Emmylou Harris
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| Emmylou Harris | |
|---|---|
| Image:Emmylouharrissf2005.jpg Emmylou Harris performing at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco in 2005.
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| Background information | |
| Born | April 2 1947 Birmingham, Alabama |
| Genre(s) | Folk, country rock, country, bluegrass, rock, pop, alt-country |
| Occupation(s) | Singer-songwriter, producer, arranger, session musician |
| Instrument(s) | Voice, guitar |
| Years active | 1969-present |
| Label(s) | Jubilee, Reprise, Warner Bros., Elektra, Rhino, Nonesuch |
| Associated acts | Gram Parsons, Rodney Crowell, Bob Dylan, Ricky Skaggs, Neil Young, The Band, Don Williams, Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, The Hot Band, The Nash Ramblers, Spyboy, Dave Matthews, Patty Griffin, Willie Nelson, John Denver, Bruce Springsteen, Steve Earle |
| Website | www.emmylou.net |
Emmylou Harris (born April 2, 1947, Birmingham, Alabama) is a country, folk, alternative rock, and alternative country musician. In addition to her work as a solo artist and bandleader, both as an interpreter of other composers' works and as a singer-songwriter, she is a sought-after backing vocalist and duet partner, working with numerous big-name artists.
Contents |
[edit] Biography
[edit] Early years
Emmylou Harris was the daughter of a career military father, a Marine Corps officer who was reported missing in action in Korea in 1952 and spent ten months as a prisoner of war. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, she spent her childhood in North Carolina and Woodbridge, Virginia, where she graduated from Gar-Field Senior High School as class valedictorian. In high school she also won a drama scholarship to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she began to study music seriously, learning to play the songs of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez on guitar. Leaving college to pursue her musical aspirations, she moved to New York, working as a waitress to support herself while performing folk songs in Greenwich Village coffeehouses. She married fellow songwriter Tom Slocum in 1969 and in the following year recorded her first album, Gliding Bird, which was released by Jubilee Records. (It was reissued in 1979 on Emus Records.) The couple soon divorced, and Harris and her newborn daughter Hallie moved in with her parents in Washington, D.C.
[edit] With Gram Parsons
Harris soon returned to performing as part of a trio with Gerry Mule and Tom Guidera. One night in 1971 members of the country rock group The Flying Burrito Brothers happened to be in the audience. Former Byrds member Chris Hillman, who had taken over the band after the departure of its founder Gram Parsons, was so impressed by Harris that he briefly considered asking her to join the band. Instead, Hillman ended up recommending her to Parsons, who was looking for a female vocalist to work with on his first solo album, GP. Harris toured as a member of Parsons' band, The Fallen Angels, in 1973. An album from that period, Live 1973, was released in 1982. Later in 1973, Harris returned to the studio with Parsons to record the album Grievous Angel. Parsons died in a motel room near what is now Joshua Tree National Park on September 19, 1973, from an overdose of drugs including alcohol. Parsons' Grievous Angel was released posthumously in 1974 and three more tracks from his last sessions with Harris were included on another posthumous Parsons' album, Sleepless Nights, in 1976. Following Parsons's death, Harris was devastated and appeared to be at a musical crossroads. Her most well known song Boulder to Birmingham was written about Parsons. Her friend Linda Ronstadt invited Harris to join her in Los Angeles. Ronstadt, having a deep admiration for Harris' musicianship, informed everyone she possibly could of Harris' talents and was instrumental in helping to get her work in musical venues along the Sunset Strip. In fact, Harris credits Ronstadt with being the force behind her getting a record contract.
[edit] The Hot Band
Harris met Canadian producer Brian Ahern, who produced her major label debut album, Pieces of the Sky, released in 1975 on Reprise Records. The album included a number of cover songs, including The Beatles' "For No One" and Harris's first hit single, The Louvin Brothers' "If I Could Only Win Your Love". In 1977 Harris married Ahern and had another daughter, Meghann, in 1979. Harris and Ahern divorced in 1984.
Executives of Warner Bros. Records (Reprise Records' parent company) told Harris they would agree to record her if she would "get a hot band". Harris did so, enlisting guitarist James Burton and pianist Glen Hardin, both of whom had played with Elvis Presley as well as Parsons. Hardin had also been a member of Buddy Holly's band The Crickets. Other members were drummer John Ware, singer-songwriter Rodney Crowell on guitar, pedal steel guitarist Hank DeVito, and bassist Emory Gordy Jr with whom Harris had worked while performing with Parsons.[1] Later, bluegrass multi-instrumentalist and singer Ricky Skaggs became a member, as did English guitarist Albert Lee who replaced James Burton. Vince Gill was featured as well. The Hot Band lived up to its name, with most of the members continuing on to solo careers of their own.
