from their copious vault.
In 2018, Welch was the first musician to receive the Thomas Wolfe Prize for Literature. The award is bestowed by University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s Department of English & Comparative Literature and recognizes contemporary writers with a distinguished body of work.
2019 saw Welch and Rawlings nominated for an Academy Award for “Best Original Song” where they performed their singing cowboy duet live at the Academy Awards. “When A Cowboy Trades His Spurs For Wings” was written for the Coen brothers’ film The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs. In 2020, the duo released All the Good Times, the first album under both their names, and won the GRAMMY for the Best Folk Album. They were crowned with the Berklee American Masters Award and honored by Americana Music Association with a Lifetime Achievement for Songwriting.
Welch and Rawlings continue to tour the world in support of their music while simultaneously writing and lending their talents to countless fellow artists’ projects. They are continuously working to release their acclaimed catalog on vinyl of the highest possible fidelity. Acony Records is proud to be partnering with Paramount Pressing & Plating in Denver, Colorado, a joint venture between Rawlings and esteemed plating craftsman Gary Salstrom, to produce superior vinyl records.