Emmylou Harris: Cowgirl's Prayer : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Emmylou Harris shared credit on her last album, At the Ryman, with the Nash Ramblers, a group of Nashville's finest acoustic players that was perfect for an album cut live at the hallowed former home of the Grand Ol' Opry. Two years later, Cowgirl's Prayer shows that At the Ryman was both a turning point and a holding action.

Though sparingly produced again by Allen Reynolds and Richard Bennett, with the same musicians on hand and additional backups by the likes of Trisha Yearwood, Ashley Cleveland and Alison Krauss, this is an Emmylou Harris album first and foremost. While on Ryman, Harris explored a cross section of styles, the strength of Cowgirl's lies in a typically conscientious, thematic song selection marked by Harris' own return to songwriting.

Both "The Light," which Harris cowrote with Kieran Kane, and her own "Prayer in Open D" venture into the "valley of sorrow in my soul," a terrain that haunts the album.

Not that Cowgirl's Prayer is without solace. Lucinda Williams' "Crescent City," uplifted by a Cajun fiddle, delivers salvation "in the town where good times stay." Tony Joe White's "High Powered Love," meanwhile, promises liberation through the physical; Harris sings it with Wynonna-style earthiness – no mean feat for a luminous vocalist renowned for her bittersweet delicacy. Even in segueing from David Olney's spoken-word parable "Jerusalem Tomorrow" into Jesse Winchester's old-time gospel-flavored "Thanks to You," Harris refuses to be bound by genre convention, infusing each song with its own life as befits traditional music's unrivaled interpreter.