Emmylou Harris: At The Ryman : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Emmylou Harris has championed folk tunes, bluegrass breakdowns and honky-tonk masterpieces for fifteen years now. She aced Bruce Springsteen, Donna Summer and Rodney Crowell songs during this period as well, but Harris's consciousness of the past made her the prescient heroine of an era in which tradition-based country music regained its prestige and improved its market share.

At the Ryman, a consistently rewarding concert album done with her new all-acoustic band, the Nash Ramblers, demonstrates that this popular view tells only part of the Emmylou Harris story. Giving Johnny Cash's "Guess Things Happen That Way" an appropriately light spin or allowing her voice to twang, whine and keen through a hardy rendition of Bill Monroe's "Walls of Time," Harris wrings an unaffected country passion out of her voice that early folk inspirations of hers – far less idiosyncratic singers like Joan Baez or Judy Collins – could never claim. Like Tammy Wynette, Harris can get to the heart of the matter.

Some of Harris's albums have matched her with arrangements that seemed to forget that her voice, like Wynette's, is more expressive than it is large. On At the Ryman, Harris works with a sympathetic five-man band – from the Nashville bluegrass and rock worlds – that, with no sweat or overplaying, follows her through Tex Owens's "Cattle Call," Stephen Foster's "Hard Times," John Fogerty's "Lodi" and the Everly Brothers' "Like Strangers." Consistent with her finest work with the now-dissolved Hot Band, these live acoustic settings place the emphasis on Harris's singing. That's nothing to underrate, because although Harris's intent is serious, she is always emotionally potent, never stuffy. That's true of the great country singers at their best – and Harris is one of them.