The Remarkable Adventures of Emmylou Harris and Her Band of Merry Pickers

Genius recognizes genius. Emmylou Harris’s career has been filled with remarkable adventures and a cast of truly exceptional band members. Writer Gene Santoro tells the tale.

Gene Santoro, Music Aficionado, October 4, 2017

Emmylou Harris isn’t just a matchless singer with spectacular chops, and 46 Grammy nominations. She’s also made her mark as one of our era’s great musical explorers with a laser-sharp eye for picking exceptional collaborators..

In the 1970s, she helped establish country rock with albums like Elite Hotel. Then she revived classic honky-tonk, flexed her creative muscles joining the bluegrass breakout, shaped emerging Americana, and tackled post-psychedelic alt-rock. The woman means it when she sings that she is “born to run.”

And all along the way, she enlisted a cast of Who’s Who pickers that includes James Burton, Albert Lee, Ricky Skaggs, Tony Rice, Jerry Douglas, and Buddy Miller.

Genius recognizes genius. Everyone wants to play with Emmylou.

So let’s trace Emmylou Harris’s remarkable musical voyage—and give props to the key hands she brought on board.

EARLY DAYS

The self-described high-school “prig” in 1963 Woodbridge VA wanted to quit school and become Woody Guthrie. She skipped college to play pass-the-hat joints in New York City, made a 1970 album (Emmylou Harris) she hates, and got pregnant: “the worst possible thing any girl could do to her budding career.”

Her marriage broke up and she put music on hold, but her innate toughness focused her, as it would time and again: “My life had been a little too nebulous. The pregnancy, although it wasn’t planned, gave me something very real and present to relate to.”

Folkie friends urged her back onstage. And so in early 1971, Rick Roberts of the Flying Burrito Brothers saw her at a DC bar, the Red Fox. He returned with the band, who asked her to join. The Burritos disintegrated first, though, leaving one of country-rock’s great what-ifs.

But Chris Hillman, who’d fired Burritos co-founder and erstwhile creative partner Gram Parsons for his uncontrolled substance abuse and erratic behavior, tipped his old running buddy off about the vibrant young singer.

Parsons was hanging out with the Rolling Stones while they cut Exiles on Main Street. But even the Stones got so fed up with his boundless self-destruction that they tossed him. So he finally saw Harris in DC. They spoke, nothing happened for months, then he asked her to come to LA for his first solo album.

GP AND GRIEVOUS ANGEL

When Parsons and Harris started singing together, they discovered an intuitive vocal blend that juiced them both creatively. Parsons, wayward scion of a wealthy dysfunctional family, poured money into his dream sessions. He couldn’t get Merle Haggard to produce, but he did sign up Elvis Presley’s legendary guitarist James Burton—a serious coup.

Louisiana-born Burton got his first Tele at 14, when he started playing professionally. Four years later, he wrote the immortal lick for “Suzie Q,” and partner Dale Hawkins wrote the lyrics. That led Ricky Nelson to hire him for his signature style, a combo of chicken-pickin’ and pedal steel-like glisses and bends shaped by using a flatpick plus a fingerpick on his middle finger. Hear how that works on “Hello Mary Lou.”

When Burton joined the Shindig house band, he was playing 25 recording sessions a week. He turned down Bob Dylan’s job offer to sign on with Elvis. For him, the Parsons gigs were sessions; he never planned to tour.

GP was uneven, reflecting how Parsons was a bloated coked-up booze hound. To promote it, Harris took charge, creating set lists and drilling their erratic road band, the Fallen Angels. The album didn’t sell.

Neither did its followup, Grievous Angel, likely the best example of Parsons’s “Cosmic American Music,” because he stayed cleaner than he’d been for years. Tracks like “Cash on the Barrelhead,” shimmering with duo harmonies, suggest what might have been. “Love Hurts” and “Ooh Las Vegas” still surface in Harris’s shows.

Harris and Parsons planned a new tour group with bluegrass/Byrds guitar whiz Clarence White. But White was killed by a drunk driver, and the ever-unstable Parsons ODed on morphine and alcohol in September 1973. Harris was left with heartache on what looked like another dead end.

THE HOT BAND

But Parsons also left her a legacy: a handful of great tunes, an abiding love for country music, confirmation of her inner strength, and the core of a great band. She drew on all that to help make country-rock commercially viable—and accepted in Nashville.

