Emmylou Harris: Roses In The Snow : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

The Cowboy boots pictured on the sleeve of Emmylou Harris' Blue Kentucky Girl–the LP for which she won the "Best Country Album" Grammy last year – looked store-bought and stiff. On Roses in the Snow, they're broken-in quite a bit. After the pleasant surprise of this artist's first two post-Gram Parsons solo discs, her pop-country hybrid began to sound increasingly slick and lifeless, embalmed by Brian Ahern's waxed-burlap production. But just recently, Harris has stopped trying to cover all bases, dropped the Linda Ronstadt-derived formula of song selection and followed her roots back to country music. The change is instantly noticeable here, and it's a big improvement.

On the new record, the instrumentation is almost entirely acoustic, the ensembles are smaller and the emphasis is on harmony singing with the simplest possible accompaniment. It's no coincidence that three of the ten tunes are Protestant hymns and two others inspirational in content, since the purest country music, like the purest black music, started in church.

Throughout the LP, the vocalists–Harris, Ricky Skaggs (who sings several duets with the star), Tony Rice, the Whites, and guests Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Johnny Cash – sound like a bona fide community as appealing as Kate and Anna McGarrigle's Canadian counterpart. The material is also well chosen. Emmylou Harris continues to unearth fantastic Louvin Brothers numbers ("You're Learning"), A.P. Carter's "Gold Watch & Chain" is a special delight and the trio of Harris, Parton and Skaggs performing the traditional "Green Pastures" gives me pleasant chills. Though the bluegrass rendition of Paul Simon's "The Boxer" is inspired in theory, it's reprehensibly careless in execution: the song's hero should remember every "glove" that knocked him down, not every "bloke," as Harris strangely sings.

Nonetheless, Roses in the Snow is a success, thanks largely to Brian Ahern's amazingly breezy, flesh-and-blood production (to be fair, he did a good job on Rodney Crowell's debut album, too) and to Emmylou Harris' staunchly renewed convictions.