Emmylou Harris: Blue Kentucky Girl : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Blue Kentucky Girl is virtually a textbook example of how to make a modern country album. It's lucid and self-assured, without a single dud among its ten cuts, and done in a style that's invariably elegant while hewing rigidly to a hard-edged, functional tone. As a singer, Emmylou Harris has always demonstrated fine taste and technical precision, and either she or her producer/husband Brian Ahern are uncommonly intelligent in their choice of songs: the material is as sentimental as it has to be, but never mawkish, walking a careful tightrope between old-fashioned traditionalism and Harris' own glossily modern sensibility.

There's a good, sprightly Willie Nelson tune ("Sister's Coming Home"), a suitably opaque and impressionistic Gram Parsons composition ("Hickory Wind") and a Doc Pomus classic ("Save the Last Dance for Me") mixed in with new and older material, all sung in the same evenhanded, smoothly professional style. To round things off, Harris includes "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues," a song by her longtime protégé, Rodney Crowell, with high harmonies courtesy of Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt.

On the surface, Blue Kentucky Girl is almost flawless and unfailingly pleasant to listen to. But the point of country music is to move you, and this, unfortunately, is exactly what the LP doesn't do. Emmylou Harris has always been too reserved to come across as forcefully as she should, but on her earlier work, she showed signs of developing a real personality. Here, however, she generally takes refuge in an impersonal, rather empty vocal perfection, and the new record doesn't get to you emotionally. It's just too tasteful to ever cut to the bone.

Harris came into country-music prominence via her early association with Gram Parsons, and, like him, she sees country as a secondhand, stylized form. But she doesn't have (or hasn't been allowed to show) the force of character that, in Parsons' case, converted self-conscious stylization into a uniquely personal testament. Instead, Emmylou Harris comes across like an earnest grad student, presenting this music to us without ever taking it over and making it her own. Blue Kentucky Girl's most affecting cut is "Every-time You Leave," a duet with Don Everly, and the song works not only because it's such a simple and uncluttered vehicle, but because the naked vulnerability in Everly's voice forces Harris to push harder just to keep up. Elsewhere, though, the passion is too cut and dried, the sorrow always distanced and never more than bittersweet.

I don't mean to slight Harris' talent, which is obviously large and admirable. Blue Kentucky Girl is an impressive album, nearly perfect in its way, and if it were a college thesis, I'd give it an A plus. But perfection isn't always enough. The kind of expertise demonstrated here by Emmylou Harris can do everything except make you care.