Gillian Welch delivers on high expectations, and then some

Thursday night at the Moore, Gillian Welch and her musical partner David Rawlings took their audience on a stirring and political road trip through Dixieland with the windows down,  summer country air rustling through the fields.

Throughout most of the show, Welch stood on a modest carpet with Rawlings, her head and limbs slung like a willow tree over her flaxen guitar. From the first note, Welch's voice was its usual whisky and honey, deep and pure, and full of palpable tenderness. The show opened with "Hard Times Ain't' Gonna Rule My Mind" and even Welch herself noted that the enormous audience was silent while listeners hung on her every word.

Everybody relaxed as the night wore on, hooting and clapping as Rawlings conquered a mind-blowing series of solos and exceptional runs. He and Welch bantered as they reconfigured their instruments between songs, Rawlings endearing himself to the audience as Welch prepared to play both banjo and harmonica, "a melange of questionable intonations that we like to call old-timey sounds." At one point Welch set aside all of her instruments to play "Six White Horses," a song from the pair's new album, which involved boisterous clapping, knee-slapping and, eventually, dancing on the hard surface of the stage to recreate the song's recorded percussion.

Welch and Rawlings performed two sets and two encores full of folk stories resonated with every human in the theatre. The show's climax came as they settled in for a slow and inspired rendition of "Revelator," perhaps her most well loved and well known song. The song summoned a collective catharsis from the crowd, which erupted with a near-religious fervor as Rawlings set fire to the song's guitar lines. The mix of old and new material drew to a close with "I'll Fly Away," a Depression-era hymn widely recorded for decades. (Welch's version is typically a duet with Alison Krauss.) The jubilant audience sang along—"When I die, hallelujah, by and by, I'll fly away"—finding acceptance of some kind on this brief musical trip to simpler times.

That seemed an appropriate ending to the show—until Rawlings and Welch marched into a blazing, unexpected rendition of the Jefferson Airplane anthem "White Rabbit." Welch dropped the honey and wailed: "FEED YOUR HEAD!" again, and again, and again.