With her ordinary housedress and faraway gaze, Gillian Welch looked as though she'd just stepped out of a Dorothea Lange Farm Security Administration photo on the cover of her 1996 debut album, Revival. She sounded like it, too. Welch resurrected the simple, singular arch of prewar country and folk music by quoting the Carter Family, embracing Woody Guthrie and paying her respects to the earliest...

Gillian Welch doesn't play rock music, but the determination with which she has cast herself into a role that by no right belongs to her shows pure rock attitude. This child of Hollywood television-theme composers moved to Nashville after an apprenticeship in the folk dens of Santa Cruz, Calif., and Boston. Despite her affection for the Pixies, Welch abandoned the present tense altogether in favor...