Record biz honchos told the unknown singer she needed an all-star “hot” band for a major label deal. The name stuck. So did Burton; for two years she scheduled her tours around Elvis’s to avoid conflicts—and the road-band disaster that engulfed her with Parsons.

Harris is a natural collaborator, seeking creative dialogs rather than total control. Producer Brian Ahern enabled her innate eclecticism, as she explored classics and dug up songs by up-and-coming composers she helped make famous. For the next few years, they mixed and matched the disparate material to exploit her flexible vocals, modeling their projects on successful album-oriented rock acts, relying on FM-radio play to reach fans.

ELITE HOTEL AND PIECES OF THE SKY

It worked. Elite Hotel, her 1975 debut, hit #1 on the country charts but also sold well to rockers who avoided Nashville “product.” A series of richly diverse albums in similar veins followed, yielding a string of hits and Grammy nods.

Burton’s spare, expressive attack keynoted the first two discs. Classic spots include the laconic treated solo on “One of These Days”; the barbed-wire duo line with pedal steel maven Hank De Vito on “Amarillo”; the Leslie-cabinet-ish solo on “One of These Days”; the chicken-pickin’ on “Ooh Las Vegas”; and the snapped-off honky-tonk lines of Buck Owens’ “Bottle Let Me Down.”

De Vito was an ideal if improbable foil. Born in Staten Island, New York, he studied graphic arts—he’s an ace photographer—at NYC’s School of Visual Arts. He says he was in the right places—New York, San Francisco, and LA—for the birth of country rock. Among his memorable Hot Band spots: the tension-building intro of “Amarillo,” the aching lines on “Together Again,” the ironically beautiful backdrop on “Sin City,” and the whiplash solo on “Ooh Las Vegas.”

Ex-Burritos also chipped in. Bernie Leadon’s slyly sarcastic dobro on “Bottle Let Me Down” and banjo breakdown on “Bluebird Wine” are priceless. And Byron Berline’s mandolin on “Sin City,” “One of These Days,” and “If I Could Only Win Your Love” is stinging, idiomatic, and skillfully to the point.

THE HOT BAND 2.0

By 1976, Burton couldn’t juggle Elvis and Emmylou any more. That left the Hot Band with a gigantic hole. Enter Albert Lee.

Lee, born in London to a Gypsy family, idolized Burton and Scotty Moore. With the forgotten Heads Hands & Feet, his speed-demon Telecaster runs floored other pickers. He turned down an offer from Deep Purple’s Jon Lord to work in LA with the reunited Crickets, Buddy Holly’s band. There he got the call from Harris, and dove in for Luxury Liner and Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town.

Lee’s virtuosic velocity powers the headlong rock’n’roll rush of tracks like “Luxury Liner” and “I Ain’t Livin’ Long Like This.” But he also does painful nuance well (“Pancho and Lefty”). He even used Clarence White’s B-string bender for some pedal steel mimicry.

Another addition was multi-instrumentalist Ricky Skaggs, a bluegrass child prodigy who’d appeared with Bill Monroe when he was six, and with Flatt & Scruggs on TV a year later. With the Hot Band, he fired up “I’ll Be Your San Antone Rose” and “C’est La Vie” with his deft, fluid fiddling.

Harris’s vision and drive had forged terrific groups to complement her supple voice, and matured country-rock into a hybrid both Nashville and rockers could love. But the cultural landscape was shifting.

ROOTS AND BLUEGRASS

Urban Cowboy’s boffo box office in 1980 made Nashville honchos hungry to clone its glitzy soundtrack. Instead, Harris zagged.

Blue Kentucky Girl dug into her roots: folk music, the 1950s honky-tonk/rockabilly of her idols Kitty Wells and Loretta Lynn. Skaggs’s yearning fiddle shadows her aching voice on “Sorrow In The Wind.” Lee’s Bakersfield-style electric guitar meets songwriter Rodney Crowell’s snappy acoustic solos to spice “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.” DeVito and Burton reprise their tight teamwork for Parsons’ immortal “Hickory Wind.”

A year later, Harris was one of the earliest mainstream stars to tackle bluegrass, with the prophetic Roses In The Snow. Naturally, she enlisted heavy hitters in the idiom to augment Lee and Skaggs.

Tony Rice became a newgrass guitar icon after his groundbreaking work with the 1970s David Grisman Quintet. There he learned to fold jazz harmonies and odd meters into his acoustic attack—a model of clarity, precision, and intonation that powers “Wayfaring Stranger,” the disc’s hit single, and “I’ll Go Stepping Too.”

