Emmylou Harris: Pieces Of The Sky : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

When the Byrds recorded Sweetheart of the Rodeo in 1968, the romance between country music and pop was still secret. Seven years later, both country and country-influenced pop are all but mainstream. In order to seduce the mass audience, country producers and musicians smoothed down the music's rough edges, removing many of the music's distinctive qualities. Meanwhile, in order to build connections to more legitimate roots, some rock musicians tried to graft those same rough edges onto their own ridgeless pop styles. In the process, both types created music that was neither authentic nor innovative, but was a mild, occasionally charming contrivance.

But Sweetheart of the Rodeo itself remains apart from the clichéd and shallow music inspired by it: It still sounds real and powerful. The difference was Gram Parsons, the only true innovator to emerge from the jumbled milieu. A native southerner, he had grown up with coexistent passions for old-time country and rock 'n' roll and began making music with these passions intact. Parsons used the Byrds as a vehicle for his grand design: to wed pure country music to a new audience.

Parsons never made contact with that hoped for audience, but he made some great music. His six albums—from the formative Safe at Home by his International Submarine Band through the final heartbreaking Grievous Angel—include literally every noteworthy work to be associated with the country-rock movement. The difference between Parsons and the rest was partly his awareness and understanding of the tradition he was carrying on, but it was mostly the feeling: He was connected to pure country in a spiritual way, and he could communicate what he felt with singular vividness.

If Parsons's haunting music never reached a sizable audience, it deeply touched a succession of worthy musicians, and Parsons made the most of each partnership: with Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman in the Byrds; with Hillman, Sneeky Pete and Chris Ethridge in the Flying Burrito Brothers (whose Gilded Palace of Sin remains the crowning achievement of the milieu); and finally with Emmylou Harris on his two solo albums, GP and Grievous Angel.

Now Emmylou Harris is incorporating Parsons's convictions into her own work, and she talks candidly about what the partnership gave her in terms of both knowledge and inspiration. Harris isn't a lifelong country devotee even though she grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. But while working with Parsons, she caught his fever for the rigidly expressive, high-droning sound of old-fashioned country as introduced to her by Parsons on the records of people like Lefty Frizzell, early George Jones, Hank Williams and especially the great harmony duos, the Louvin Brothers and the young Everly Brothers.

On her own Harris has, like her old partner, bypassed Nashville altogether, preferring to work clubs with her band in her present home area, Washington D.C., and to record her own solo album in Los Angeles with many of the same musicians Parsons had used. Present-day Nashville has very little to do with the music on Pieces of the Sky; the closest Emmylou gets is "Coat of Many Colors" by Dolly Parton (herself a pristine anachronism in the world of Lynn Anderson and Olivia Newton-John) and a credibly rustic Billy Sherill ballad, "Too Far Gone."

Pieces of the Sky is superficially a country album to about the same extent Heart like a Wheel is. But whereas Linda Ronstadt stays primarily with recently written neo-country material and young, country-oriented pop musicians, Harris has laced her recording generously with old warhorses on both counts. There are old songs—by Charlie and Ira Louvin, Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, plus vintage-sounding newer tunes—and on hand are crusty old pickers like James Burton and Glen D. Hardin. Despite the differences in approach, the focus of each album is the lead voice and it's hard to avoid making comparisons between the two.

While Ronstadt has a full-bodied sonority to her voice, giving her great power in the dramatic passages of the songs she sings, Harris has a softer, almost fragile turn in hers that belies its basic sturdiness. Emmylou tends to underplay her lines, giving her vocal sound the drama of vulnerability rather than that of all-out passion. Her duet with herself on the Everly Brothers tune, "Sleepless Nights" (which she once recorded to heartbreaking perfection with Parsons on a never released track), is restrained to a point not far above a whisper, but the mournful sincerity of her singing gives the track a nevertheless unquestionable intensity. Her rendering of the Beatles' "For No One" (which producer Brian Ahern persuaded her to record) is nearly as understated, with a small string ensemble and a spun-silk guitar solo by Amos Garrett beautifully reinforcing the close, shadowy mood.

She can convey a credible sense of sweet fragility without holding back to those extremes, as she shows in her delightful duet with Herb Pederson (late of the Dillards) on the Louvins' "If I Could Only Win Your Love," her faithful rendition of the Parton song or "Boulder to Birmingham," the album's most commercial track and the only Harris original (cowritten with Washingtonian Bill Danoff). This panoramic love song invokes the classic traveler's theme in a succession of affecting metaphors:

Well you really got me this time
And the hardest part is knowing I'll survive.
I've come to listen for the sound
Of the trucks as they move down out on 95
And pretending it's the ocean
Comin' down to wash me clean,
To wash me clean.
Baby do you know what I mean?

In this verse and throughout the song, Emmylou juxtaposes her most intimate singing with her fullest, thereby deftly moving along the shifting sequence of perspectives to form a coherent progression. Here, working with her own ideas, her intelligence and sensitivity are readily apparent.

A little-known writer, Danny Flowers, has provided Harris with a song that stands with the old classics and with "Boulder to Birmingham": His "Before Believing" opens with an elegant acoustic guitar figure, then moves deliberately into a stark, simply worded lover's monologue (from which the album's title was drawn). The track has a wintry clarity that contrasts poignantly with the language of the song, and Emmylou works this contrast skillfully, so that her voice seems to glow in its somber, chill surroundings.

On Pieces of the Sky, the greater the challenge the song provides, the more inspired Emmylou's performance becomes. Concurrently, the album's least riveting moments come from its most upbeat, least passionate songs: Haggard's "Bottle Let Me Down," Shel Silverstein's "Queen of the Silver Dollar," and "Bluebird Wine," a catchy but slight tune by a young Texan named Rodney Crowell.

With a production touch from Ahern much lighter than his work with Anne Murray, and with a bunch of knowledgeable old hands playing along, Emmylou has received a backdrop that's more than fair, more than sympathetic. And she's responded with a performance sufficiently impressive and winning to make Pieces of the Sky a classy, durable record. Although Harris hasn't made an album the equal of Parsons's work (she wasn't expected to), it's quite likely she'll engage a much larger audience than Parsons ever did. Aside from having that miraculous voice, she has great personal charm made up in proportionate parts of intelligence, honesty and self-effacement—and (as the cover makes obvious) she's very pretty in a rustic way. Even though Pieces of the Sky is, like Parsons's records, more a country album than just about anything to come out of Nashville in years, Harris's exceptional musical and personal appeal should be sufficient to put her in touch with a good many noncountry listeners.

Emmylou may have a hit record: It's certainly good enough to be one. If she does, I'm certain she'd love nothing better than to make that original Parsons/Harris duet on "Sleepless Nights" available to her audience, old and new. But Harris's commercial success wouldn't just serve to expose a wealth of presently obscure brilliant music to a new body of listeners; it would also provide a solid base for the development of a singer/writer whose intelligence, taste and convictions do full justice to her gorgeous voice.