When Emmylou Harris was starting out in the late 1960s, she thought country music wasn’t for her. “I hadn’t seen the light,” she says. “I was a folk singer who believed you don’t ever work with drummers as they wreck everything.” It was Gram Parsons, of the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers, who changed her mind. Their musical partnership was brief – Parsons died after an accidental drug overdose at the Joshua Tree national park in 1973, aged 26 – but his impact on her was profound. “He had one foot in country and one in rock and was conversant in both. It changed my thinking completely.”
Is Harris, legendary doyenne of the country ballad and distinguished recipient of three Country Music Association awards whose guitar was exhibited in Nashville’s Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, really saying she hated country? “It can be corny!” she says. “Country music aims straight for the heart and when it misses, it misses really badly. And that’s the stuff that makes the most noise and takes up most space.” She pauses. “But then you hear something like George Jones’s Once You’ve Had the Best, and you hear the simplicity of his phrasing and the earnestness with which he sings. There’s a soulfulness to country music that can elude you if you just look at the big picture.”
That soulfulness, along with her crystalline vocals, has been the thread running through Harris’s career. Blurring the lines between country, folk and rock, she has been celebrated as a songwriter and a matchless interpreter of other people’s songs. After Parsons died, Harris put together a country-rock ensemble called the Hot Band and released a string of solo albums, the first of which was 1975’s Pieces of the Sky, where she lamented Parsons’ death in the self-written Boulder to Birmingham, and which went gold in the US. Through subsequent albums including Roses in the Snow (1980) and The Ballad of Sally Rose (1985), Harris saw herself as the keeper of Parsons’ flame, continuing his quest to make traditional country music credible. In doing so, she enjoyed greater commercial success than he ever managed in his lifetime.
Though Harris’s popularity dwindled towards the end of the 80s, she had an artistic rebirth in 1995 with the Daniel Lanois-produced Wrecking Ball LP, which dialled back the twang, reconnected her with her folk roots and brought her to a whole new audience. Over the years, Harris has won 14 Grammys and sold more than 15m records, and has performed alongside Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, Willie Nelson and Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst. Not for nothing was she described by Billboard magazine as a “venturesome, genre-transcending pathfinder”.
It’s a bright December morning in Harris’s home town of Nashville, where she is talking to me from her study. She has decided she doesn’t wish to be on camera, but rather than switch off the video, she positions her phone facing the ceiling with her just out of shot – or so she thinks. I spend a good half-hour of our chat talking to a comically disembodied hand holding a fag, smoke wafting across the screen like dry ice. None of this gets in the way of our conversation, since Harris, 78, is warm, gently spoken and a natural storyteller. We are here to talk about her upcoming European dates, billed as her farewell tour. But Harris is not retiring – at least not completely. “I’m going to continue to sing and perform here in the States as long as they’ll have me. But I won’t be going across the Atlantic again. I’m a real road dog and I do still love being out there, but it’s hard. So I’m just keeping it local now.” Harris is approaching the European shows “like a retrospective. There’s no script but the songs are stories and there will be stories about the songs.”
Harris is also in the middle of writing a memoir, though progress is slow: “I don’t seem to be an artist that can do two things at once.” Still, it has brought old memories to the surface, such as her father, Walter, who was in the Marine Corps, going to Korea in 1952 and being shot down over enemy territory where he became a prisoner of war. Harris was five when he left and his family didn’t know whether he was dead or alive. “He was considered missing in action until the day he was released 16 months later,” Harris says. When he came home, he never spoke about what happened.
Harris’s musical education came via her older brother, a big Bob Dylan and Joan Baez fan, and from listening to the radio while doing her schoolwork. By this time, the family were living in Woodbridge, Virginia, “about 25 miles from Washington DC where there was a radio DJ, Dick Cerri, who played folk every night from 7pm until 12. That was like my church.” Cerri turned her on to the Canadian folk duo Ian & Sylvia, and the folk-blues of Tom Rush, Bukka White and Mance Lipscomb: “Once I heard those guys, I was off and running.”
Harris’s grandfather bought her first guitar for $30 in a pawn shop when she was 16. Rather than take lessons, she taught herself to play. “I was a folk singer so I didn’t think I needed anyone else,” she says. Nonetheless, she had concerns about the kind of songs she was singing. “I felt very inauthentic and like I should be hopping box cars or something.” So she wrote to the folk singer Pete Seeger. “I asked: ‘Is it OK for me to sing these songs about people who have had a much harder life than I have?’” Seeger wrote back and reassured her it was fine and that “everybody has their hardships”. In 2009, Harris sang for Seeger at Madison Square Garden for his 90th birthday celebrations, alongside Bruce Springsteen, Arlo Guthrie and Baez. She still remembers him as one of the kindest men in the business. She recently watched A Complete Unknown, the Bob Dylan biopic starring Edward Norton as Seeger. “I thought he did an amazing job. He inhabited Pete in exactly the way that I remember him.”
