Gillian Welch: This Land Is Her Land

A few months ahead of the 2020 presidential election, singer-songwriter Gillian Welch took to Instagram and shared a black-and-white Depression-era photo taken by Dorothea Lange when she was documenting dustbowl migrants for the WPA. There are no people in this particular image. Instead, it captures a hand-painted sign propped against a gas station air pump, the text one righteous, run-on sentence: “This is your country dont let the big men take it away from you.” In her post, Welch ruminated on the message’s implications: “It reminds me to be ever watchful for the destructive hand of greed. It reminds me not to take our rights and freedoms for granted. It reminds me that I vote with purpose in order to safeguard those rights that are an unalienable part of our democracy.”

“God, I’ve had that photograph tacked to my wall since I was about 17 when I went away to college,” she marvels at her kitchen table in East Nashville on a recent January afternoon. It wasn’t merely aesthetic appeal that inspired Welch to hang up the Lange image in her dorm room at the University of California Santa Cruz, where she studied photography before famously finding her longtime musical partner Dave Rawlings at Berklee College of Music. “Part of its magic was understanding that the people who saw that sign were the people who would have needed to see it. It was not on a billboard on the side of a big fancy building. That resonated with me. You don’t need to shout it for the entire world, but you need to give hope to the people who need it, who you can speak to.”

Asking one of this century’s most highly revered singer-songwriters about a years-old social media post might seem beside the point. In actuality, it’s a way of getting to the heart of Welch’s outlook. She and Rawlings deploy folk idioms, references, and signifiers with such shrewdness that fans spent a 2025 Reddit thread parsing what message the duo intended by combining Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” with “I Hear Them All,” a grand expression of empathy that Rawlings co-wrote, into a live medley. One poster observed why interpreting a Welch/Rawlings performance is such a subtle art — “I don’t think I’ve ever heard them talk about politics” — and several others concurred. When I relate this exchange to Welch, she’s not surprised. “I am a fighter, but in a very quiet way,” she responds. “I will never be the one with the bullhorn.”