Also key was Jerry Douglas, another bluegrass child prodigy who would star with Alison Krauss and Union Station and master jazz, blues, even classical music. His fleet fingerpicking, aggressive attack, and nimble use of the bar create a cutting edge that can curl into a moan or slice like wire on the title cut and the album’s second single, Paul Simon’s “The Boxer.”

OUT OF THE MACHINE, INTO AMERICANA

The bland corporate rock of the 1970s and 1980s that inspired high-energy punk and New Wave reactions trapped most stars from classic rock’s creative surge. In the 1980s, Harris struggled to find her artistic bearings. Covers of “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” and “Mister Sandman” turned her dwindling rock fans off but scored Nashville hits. Albums with Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt sold, but felt irrelevant to rising roots- and alt-rockers, and “new country” honky-tonk revivalists.

By 1989, Harris’s airplay and sales were slipping. So she cut loose with the Nash Ramblers.

Now, of course, Americana is a marketing category. But in 1989, it was still an emerging musical concept. The Nash Ramblers, an all-star acoustic lineup with a typically tongue-in-cheek name, helped define it. The material spanned the musical spectrum, with songs by Steve Earle, Bruce Springsteen, and John Fogerty next to Bill Monroe classics. Understatedly daring, the live album won a Grammy.

Harris’s ace quintet had chops to burn.

Al Perkins (Burrito, Manassas) had stamped country-rock via his virtuoso work on pedal steel and dobro. His dobro also threaded the 1980s Americana breakout, with both longtime buddy Hillman (Desert Rose) and the Nash Ramblers. His tasty melodic lines on “Guitar Town,” “Cattle Call,” and “Lodi” are unmistakable. And he doubles on pre-Scruggs banjo for “Montana Cowgirl.”

Sam Bush, another child prodigy who founded New Grass Revival, doubled on fiddle and mandolin. He upset bluegrass traditionalists, even Bill Monroe, an early champion of his. Ironically, Bush’s Nash Ramblers work shines especially bright on Monroe-penned tunes like “Scotland,” “Walls Of Time,” and “Get Up John.”

The album hit #2 on Billboard’s Country chart and #26 on its general 200. For five years, Emmylou Harris and the Nash Ramblers helped spread the sound of Americana on tours.

WRECKING BALL

In the midst of that, a re-energized Harris joined forces with eccentric producer Daniel Lanois (Eno, U2, Dylan) on Wrecking Ball, a revelatory album for classic-rock fans who’d forgotten about her. It brought her songwriting to the fore, and won a Grammy for folk.

Lanois played most of the album’s stringed instruments—guitar, bass, bass pedal, mandolin, dulcimer. But his mandolin work on “Where Will I Be,” “Goodbye,” and “Goin’ Back to Harlan” is especially on point.

Harris was back in the artistic game, on her terms. Her faith in her songwriting grew, as she rode the arc toward a new creative peak.

ALT-ROCK

Not many artists in their 50s can keep successfully reinventing themselves. But Harris did. She delivered Spyboy (1999) and Red Dirt Girl (2001), which refashioned her remarkably supple voice as the center for gritty, offbeat alt-rock.

This time, her key co-conspirator was Buddy Miller, a guitarist’s guitarist and sonic shapeshifter with a vast guitar collection. He’s played with Johnny Cash, Levon Helm, Solomon Burke, Richard Thompson, Patty Griffin, the Carolina Chocolate Drops, Lucinda Williams, and John Fogerty; he toured with Robert Plant and Alison Krauss for Raising Sand, and with Plant’s Band of Joy.

On Spyboy, the grungy live classic, he can lay back and create richly textured ambience while bassist Daryl Johnson takes point, or charge headlong into full-throttle solos. The band’s ferocity challenges Harris to put more of an edge in her vocals—and she does. Check out “I Ain’t Living Long Like This,” “Deeper Well,” “Tulsa Queen,” and “Born to Run.” On “Red Dirt Girl,” he provides the perfect foreboding soundscape for Harris’s tragic lyrics.

CODA

On April 2, Emmylou Harris turns 70. Her tragedies and triumphs are woven into the immortal music she’s crafted. Last fall, a star-studded live tribute, The Life & Songs of Emmylou Harris, was released on CD and DVD. Beginning in May, she crisscrosses the country on tour. The 16-year-old prig who wanted to be Woody Guthrie has come a long way indeed.

© Gene Santoro, 2017