A singer finds her own voice
By MICHAEL DWYER
Sunday 15 April 2001
Emmylou Harris's voicemail message sounds like it could have been recorded in 1975. When the phone company greeting leaves a gap for her name, 25 years of exquisitely fragile musical memories come tumbling down the line with one slightly hesitant word. "Emmy."
I was taken back to Gram Parsons, who first hauled the sweet-voiced Alabama girl into the spotlight with his seminal solo albums of the early 1970s. Parsons was dead within two years of their meeting, but not before he'd changed his protege's life forever.
On her 29th solo album, Red Dirt Girl, Emmylou Harris retains the pure, girlish tone that lit up those now revered records. Similarly intact is the oft-remarked vulnerable undertow she later brought to sessions with Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, George Jones, Willie Nelson, Roy Orbison and dozens more.
"I think my voice has changed a bit," she demurs when we meet at a cafe in Santa Monica, where she's staying with the younger of her two daughters, singer-songwriter Meghann Ahern. "It might have lost a little bit of its clarity and its sweetness and its girlishness. But I think it's gotten a little more interesting.
"And I think I've gotten more fearless. I'm not intimidated by what I can't do. I'm very limited, but if everybody could sing everything, that would be really boring. I read once that style is a product of your limitations," she says with a slow grin. "I love that."
In keeping with a life and career that has earned its share of bruises, the humility appears perfectly genuine. Coming from an artist who just won her 10th Grammy award "thank God for the contemporary folk category, it's for all us misfits" it's particularly engaging.
As the singer approaches her 54th birthday, masses of glamorous silver hair have superseded the dyed brown tresses of years past, though she exudes both youthful style and elegance in blue jeans, shiny black vinyl raincoat, matching black boots and blue-tinted glasses.
Moreover, with Red Dirt Girl, she's achieved something only maturity could deliver: she wrote nearly all its songs herself. Six years since Wrecking Ball re-established Emmylou Harris as a potent and progressive interpreter of other people's songs, it's a new benchmark of which she is justly proud.
"I still think of myself as an interpreter who writes occasionally, but there were certain things that only I could express with my own writing," she reflects of the process, which she describes with lingering exasperation in terms of a tiny chisel meeting "a huge block of granite".
"Wrecking Ball raised the stakes for me as an interpreter and I felt at that point I had almost gone as far as I could. I had to bring something else to the table. Dan (Lanois, producer of that album as well as works by Dylan and U2) was very forthright in saying, 'You really need to put some focus on your writing.'
"It was like giving me a homework assignment. I knew I was hearing the truth and I also knew if I was going to ever make another record, I had to bring (out) that other side of my creative abilities. Initially I thought well, if I could write maybe half the record, get four of five really good songs."
Eleven of the 12 songs carry Harris's writing credit. The Ballad of Sally Rose, her only other self-penned record, was promoted as a conceptual autobiography in 1985, but there's something even more revealing about Red Dirt Girl. "You know what they say," she says. "All fiction is autobiography and all autobiography is fiction."
Replete with images from her upbringing in the American south, the title track surprised even its writer. A fictional story about a childhood friend whose life comes to tragedy, it refers in one line to a telegram Harris remembers her mother receiving when her fighter pilot father was shot down over Korea in 1952.
"It was one of the most vivid memories of my childhood," she recalls. "I didn't know what Missing in Action meant, but I knew it meant I might never see my father again. I wasn't thinking about that when I wrote the song but it must have been something that you just carry around. Even though it was a made-up story, it was still a part of my experience in a way."
Another song, Bang The Drum Slowly, is a moving elegy to her father, who died in 1993, and who she now praises for accepting her musical aspirations "when I couldn't pay the rent". And, for anyone who knows the singer's personal history, I Don't Wanna Talk About It Now clearly refers to her three-times-unlucky marital record.
"It is a song about things not working out the way that you wanted," she says. "It's not made up." She shrugs. "At least I got a song out of it."
Harris's first marriage, to songwriter Tom Slocum, took place when she was just 22 years old. As a young folkie, she had been attracted to the Greenwich Village cafes where her hero Bob Dylan made his name 10 years earlier. The folk scene and her marriage were both in decline by the time she gave birth to her first daughter, Hallie, and she ended up back under the family roof. "My parents were very concerned about a life in the arts cause they were
afraid that element was not rewarded, that I would have my heart broken, that I would be disappointed, that I might be in some kind of danger," she says.