Harris' subsequent Elite Hotel (1975), Luxury Liner (1977), and Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town (1978) were all successful country albums but also had appeal for rock listeners. Country music was experiencing crossover success at the time, and the approach of many country artists was to try to marry their music with smooth, L.A.-style pop, but Harris had more of a rock and roll sensibility and so aimed her music more in that direction.
However, Harris still embraced country. Her Grammy Award-winning 1979 gold-certified album Blue Kentucky Girl featured straight Loretta Lynn/Kitty Wells-style country and included Harris' #1 smash "Beneath Still Waters", while 1980's Roses in the Snow was another gold-certified collection of bluegrass and country material, featuring Ricky Skaggs, Tony Rice, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Douglas.
[edit] More collaborations
In addition to her own solo work during this period, Harris began a number of ongoing collaborative relationships with other artists, many of which she would revisit throughout the course of her career. A Christmas album, Light of the Stable, was released in 1979; its title track featured backing vocals by Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Neil Young, all three of whom Harris had been working with sporadically since the mid-1970s. She later recorded two albums, Trio and Trio II, with Parton and Ronstadt (as well as a number of singles), a duet album with Ronstadt, and a number of various projects with Young. In addition, her vocals were prominently featured on Bob Dylan's 1975 Desire album. She also worked with The Band during this period, appearing in their film The Last Waltz.
In 1980, Harris recorded "That Lovin' You Feelin' Again" with Roy Orbison. The duet was a Top 10 hit on both the Country and Adult Contemporary charts. They would win the Grammy Award for Best Country Vocal Performance—Duo or Group
[edit] Pop-chart success, songwriting
In 1981, Harris reached the Pop Top 40 on the Billboard charts with a cover of "Mister Sandman"—again Top 10 Country as well as Adult Contemporary—from her Evangeline album. (The album version of the song featured harmony by Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt, but neither Parton's nor Ronstadt's record companies would allow their artists' vocals to be used on the single, so Harris re-recorded the song, singing all three parts.)
White Shoes in 1983 included an eclectic pairing of the rockish reading of "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" with a remake of the Donna Summer hit "On the Radio", as well as tracks from a diverse group of songwriters such as Hot Band member Crowell, Sandy Denny, and T-Bone Burnett.
Harris' major-label releases thus far had included few self-penned songs, but in 1985 her songwriting skills were much in evidence with the release of The Ballad of Sally Rose, for which she co-wrote all of the songs. The album was semi-autobiographical in theme, based loosely on her relationship with Parsons. Harris described it as a "country opera". Her co-writer and producer on the album was English songwriter and musician Paul Kennerley, writer of the hit singles "Born to Run" (on Harris' 1981 Cimarron album and "In My Dreams" (on White Shoes) . Kennerley also produced her next album, Thirteen. They were married in 1985 and divorced in 1993.
In 1987, Harris enjoyed the biggest commercial success of her long and varied career when she teamed up with Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt for their long-promised and much-anticipated Trio album. (Their original recording sessions for this project had begun 10 years earlier.) The album spent five weeks at #1 on Billboard's Country Albums chart (also quickly reaching the Top 10 on the Pop Albums chart), sold several million copies and produced four Top 10 Country hits, including "To Know Him Is To Love Him", which hit #1. The disc was nominated for the coveted Album Of The Year Grammy award (given to U2 that year for The Joshua Tree) and the three women won the statuette for Best Country Vocal Performance—Duo or Group.
Harris also found time in 1987 to release a solo album, Angel Band, featuring traditional gospel songs, on which she worked, among others, with rising country star Vince Gill.
In 1989, she recorded two songs with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band on their album, Will the Circle Be Unbroken: Volume II. In a snippet of studio chatter included on one of the songs, she talked during the recording session about her beginnings and how music had changed:
Years ago I had the experience of sitting around in a living room with a bunch of people and singing and playing, and it was like a spiritual experience, it was wonderful. And I decided then that was what I was going to do with my life was play music, do music. In the making of records, I think over the years we've all gotten a little too technical, a little too hung up on getting things perfect. We've lost the living room. The living room has gone out of the music, but today I feel like we got it back.
Around 1991, she dissolved The Hot Band and formed a new band of acoustic musicians—Sam Bush on fiddle, mandolin and vocals, Roy Huskey, Jr. on bass and vocals, Larry Atamanuik on drums, Al Perkins on banjo, guitar, dobro and vocals, and Jon Randall on guitar, mandolin and vocals—which she named The Nash Ramblers. They recorded a Grammy Award-winning live album in 1992 at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee, which led to the $8 million restoration of the facility into a premium concert and event venue. It was her last album with Reprise Records.
