Voices: Emmylou Harris

Emmylou Harris remembers her first guitar. "The strings were set so high off the neck that it hurt to push them down!" she recalls. "But I didn't know anything about guitars, I thought they were all like that." She'd found an instrument she could work with, though."My other attempts at music had been just abysmal. Piano, I hated. I hated practicing it," she says. She joined her high school marching band, "and they started me off with clarinet, but my fingers were too small to close the holes, and it was always squeaking, and then they moved me over to saxophone, where at least I could close the holes. But I never felt comfortable playing a reed instrument. But guitar -- I think I was sixteen, and the Christmas before my cousin had been given a nylon string guitar, and I played it and played it, and that's when I asked for a guitar. My grandfather bought one at a pawn shop, I think it cost about thirty dollars, and gave it to me. And I just didn't want to put it down."

She still hasn't. Forty four years on and counting, Harris is still following the music and searching out the songs.

The journey thus far has included a dozen Grammys, collaborations with artists from Gram Parsons to Dolly Parton, from The Pretenders to the The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and in recent years, work in creating the songs as well as interpreting what other have composed. "Sooner or later, I had to make that part of my job," Harris says of her decision to go deeper on to writing songs. A quiet visionary, Harris is a leader in the shifting streams of country rock, traditional country, Americana, and contemporary folk music.

Early on, growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, and in Virginia, she was drawn to the music of "Ian & Sylvia, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Tom Rush, the Carter Family, all those people. I loved that Joan Baez was just a woman up there with a guitar singing. Those old ballads that she did, there was just something so haunting about that. Judy Collins, she found all these great songs --and I thought who is this guy Bob Dylan, who writes all this great stuff -- and I just got deeper and deeper," Harris says.

Though she'd won a scholarship to study drama, at college Harris quickly came to the conclusion that she loved music more than acting . A move to New York, another to Nashville, an early marriage, a child, and a divorce brought her back to northern Virginia, "and I think that's really when I got serious about making a career, making a living with my music, really decided on that," she says. "I had to support myself and my daughter and I didn't really have skills at anything else."

Skilled at music she was, though, with a haunting soprano and an ear for the heart of a song. Though she still thought of herself as a folk singer, after playing in the Washington , DC, area for a time she accepted an invitation to join country rock pioneer (though he wasn't exactly thought of that way then) Gram Parsons as the singer with his band. Parsons, who died young,"gave me such an incredible legacy of music. He opened the doors of country music to me," Harris says.

Folk and country form the bedrock of her approach to music, but it's her own unique voice -- both her singing voice and her voice expressed in the musical choices she's made -- that have brought fifteen million people around the world to buy her albums over the years, even without, in recent times, radio airplay or a mainstream hit. Songbird: Rare Tracks and Forgotten Gems is her latest project. As the title would suggest, it's not a chronicle of her music but rather a selection of material that Harris herself has chosen to shine new light on at this stage in her career.

There is an early unreleased alternate take of the song Clocks from her first album from those early days in New York, a set of duets with Parsons which show both the polished and the raw sides of their work together, the title track, My Songbird, a Jesse Winchester song, and dozens more -- seventy eight tracks in all-- her favorites from her own solo releases as well as contributions she's made to tribute projects and soundtracks, a rare recording she made for Guy Clark as a birthday gift, out takes that never made it to release, and selections from the well loved Trio albums, which find Harris singing with her friends Linda Ronstadt and Dolly Parton. Sheryl Crow, Beck, The Seldom Scene, the Pretenders, Steve Earle, George Jones, Mark Knopfler, and Dolores Keane are among the other singing partners represented. The the ten video selections span thirty years of performance and conclude with a PSA for one of the causes Harris is passionate about, animal rescue.

Another thing Harris is passionate about is singing, and the sharing of music. That's kept her going through the ups and downs of the years, decades, and moments that have comprised her life and career so far. She's not planning to stop making music any time soon. "If there's one thing you could take from this boxed set, it's that it would only take one song, the possibility of one song, to keep me going," she says."And that's a blessing."

video of Emmylou Harris, Dolores Keane, and Mary Black singing Sonny from 1991. The audio recording of this song is included on Songbird; the video is not.

more about Songbird

What is your favorite Emmylou Harris song? Let us know in the comments.

You'll find music content from many genres and plenty of other music fans at Gather Essentials: Music. For more of Kerry Dexter's Voices columns, look here. It's published on Thursdays.

Kerry Dexter, Music Correspondent Kerry's credits include VH1, CMT, the folk music magazine Dirty Linen, Strings, The Encyclopedia of Ireland and the Americas, and The MusicHound Guides. She also writes about the arts and creative practice at Music Road and contributes to Fred Bals' Series of Tubes.