"But once they knew that that's what I wanted to do they were always there for me. They pretty much raised my oldest daughter. They were surrogate parents to her and I always knew I had a place I could come to. They never said, I told you so."
Soon enough, they would have little cause. In 1972, Harris was introduced to Gram Parsons, the maverick writer and performer who had already worked with the Rolling Stones and The Byrds to forge a country-rock musical hybrid which has since sprouted its own family tree spanning from The Eagles to The Cruel Sea.
Harris discovered her vital sense of harmony alongside Parsons, and she credits their fleeting friendship with cementing her relationship to music. While it's often claimed that he lured her away from her fledgling folk aspirations and into the country music tradition, in fact her passion for song always transcended considerations of genre.
"I was associated with Gram for such a short period of time but so much happened as far as finding my voice, for lack of a better (phrase). He turned me on to the pure stuff, like the Louvin Brothers, and then he wrote songs like Thousand Dollar Wedding which what the hell was it? It was totally unique and totally his own.
"He did instil in me a great love of traditional music which influences me still but I'm touched and influenced by all kinds of music. I'm inspired by just the song, the act of singing the song. The song was always sacrosanct, it was like the jewel and you were trying to find the best possible setting for it."
Parsons' lasting place in her education was celebrated as recently as 1999, when Harris helped to produce a tribute to his work. "Gram was an extremely important person in my life and I don't think you ever lose the people that are important to you and who affect you, but that was 27 years ago and I've been down a lot of miles since then."
Harris's solo career evolved in tandem with a constant stream of big name duets. Her reputation as a peerless harmony singer keeps her in constant demand, even if she's well over the familiar allegations of "vulnerability".
"I don't think of it as vulnerability at all, I don't see that," she says. "Singing is a totally unconscious process for me. I'm carried by the words and whatever emotional impact I'm feeling, whether it's someone else's words, which I have to relate to in my own way, or something I've written myself.
"I think you have to have some kind of reaction to it rather than just being in love with the sound of your own voice. Obviously a good melody helps but the words have always been the things that pull me in, good lyrics. Dylan, you know, was a huge influence on me and he just changed the whole way we think about language, in songs or anywhere."
Not surprisingly for an artist whose path has brought her into contact with so many bona fide greats, Harris talks about her gifts in terms of a learned craft. She's "intimidated by words" and concerned that her tunes aren't interesting enough. "They have to shimmer with the words," she says. "Sometimes I worry that my melodic vocabulary is limited.
"But I am in love with the sound of words, and the images that are evoked with the sound of a word. And that just never goes away, that love of language. I've been singing really good songs by other people for most of my life and that leaves an impression. You can't be left untouched by it.
"For me, (writing) is so terribly personal and I find it a bit threatening and a bit frightening so it's hard to go back and revisit that spot before Red Dirt Girl was reality, when there was a blank page. I can be very cavalier about it right now but it's not something I'm very anxious to go back to, I have to say.
"It worked out really, really well but who knows how? I think the muse decided to pay me a visit."
Harris won't be drawn on her plans. In a backing capacity, she continues to be an almost omnipresent fixture on the charts that's her singing bass, of all things, with Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch on the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack.
Meanwhile, Red Dirt Girl has allowed her the luxury to indulge one of her life's pleasures: touring. Her Melbourne show comes at the beginning of another long stretch on the road with her band of three years, Spyboy.
"I take pretty good care of myself," she says on the subject of her gruelling schedule. "I've just joined the Y(MCA) and when I'm home I go five days a week. I hate it. I do smoke but I'm not a heavy smoker and I can't drink 'cause it makes me sick. I live with my mother and she takes really good care of me.
"I basically think I have good genes. I come from healthy stock and I'm grateful for that. It's a reason to keep working while you love your work, still got your health and still got your energy. Who wants to slow down? Slow down when you're dead I say."
Emmylou Harris plays the Palais Theatre on Friday.
Copyright © The Age Company Ltd 2001.