[edit] New directions
By the 1990s, Harris started receiving less airplay as mainstream country stations began shifting their focus to the youth-oriented "new country" format. Harris' albums Bluebird and Brand New Dance (1989 and 1990, respectively) received ample critical acclaim and sold reasonably well, yet her chart success was on the wane. 1993's Cowgirl's Prayer—the first album since her switch to Elektra Records—was critically praised but received very little airplay, and its single, "High Powered Love" failed to chart entirely, prompting her to shift her career in a new direction.
In 1995, Harris released one of the most critically acclaimed albums of the decade, Wrecking Ball, produced by Daniel Lanois, best known for his work with U2, Peter Gabriel and Bob Dylan. An experimental album for Harris, to say the least, the record included Harris' rendition of the Neil Young-penned title track (Young himself provided guest vocals on two of the album's songs), Steve Earle's "Goodbye," Julie Miller's "All My Tears", Jimi Hendrix's "May This Be Love", Kate and Anna McGarrigle's "Goin' Back to Harlan" and Gillian Welch's "Orphan Girl". U2's Larry Mullen, Jr showed up to play drums for the project. The album received virtually no country airplay whatsoever, but did bring Harris to the attention of alternative rock listeners, many of whom had never listened to her music before.
Harris then took her Wrecking Ball material on the road, releasing the live Spyboy in 1998, backed with a power trio comprising Nashville producer, songwriter and guitarist Buddy Miller and New Orleans musicians, drummer Brady Blade and bassist-vocalist-percussionist Daryl Johnson. In addition to performing songs from Wrecking Ball, the album updated many of Harris' career hits, including "Boulder to Birmingham".
Also in 1998, she appeared prominently on Willie Nelson's moody, instrumentally sparse Teatro album, (produced by Wrecking Ball producer Lanois).
In January 1999, Harris released a Trio 2 with Parton and Ronstadt. Much of the album had actually been recorded in 1994, but remained unreleased for nearly five years because of record label and personnel disputes, conflicting schedules, and career priorities of the three artists. Trio 2 was much more contemporary-sounding than its predecessor and was certified Gold. It included their version of Neil Young's classic "After The Gold Rush", which became a popular music video and won another Grammy—this one for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals. Harris and Ronstadt then released a duet album, Western Wall: The Tucson Sessions, later the same year. The two superstars toured together during the fall months in support of the disc. Both albums made the Top 10 of Billboard's Country Albums chart and did well on the pop side as well.
Also in 1999, Harris paid tribute to her former singing partner Gram Parsons by co-executive producing Return of the Grievous Angel: A Tribute to Gram Parsons, an album that gathered together more than a dozen artists. Harris duetted with Beck, Sheryl Crow and The Pretenders on three of the album's tracks.
In 2000, Harris released her solo follow-up to Wrecking Ball, Red Dirt Girl, produced by Lanois protege Malcolm Burn. For the first time since The Ballad of Sally Rose, the album contained a number of Harris' own compositions. Like Wrecking Ball, the album's sound leaned more toward alternative rock than country. Nevertheless it reached #5 on Billboard's Country Albums chart as well as a healthy #54 on the pop side. It also won Harris yet another of her record 12 Grammy awards in the category of 'Best Contemporary Folk Album'.
Harris also guested on alternative country singer Ryan Adams' solo debut Heartbreaker.
Also in 2000, Harris joined an all-star group of traditional country, folk and blues artists for the T-Bone Burnett-produced soundtrack to the Coen Brothers film, O Brother, Where Art Thou? The soundtrack won multiple CMA, ACM and Grammy awards. A documentary/concert film, Down from the Mountain, featured the artists performing music from the film and other songs at the Ryman Auditorium. Harris and many of the same artists took their show on the road for the Down from the Mountain Tour in 2002.
[edit] Recent work
Harris released Stumble into Grace, her follow-up to Red Dirt Girl in 2003. Like its predecessor, it contained mostly self-penned material. In 2004, Harris led the Sweet Harmony Traveling Revue tour with Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, Buddy Miller and Patty Griffin. They performed singly and together and swapped instruments.
In 2005, Harris worked with Conor Oberst on Bright Eyes' release, I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning, performing backup vocals and harmonies on three tracks. In July, she joined Elvis Costello on several dates of his U.S. tour, performing alongside Costello and his band on several numbers each night. Emmylou and Costello recorded a version of Costello's song, "The Scarlet Tide", from the soundtrack of the movie, "Cold Mountain". July also saw the release of The Very Best of Emmylou Harris: Heartaches and Highways, a single-disc retrospective of Harris's career, on the Rhino Entertainment label. This same year, Harris appeared as a guest vocalist on Neil Young's widely acclaimed Prairie Wind. She also appeared in the Jonathan Demme documentary-concert film Neil Young: Heart of Gold, released in 2006.
