Listen
to Emmylou Harris
Your first thought on meeting Emmylou Harris is that if this is what 30-odd
years on the road fronting country-rock bands does for you, maybe we should
all try it. For all the grief it brought her early on, it seems, as she
enters her seventh decade, to have left her in terrific shape.
Never mind the fact that she is commonly referred to as a “legend,” a routine
tribute to her role in making country music cool again in the 1970s, which
was trumpeted by an effusive Jools Holland when she performed on his TV show
Later in May. Forget the 15m albums she’s sold, her dozen Grammys, the halls
of fame to which she’s been elected and the respect she’s earned from fellow
legends who have queued up to sing with her over the years – a cast that has
included Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Dolly Parton and Mark Knopfler.
According to another of her many musical accomplices, the country star
Rodney Crowell, Harris has been “one of the few women who have that cultural
mystique that poetic artists like Dylan and Lennon carry. She was one of the
first women to stand up with that sort of integrity”.
This is all laudable stuff; but what’s most striking about Harris in person is
just, well, her. Like the tremulous voice on her records, nothing appears to
have been retouched. How effortlessly she seems to have adapted to growing
old in a field where youth (or the appearance of it) rules supreme. Or to
put it more simply, as one fan, “Steve”, did online around the time of her
birthday last year, “Emmylou is 60? God, if a woman can be truly sexy at
that age, she’s it… Jeez.” A year on, Steve would undoubtedly approve of the
demure, quietly spoken lady in tinted glasses and loose floral daywear
sipping herbal tea in a London hotel. She’s here to talk about her new
album, All I Intended to Be, which is out next week. Her first solo album in
five years, it’s a typically well-crafted collection that shows off her
prowess as an interpreter of other people’s songs, her ability to elide the
distinction between folk, country and rock, and her own underrated skill as
a songwriter.
Fine as it is, All I Intended to Be is unlikely to change Harris’s life, or
indeed anybody else’s. The most interesting thing about it is the way it
discreetly nods to her troubled past. It is peopled with ghosts and coloured
by a mood of persistent, aching sadness that seems, paradoxically, to have
got more pronounced the older and more successful Harris has become. It is
summed up on her bleak and heartfelt cover of the Tracy Chapman tune All
That You Have Is Your Soul.
The album was produced by the second of Harris’s three ex-husbands, Brian
Ahern, the Canadian she met in 1975 who helped to steer her stuttering, if
not chaotic, career in the direction of mainstream success. They split up,
personally and professionally, in 1983, but have remained friends.
The renewal of their working relationship, Harris says diplomatically, is no
big deal. “Brian and I have done things together over the years. Neither of
us are the sort of people who like to stay angry, and we’ve been very much
committed to raising our daughter.” Meghann is now 28 and working as a film
scriptwriter in Los Angeles.
It all sounds calm and manageable today, but before she got her act together
with Ahern, Harris’s life in music was a turbulent hard-luck story. A
well-educated middle-class girl, she was sucked into the youth-culture
vortex of the 1960s with unhappy consequences, ending up in the early 1970s
an impoverished single mother, living off food stamps, trying to make it as
a folk singer. In a male-dominated industry (where, as she once put it,
“ladies were regarded as a liability: the view was, they get pregnant and
they freak out on the road, they’re unreliable and they don’t sell”) this
was a tough call.
Just as tough was her struggle later on to emerge from the shadow of her
musical partner and mentor, Gram Parsons. A legendary party animal, former
member of the Byrds and leader of the Flying Burrito Brothers, Parsons was a
close associate and drug buddy of the Rolling Stones. Praised by Keith
Richards for teaching him more about country music than anybody else, and
also for his narcotic know-how – “Gram could get better coke than the
mafia,” Richards once cooed – Parsons died in 1973, aged 26, following a
drink-and-drugs binge in a motel in the Joshua Tree National Park. Feted by
rock bands like U2, who named their album The Joshua Tree after the site of
his demise, Parsons’s cultish reputation has grown posthumously in step with
that of his protégée, the woman he discovered, hired and sang with for the
last two years of his life. As Harris’s friend and Nashville neighbour the
country singer Nanci Griffith has noted, “More people know Gram Parsons now
through Emmy than did during his lifetime.”
It’s hard to connect this well-mannered, bespectacled senior with her
24-year-old self. As she says gracious things such as “I have never stopped
admiring Brian [Ahern]’s work or him as a person,” and insists that drugs
aren’t for her and that she doesn’t “have the stomach” for alcohol, you
wonder how Harris came to tour America with a drunken connoisseur of class-A
drugs, quietly knitting clothes for her daughter at the front of the bus
while he and the rest of the band got stoned at the back. Maybe they did, as
the critics agree, help reinvent country rock; but Gram Parsons and Emmylou
Harris were one of the most unlikely couples in music. It’s strange to
reflect that a bad boy like Parsons should have provided the launch pad for
a woman widely regarded as one of rock’s first feminist icons.
As she apologises at the start of the interview for having taken so long to
finish her new record (“My focus was, dare I say, a little lacking” – what
with touring, preparing a career-retrospective box set, and looking after
her charity, Bonaparte’s Retreat, a refuge for dogs that she runs from her
Nashville home), it’s easy to forget that Harris is a survivor of one of the
most self-destructive, but also most creative, periods in rock history. My
hope interviewing her now is that, with all her southern politesse and with
a new album to shift, she hasn’t chosen to forget it too.
Harris has been reluctant in the past to go into detail about the relationship
with Parsons, and completely blanked his biographer, Ben Fong-Torres. “I
have my own biography of Gram – I don’t want to be part of somebody else’s,”
she said later. Others have noted a sharp contrast between the enthusiasm
with which Harris has always praised Parsons’s influence on her music – she
even recorded a concept album, The Ballad of Sally Rose, themed around it –
and her silence on the subject of the man. “Harris likes to mention Parsons,
but she doesn’t like to be asked about him,” the writer Nicholas Dawidoff
has observed, describing the effect as “a feeling you’ve been led into
sensitive terrain by the same person who then wheels and warns you away”.
