Time (The Revelator) (2001)

Recorded at Nashville's historic Ryman Auditorium with only two acoustic guitars and two voices, this album strips roots music back to its barest architectural bones. Gillian Welch and David Rawlings weave ancient mountain folklore into modern dread, linking the wreck of the Titanic, Abraham Lincoln and rock and roll in the epic 'I Dream a Certain Lady'. In Welch's hands, Americana is not a nostalgic costume: it is a living, ghostly dialogue between historical American mythology and modern anxiety.