In early 1968, Harris moved to New York’s Greenwich Village to launch her folk career. Two years later, she seemed to be well on her way. Having signed to a small label, she was about to release her first album, Gliding Bird. She had just married her musician boyfriend, Tom Slocum, and was expecting their first child. But Gliding Bird bombed, Harris’s label went bankrupt and her marriage fell apart. Harris was suddenly broke, living on food stamps and raising her infant daughter, Hallie, alone. Did she think she’d blown it? “Yeah, pretty much,” she says. “In the end, I had to go back to Maryland to my parents. I went home to mama. It was not a happy time.”
Harris went back to playing bars and coffee houses in Washington DC, which she couldn’t have done “without my parents who were wonderful in helping me with my daughter”. She put together a folk trio and “everything started moving along. I wasn’t making a lot of money, but I was developing a style of my own.” Then the Flying Burrito Brothers blew into town for a week of shows. Parsons, a Harvard drop-out born into considerable wealth, had left the band by this point but had come along to watch his old bandmates. One night he told the Burrito’s Chris Hillman that he was looking for a female singing partner and was overheard by Harris’s babysitter, Tina. “Tina’s main job was working for a promoter and so she offered up my phone number to Gram,” Harris says. “If I didn’t tell you before, there’s a lot of serendipity to my story.”
Parsons called Harris, went to see her perform and then asked her to join his touring band, the Fallen Angels. Harris accepted the job but then Parsons went to ground for a year. “So I just carried on with my trio working six nights a week. I was fairly independent by this point. But then Gram called up and said he wanted to get to work and I got a ticket in the mail to Los Angeles.” You just hopped on a plane to meet this man who had left you hanging for a year? “Sure,” Harris laughs. “It was a round-trip ticket, so at least I knew I could get back. [These chances] don’t appear that often, so you’ve gotta grab them.”
Harris sang on both of Parsons’ albums: 1973’s GP and Grievous Angel, released posthumously. The latter, hailed as a masterpiece that helped birth a new genre known as alt-country, was a perfect showcase for Harris and Parsons’ rare chemistry. Listen to their harmonies on Love Hurts, a song first popularised by the Everly Brothers, and they are yin to each other’s yang. Harris says she stopped thinking about her solo career, imagining she and Parsons would work together long into the future.
Even so, they must have seemed an odd pairing. There was Parsons, famed for his herculean drug intake who partied with the Rolling Stones; Keith Richards remarked that “Gram could get better coke than the mafia”. Then there was Harris, “the girl scout” who crocheted and knitted on the tour bus. “I had that wonderful yarn that they made the fishermen’s sweaters from, with the nice oil. And I would just sit there amid all the craziness, and knit away.” Did she sense Parsons was heading for disaster? “I think I was pretty naive, and I didn’t see that side of Gram. I must’ve known about it, but I will say that when we were working together, he was on. He was so focused. So I guess I thought whatever trouble he might have been getting into, he was now on the right road. And I was completely wrong about that.”
After Parsons’ death, Harris “was devastated on so many levels. I really didn’t know what to do next.” She credits that other queen of country-rock, Linda Ronstadt, for helping her to find a way through her grief. Ronstadt invited Harris to stay at her house in Los Angeles and arranged for her to play a series of shows at the Roxy. “She told everybody in the music business about me,” Harris says. “Back then the business was still very small and coming from Linda, who was on the verge of becoming the biggest star in the world, her words had great weight. But more than that, her friendship got me through a terrible period.”
Harris’s solo career took off and she also found herself in demand as a duettist, including with Johnny Cash. (Harris spent a Christmas with Cash and his wife, June Carter, at their home in Jamaica, and remembers them “as the kind of people that made you feel you’d known them all your life”.) Among her favourite collaborations is Trio, the 1987 album she made with Ronstadt and Dolly Parton where they covered songs by Linda Thompson, Kate McGarrigle and the Appalachian singer Jean Ritchie (they recorded a follow-up, Trio II, in 1999). I tell Harris I’d love to have been a fly on the wall in the studio. “Well, you’d have had a blast because they’re two of the most intelligent and funny people to be around. There was a lot of laughing going on. I didn’t have a lot of women friends back then because I was always on the road or in the studio. So the chance to be around women and talk about girly things as well as making music together was just wonderful.”
For much of her career, if Harris wasn’t the only woman in the room, she says was “certainly the only woman on the bus. But I never had problems. All these gentlemen I worked with, most of them are still in my family of people and some are my neighbours.” It took until the early 2000s for Harris, self-anointed road dog, to discover that touring could be improved by the presence of an actual dog. “My one regret is that I didn’t discover that sooner. I mean, the guys were great, but my dog was with me all the time. As they say, they are company in your solitude.”
That dog was Bonaparte, since departed, who lent his name to the dog rescue centre, Bonaparte’s Retreat, that Harris set up in her back yard in 2004 and is still going strong today. “We adopt the bigger dogs, the older dogs, the ones that have medical conditions that mean they get left behind at the shelters,” she says. Between music, dogs and writing, life doesn’t appear to be winding down for Harris. “Well, I don’t really know what winding down is,” she says. “I remember when Willie Nelson was asked when he was going to retire, he said: ‘All I do is play golf and play music. Which one do you want me to give up?’ I think when you’re an artist, you don’t ever really retire. As I tell my friends, I don’t know what I’m doing, but I sure am doing a lot of it.”
