The inevitable suspicion is that Harris and Parsons were clandestine lovers as
well as singing partners. But Phil Kaufman, Parsons’s close friend and road
manager, who went on to work for Harris, has categorically denied it. “It
was a relationship consummated by music. It wasn’t a physical consummation.”
More’s the pity, according to Kaufman. He thinks that if Parsons hadn’t
already been married, “something would have happened between them. If Gram
had been with Emmylou, it would have saved his life. She didn’t have any of
those bad habits. She might have levelled him off. They might be still
married today, and have lived happily ever after”.
Emmylou Harris was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1947. Her mother was a
local belle; her father a Yankee pilot from New Jersey who, bored by
civilian life, re-enlisted after the second world war. He went to serve in
Korea and nearly didn’t come back after his fighter was shot down. Harris
recalls, aged five, her first experience of unhinging grief as her mother
read the telegram reporting “Bucky” Harris as missing in action. “It was
terrifying. We didn’t know for months if he was dead or alive.” In fact, her
father had parachuted to safety and, after nine months in a North Korean PoW
camp, was still determined to pursue a career in the US Air Force. So the
family moved to North Carolina, where they led a comfortable but stateless
existence in off-base military housing, before settling in Virginia. “We
weren’t part of a real community. There were people from all over, which
meant there was no culture.” Harris explains that this is why, despite her
southern upbringing, she doesn’t have much of a southern accent and why she
wasn’t fed a musical diet of country-and-western music.
“I loved Johnny Cash, but the folk revival happened when I was 15. There was
an electricity about it, something romantic about those ballads, whereas
country music sounded boring. You have to grow up, start paying the rent and
have your heart broken before you understand country. As a teenager I became
obsessed with Bob Dylan. And Joan Baez! I mean, what girl back then didn’t
want to be her?”
She flirted with the idea of acting – “You know, all those big emotions” – and
won a university scholarship to study drama. But the more she played her
music, the less she enjoyed the acting. “When I was singing, it felt so
real. Whereas when I was acting, I was just acting.” Dropping out of
college, in 1968 she headed for the epicentre of the East Coast folk scene,
New York.
At first things went well: she was signed by a tiny folk label, and by 1970
had released her first album, Gliding Bird, and married her musician
boyfriend, Tom Slocum. But things soon took a turn for the worse. The album
flopped, selling 1,300 copies, and her marriage collapsed, by which time she
was pregnant with her first child, Hallie. “Everything blew up in my face. I
was living in a tiny Manhattan apartment with a child, no skills, waiting
table for tips. I thought my life was over.” Harris went back to live with
her parents – “They said, ‘You can stay as long as you want’” – and began to
eke out a living playing at the folk clubs in Washington, DC. It was during
a residency at a place called Clyde’s that she met the musician who was to
turn her life upside down, as he did his own.
Born Ingram Cecil Connor III, Gram Parsons was a baby-faced hippie prince from
a privileged but troubled background. His mother’s family were rich
Floridean citrus growers; his father was from old-moneyed Tennessean stock.
Both had a fatal weakness for alcohol and a tendency to depression. His
father shot himself when Parsons was 12, and by the time Parsons succumbed
to his overdose, his mother had already drunk herself to death. Thanks
partly to his parenting, Parsons found the excessive hippie lifestyle of the
1960s greatly to his liking. With his dandyish crushed-velvet gear, his
impeccable drugs contacts and a passion for what he called “Cosmic American
Music”, he soon moved in the highest circles in rock. Here he discovered, as
the decade neared its end, that the old country music he loved was becoming
fashionable with the long-hairs and R&B nuts like the Stones, who once
dismissed it as fodder for rednecks.
By 1971, Parsons was getting serious about his new solo career. He felt he
needed a female vocal foil. Chris Hillman, a bandmate from the Byrds and the
Flying Burrito Brothers, suggested a singer he’d heard in a Washington folk
club. By an extraordinary coincidence, this conversation took place at a
venue in Baltimore in earshot of Harris’s baby-sitter, who gave Parsons her
number. “When I got his call I didn’t know who he was. We met at the train
station. Gram was there with his new wife, Gretchen, this charming southern
boy with wonderful manners and a wide smile. I was playing Clyde’s that
night. We worked up a few numbers between sets and sang them to this tiny
crowd. Gram said it sounded good and he’d call me. I thought, ‘Oh, sure…’”
But having raved to his friends about the musical chemistry he felt singing
with this beautiful unknown folkie, Parsons did call. Less than a year later
he posted Harris a return air ticket to LA, where he was recording his first
solo album. From the moment Parsons picked her up at the airport, Harris
didn’t know what had hit her. Learning, fast, about the rich traditions of
country music was only part of it.
“It was a totally new world. I was a person who never had fun in high school
because I was too busy being a grade-A student, and here was with people who
really knew how to enjoy themselves. I was very much the country mouse,
trying to be professional, always turning up on time, ready to work, while
Gram seemed very untogether. This was a man who really had a vision; the
problem was, he was drinking heavily. I didn’t think the record would ever
get made.”
But it did; and afterwards Harris spent months on the road in a band Parsons
named the Fallen Angels, singing at the front of the stage with the man
being touted as rock’s next big thing. “Gram was always fine when we were
singing together. That was one thing I could do for him. It was when I
wasn’t around that he seemed to get into trouble.” By the time they returned
to the studio in the summer of 1973 to record another album, it seemed to
Harris that “Gram had turned a corner. He’d stopped drinking and drugging. I
thought everything was gonna be okay”. The last time they spoke, Parsons
phoned to tell her that her favourite track from their recent sessions had
been left off the Grievous Angel album but would definitely feature on the
next. “We thought things were going to go on into eternity.” Less than a
fortnight later, Parsons overdosed in the bath, full of whisky and heroin.
Parsons’s death was bad enough; but for her, its gothic aftermath was worse:
“I didn’t have any chance to grieve in the traditional way.” First,
Parsons’s roadie Phil Kaufman intercepted the air ambulance transporting the
body, drove the coffin out into the desert, doused it in kerosene and burnt
it, in accordance, he said, with a verbal instruction from Parsons. Next,
Harris was told she “would not be welcome” at the memorial service in New
Orleans. Parsons’s wife was deeply suspicious of her husband’s new musical
companion. She’d already vetoed his plan to put Harris’s name and image next
to his on the cover of Grievous Angel. Now she was barring her from the
church where Parsons’s ashes were to be interred. “I was left running away
from my grief. I just got in my little car and drove all over America for
months, looking for people who knew Gram who could comfort me, looking for
any piece of that time I could hold onto.”
Harris still blames herself for not doing more to prevent Parsons’s death.
“It’s a great regret of mine. How could I not have seen it coming? He was so
young, and such a strong presence, I couldn’t imagine he wasn’t gonna be
there always.” Not only does Harris reject the notion that she was
romantically involved with Parsons: she doesn’t even think she treated him
the way a friend should have. “The most dismaying thing to me is that I was
too self-absorbed in what I was getting from Gram musically to notice what
was happening to him. I was too focused on me, and discovering this
incredible music.”
