Emmylou Harris
Country boundary-crosser. By John Harris.
The story of emmylou harris’s creative journey stretches back nearly 50 years, and contains three big watersheds. the first was the night in late 1971 when the former Byrd and Flying Burrito Brother Gram Parsons watched her play in a Washington DC club, and joined her for a couple of duets. Close to a year later, he invited her to work on his debut solo album, GP, and immersed her in the sad, soulful world of country music. the pair toured the Us with Parsons’ Fallen Angels band, and then collaborated on his Grievous Angel LP, before her second watershed threw everything into tragic disarray. In september 1973, Parsons was killed by an overdose of morphine and alcohol – and for harris, the loss was impossibly deep. “I know for a fact that at the time of Gram’s death that I had acknowledged that I was in love with him,” she told Mojo in 2011. In the wake of his death, she resolved to keep his music alive. And through the 1970s and ’80s, she played a huge role in bringing country music to a new, young audience – quickly finding her own voice, lovingly exploring the music’s roots, and working with such icons as Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton. In the early-to-mid 1990s came the third big development. harris found herself estranged from an increasingly homogeneous country mainstream, and became a subtly experimental singer-songwriter. her catalogue is deep, wide and diverse: it extends beyond her own records into an array of releases by other people, from roy orbison to Bob Dylan. But in everything she does, there is the same essence. “Country talks about emotional human issues: broken hearts, unrequited love, death…,” she once said. “Its aim is to go straight to the heart, and when it makes it, it’s a thing of beauty.”
“Country talks about emotional human issues… its aim is to go straight to the heart.” Emmylou Harris