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Louis Chilton, The Independent
For a moment, I’m worried I’ve offended one of our greatest living country artists. Emmylou Harris has hung up on me, less than a minute into our call. A moment later, though, she’s back, apologising. No offence caused (phew), just a snafu with her computer. “I get a little freaked out by technology,” she admits. It’s hard to believe Harris could be fazed by anything. Just look at her career: a beacon of the country music scene in the 1970s and 1980s, she ultimately proved too adventurous for the tradition-fixated genre, leading it towards new and innovative frontiers… whether it followed or not. “I haven’t fit into country since I turned 40,” she tells me. “I was too old, apparently, for country radio, and they stopped playing me completely.” Fortunately, she points out, “I never had to live and die by the charts.”
We’re speaking midway through Harris’s farewell to her European touring career, which concludes with a run of dates this May. There’s no new material on the horizon, either: “I’ve decided I have enough records, and enough material to last me however long I’m going to be doing it,” she says. But she’ll keep performing live, only within the borders of her native US. “It’s a little bittersweet,” she says. “My first loyal audience started coming from over your way. Gram Parsons (Harris’s early musical partner) had a bigger profile overseas, and I was able to latch onto that. Audiences over there seem to be better informed.” Though it is, she adds, “better in the States” than it used to be.
Now 78, Harris talks in a sort of earthy half-staccato; a cold-caller might be hard-pressed to match the speaker to the sweet soulfulness of her music. Listening to her singing voice — graceful and crystalline, especially on her early records — can feel like a religious experience. Sometimes this is literally the case, as on the 1979 Christmas album Light of the Stable, her seraphic soprano matched perfectly to earnest Christian material. Elsewhere, her voice finds God in the everyday, in the sublime sadness of ballads such as “Wrecking Ball” or “Prayer in Open D”.
Even more remarkable is just how elegantly Harris’s voice seems to synergise: many of her best songs are duets, and the range of singing partners, from Parsons, to Willie Nelson, to Don Williams, showcases just how versatile an instrument it is. “I don’t really know what I’m doing, frankly,” she says. “I’m not a schooled musician, or a schooled singer, so I’m just looking for something that creates an interesting sound, and (that’s right for) the emotional story you’re trying to tell.” Harris’s father was a Marine Corps officer and a POW in Korea; his job took the family from Birmingham, Alabama, to Woodbridge, Virginia. Harris first aspired to be an actor, studying drama at the University of North Carolina. By the time she got to “more serious” acting school, she was already feeling the pull of music. “When I got into acting classes, I discovered that it was a completely different feeling,” she says. “When I was singing, I felt that I was in a zone of some kind. And I was never able to capture that same feeling as an actor.”
It was the burgeoning, politically charged folk scene that first grabbed her; this was the Sixties, after all, when artists like Joan Baez and Bob Dylan were in their ascendancy. In the late 1960s, Harris moved to New York’s Greenwich Village to be near them, instead meeting and promptly marrying her first husband, folk singer Tom Slocum – a union that within two years resulted in the birth of her first child, Hallie, and a divorce. “We didn’t have a long marriage, but we had a marriage that worked for a while,” she says fondly. She remains close, more so, with her other two ex-husbands: “I just think you’re grateful for the good times.”
