Friday, May 9, 2008
She may have given over her country crown, but she will always remain the diva of loss.
Oct 21, 1999 | If Emmylou Harris has attained living legend status, it is as an enduring queen of country music. It's a deserved reputation if you strip away her recent achievements, which have little to do with country music yet continue unbroken the thread running through her nearly 30-year career. Harris' real talent -- only fully revealed in the past five years -- has been her ability to thoroughly reinvent herself while remaining true to her original sensibility. Today, by force and choice, she has given over her country crown to the vacuous likes of Shania Twain. But she remains what she's always essentially been: the high-plains diva. The diva of loss.
Harris was born on April 2, 1947, in Birmingham, Ala., but grew up as an Army brat in the Washington suburbs. She abandoned college to sing in folk clubs, eventually winding up in Greenwich Village, where she cut an ill-fated solo album. She moved back to D.C. and continued playing. One night she was introduced to Gram Parsons, a young singer-songwriter looking for a female singer. Much has been made of Harris' passionate relationship with Parsons, and rightly so. As a Harvard dropout on a trust fund, he hardly had country music in his soul, but he loved it and wrote it and gave Harris the direction she might not have found otherwise. They made two albums together before he died in the desert of a drug overdose in 1973. On those albums, Harris was the angel who both anchored and elevated his rough-hewn warblings. Whatever the intricacies of their personal relationship, his life gave her the voice. His death gave her the sensibility.
Not surprisingly, Harris' first three solo albums after Parsons' death were haunted by loss. She worked with musicians he had worked with. She reinterpreted a number of his songs. A photograph of Harris against the desert and the sky -- straight dark hair, gauzy dress, starkly beautiful face -- would set her image. Every lyric of "Boulder to Birmingham," a direct response to Parsons' death, offers insight into everything she's done since. Her vocals on these albums, particularly on the slow songs, are so achingly pure they take your breath away. But it is a single "Hallelujah" from the Parsons song "She" that stands out in her singing. She pushes her voice just hard enough for the purity to falter into hoarseness. That one word is filled with darkness and joy and sexual longing, the sound of the angel coming down to earth.
As the '70s ended and country music edged toward "Urban Cowboy," Harris became the uncompromising traditionalist, a lone voice of authenticity in an era of mechanical bulls. With "Blue Kentucky Girl" and "Roses in the Snow," her most purely country albums to date, she cemented her reputation as queen of a country genre that looked back with taste and reverence. The records were regarded skeptically by industry bigwigs but were embraced by critics and, ironically, by those who would be embarrassed to call themselves country, much less bluegrass, fans. Emmylou was the thinking man's country star. Forever the young woman on the cover of "Roses in the Snow" -- austere beauty holding steady amid strands of silver, a bit of bruised lipstick, a pale shoulder against a woodsy backdrop, the earthly angel -- her vocals perfectly matched the image, treading an ever-narrower path. Too bad the angel got restless.
Most of the people I know who own Emmylou Harris records have one or two from the '70s. Few, besides those of us willing to follow our diva wherever she might lead, have noticed that by the end of the '80s, at the time of "Bluebird," she is no longer the dark-haired beauty against the sky. Her hair is more silver than black, the dress less gauzy as she twirls in an empty white room, a city room. A black-and-white close-up reveals a face as delicate as cut glass. On "Lonely Street," sounding as empty as the room on the cover looks, the voice that had once soared reaches for the sky and cracks. The voice is about loss now too.
Looking back, I see songs from "Bluebird" as the first signs of Harris' '90s reawakening. There would be others, as she dropped her longtime Hot Band to go all acoustic and as her record company dropped her. She divorced for the third time; the material got more spiritual; the tattered yet reinvigorated voice returned to the front of the mix, tinged now with a mature blend of sexuality and despair. It all came together in the perfectly titled "Wrecking Ball." Given the luxury of picking her producer, Harris chose Daniel Lanois, known for producing U2. For those out of touch with her since 1980, the new voice -- light as a feather, rough as sandpaper, a razor-edged break between her lower and upper registers -- was as shocking as the harshly grainy cover photo. A missed note in a Bob Dylan tune stays. She sings Gram's part now, too. The sensibility hasn't changed a bit.
Since then Harris has toured the world with her "Wrecking Ball" band, who bring a needed freshness to her country repertoire. Lately, she's been singing with musicians who were kids in her heyday: Luscious Jackson, Beck, the women of Lilith Fair. She's still singing with people she's always sung with: Neil Young, Willie Nelson, the McGarrigles and her musical soul mate, Linda Ronstadt, with whom she's just released a duet album called "Western Wall." She's bringing heartbreak to new places. To see how far she's come and how little she's strayed since the beginning, check out the rooftop photograph inside "Western Wall" and listen a few times to her own tunes as well as David Olney's gorgeous "1917." They're why I've been listening for more than 20 years. The country angel is gone; the high plains diva is here to stay.
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