All the Roadrunning, an album of collaborations with former Dire Straits frontman Mark Knopfler, was released on April 24, 2006 (April 25 in USA), and supported by a tour of Europe and the USA. The album was a commercial success, reaching #10 in the UK and #17 in the USA. Selections recorded during the All the Roadrunning tour performance at the Gibson Amphitheatre were released as a CD/DVD package entitled Real Live Roadrunning on November 14, 2006. In addition to several of the compositions that Harris and Knopfler recorded together in the studio, Real Live Roadrunning features solo hits from both members of the duo, as well as a few classic tracks from Knopfler's days with Dire Straits.
Harris is featured on a A Tribute To Joni Mitchell, released on April 24, 2007. Harris covered the song "The Magdalene Laundries" (originally on Mitchell's 1994 album, Turbulent Indigo). She sang "Another Pot O' Tea" with Anne Murray on Murray's album Duets: Friends & Legends, released November 13, 2007, in Canada and January 15, 2008, in the U.S.
[edit] Activism
In 1997 and 1998, Harris performed in Sarah McLachlan's Lilith Fair, promoting feminism in music. Since 1999, Harris has been organizing an annual benefit tour called Concerts for a Landmine Free World. All proceeds from the tours support the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation's (VVAF) efforts to assist innocent victims of conflicts around the world. The tour also benefits the VVAF's work to raise America's awareness of the global landmine problem. Artists that have joined Harris on the road for these dates include Mary-Chapin Carpenter, Bruce Cockburn, Sheryl Crow, Steve Earle, Joan Baez, Patty Griffin, Nanci Griffith, Willie Nelson, and Lucinda Williams. Harris is a supporter of animal rights and an active member of PETA.[2] She founded, and in her spare time assists at, an animal shelter in Nashville.[3]
[edit] Awards and other honors
[edit] Grammy Awards
2005 Best Female Country Vocal Performance ("The Connection")
2001 Album of the Year (O Brother, Where Art Thou?)
2000 Best Contemporary Folk Album (Red Dirt Girl)
1999 Best Country Vocal Collaboration ("After The Gold Rush", with Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt)
1998 Best Country Vocal Collaboration ("Same Old Train", with Alison Krauss, Clint Black, Dwight Yoakam, Earl Scruggs, Joe Diffie, Marty Stuart, Merle Haggard, Pam Tillis, Patty Loveless, Randy Travis, Ricky Skaggs & Travis Tritt),
1995 Best Contemporary Folk Album (Wrecking Ball),
1992 Best Country Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal (Emmylou Harris & The Nash Ramblers At The Ryman, as Emmylou Harris & The Nash Ramblers)
1987 Best Country Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal (Trio, with Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt),
1984 Best Female Country Vocal Performance ("In My Dreams"),
1980 Best Country Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal ("That Lovin' You Feelin' Again", with Roy Orbison),
1979 Best Female Country Vocal Performance (Blue Kentucky Girl),
1976 Best Female Country Vocal Performance (Elite Hotel),
[edit] Other honors
[edit] Discography
[edit] References
- ^ The Hot Band, Emmylou.net, retrieved 2007-10-04
- ^ [1]
- ^ http://www.emmylou.net/br.html
- In the Country of Country: A Journey to the Roots of American Music, Nicholas Dawidoff, Vintage Books, 1998. ISBN 0-679-41567-X
- Emmylou Harris: Angel in Disguise, Jim Brown, Fox Music Books, 2004. ISBN 1-894997-03-4
- Fong-Torres, Ben. (1998). "Emmylou Harris". In The Encyclopedia of Country Music. Paul Kingsbury, Editor. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 230.
[edit] External links
- Official Site (requires Flash player)
- Emmylou Harris Comprehensive former official site
- Emmylou Harris - Sweetheart of the Rodeo – An excellent biography by Bill DeYoung
- Emmylou Harris Dutch Homepage
- Emmylou Harris at All Music Guide
- Emmylou Harris at the Internet Movie Database
- Discussion of the forming of the Hot Band and the start of Emmylou Harris' career from the Old Grey Whistle Stop program on the BBC]
et:Emmylou Harris fr:Emmylou Harris it:Emmylou Harris nl:Emmylou Harris no:Emmylou Harris pl:Emmylou Harris pt:Emmylou Harris fi:Emmylou Harris sv:Emmylou Harris
Categories: American singer-songwriters | American country singers | American female singers | American female guitarists | Grand Ole Opry members | Grammy Award winners | People from Birmingham, Alabama | Alabama musicians | American vegetarians | 1947 births | Living people | Emmylou Harris albums
