Emmylou, Vince and others sing to help Nashville's working poor
The following pictures were taken at the concert by Toni Marteney.
"I met Rodney in 1974," recalls Harris. "And I guess I met Guy and Susanna (his songwriting wife, Susanna Clark) in 1975. A few years later I met Vince and Nanci.
"We're talking a long time here, but the friendship is not just in the past. It's a current thing."
The group is coming together to raise money for Nashville's Interfaith Dental Clinic. "They're trying to set up dental care for what they're terming the working poor, people who actually work but can't get a dental plan," Clark explains.
"They're running into a lot of battered women whose husbands have knocked their teeth out, or something, and they can't get a job because of the cosmetic thing."
Patients pay what they can pay. The rest of the care is donated.
The connections between the various participants are many and complex: Gill played in Crowell's band, The Cherry Bombs; Clark, Crowell and Gill co-wrote Oklahoma Borderline, a Top 10 hit for Gill; Crowell has produced albums for Clark; Gill played a major role in Harris' homemade 1987 album, the tradition-based Angel Band; Harris has recorded Griffith's Gulf Coast Highway; Clark appears on Griffith's 1993 release, Other Voices, Other Rooms and on last year's Other Voices, Too (A Trip Back to Bountiful); and on and on.
To spin out just one yarn: Harris first heard about Crowell when her producer at the time, Brian Ahern, whom she would later marry and divorce, pitched her some of his songs during a visit to Toronto.
Ahern encouraged her to be frank about her opinions of the songs, so, gradually, she was. By the end of the day, without much to show for their efforts, Ahern told Harris he had one more tape, unheard by him, from a new writer just signed to his publishing company on a friend's recommendation.
"He put the tape in and it was Bluebird Wine and Song for the Life and it was Rodney. I just fell in love with this guy's songs, with his heart, with his voice. He had the right stuff."
Eventually, Harris and Crowell hooked up in person, in Washington, D.C., where Harris was still living and working.
"We got together in a friend's living room, and the first think Rodney played me was Till I Gain Control Again. He's never stopped being a source of material for me, but also, his energy and his realness as a person and an artist, his humor, so much of who Rodney is, he's been kind of a musical soulmate for me."
Bluebird Wine became the first track of Harris' first album for Warner Bros., and Crowell became a founding member of her famed Hot Band. Together, they spent time working out arrangements and harmonies. "We were singing all the time," Harris says. "That's where our arrangement of Sweet Dreams came from, just sitting down and singing it. We loved those songs."
Crowell suggested Harris record Townes Van Zandt's Pancho & Lefty. "We were out on the road, and the only thing each of us could remember was the chorus," she recalls. "We kept singing the chorus and we couldn't wait to get off the road so we could learn the words and work up the songs."
Together, they also collaborated on writing Amarillo, Tulsa Queen and Waltz Across Texas Tonight, all songs recorded by Harris.
"He's always been a real presence," she says.
Though Harris has recorded songs such as Easy From Now On and I'll Be Your San Antone Rose by Clark's wife, Susanna Clark, she has not recorded Guy's songs.
They have written a new song together, she says, but it's still being polished up for recording, so don't expect to hear it Saturday night.
Harris met Gill when he was a member of fiddler Byron Berline's West Coast country band, Sundance. "He was a kid who could sing higher than all us girls," she laughs.
She especially treasures the memory of recording Angel Band with Gill, Emory Gordy Jr. and Carl Jackson. "We couldn't have made that record without him; it was such an ensemble piece of work, recorded in Paul Kennerley's little house with a Franklin Stove going to keep us from freezing to death."
Griffith's Gulf Coast Highway, Harris says, was like an "arrow shot into my heart" the first time she heard it on the car radio. "It was so profoundly moving," she recalls. "I had always been a fan, but I took a warp-speed move forward into understanding her, her music and where she was coming from."
When they perform together Saturday night, they'll support and interact with each other, rather than appear separately with their respective supporting bands.
Earlier this year, Harris, Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt released a second collaboration, Trio II, and later this summer Asylum will release a collaboration between Harris and Ronstadt.
In July, Harris will be featured on an album of songs by her early creative partner, the late Gram Parsons, titled Return of the Grievous Angel: A Tribute to Gram Parsons. On it, she sings with The Pretenders (She), Beck (Sin City) and Sheryl Crow (Juanita). Among the other artists contributing tracks are The Mavericks, Elvis Costello, Lucinda Williams, Gillian Welch and Wilco.
"Everybody's going to make a little list of what they'd like to do, in whatever combination, then kinda wing it and have some fun," he says. "I'm sure we'll be as surprised by what happens as anyone else.
"We're all fans of good songs; all writers, and love good songs. That would be the main common denominator, and we're all pretty easy to get along with."
Their friendships go back years, and they all have separate, successful careers, but the reunion Saturday night at the Ryman Auditorium of writer-artists Guy Clark, Rodney Crowell, Vince Gill, Nanci Griffith and Emmylou Harris isn't such a rare event.
"We listened all day long to tapes and I didn't hear anything I liked and I was very polite," she recalls.
His instincts proved solid again when Crowell encouraged Harris to record Loretta Lynn's Blue Kentucky Girl, the title track on a 1979 album and a Top 10 hit for Harris in 1979.
"It really is for such a good cause," Harris says. "In Nashville, we're very unique. I know we're a big city, but there's something about the music community that's like a small town. We have the ability to pick up the slack. Dental care is such an important thing for the basic quality of life for people."
Clark predicts that Saturday's event will stay loose on purpose. They plan to rehearse the day before, then let it happen naturally on the Ryman stage.
copyright 1999 The Tennessean
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