Emmylou Harris: Luxury Liner : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

It doesn't seem fair. To date, Emmylou Harris has charted exactly one Top Forty single, a slight, breezy cover of the Chordettes' "Mister Sandman," while Linda Ronstadt minted more than a score of them. Ronstadt may have had the monster voice and the Midas touch in the Seventies, but Harris had a touch more daring and authenticity. Albums such as Luxury Liner - with its premonitory mix of country rock, bluegrass, Texas folk, hill-country balladry, rockabilly twang and traditional country -- laid the groundwork for today's Americana and alt-country movements. Few remember the slick L.A. sessionmen who buffed Ronstadt's early-rock and Motown retreads to a high gloss, but such names as Townes Van Zandt, Gram Parsons, Rodney Crowell, Albert Lee, Ricky Skaggs and James Burton -- all of whom are present on Luxury Liner as songwriters and/or musicians -- continue to accrue in recognition and legend.

Left to its own devices, country music calcifies into rigid formulas that periodically prove to be its undoing, but Harris brought folky emotionality and rock attitude to the table. After singing harmony with Parsons until the latter's death by overdose, Harris signed to a major label. Her next six albums -- from 1975's Pieces of the Sky through 1980's Roses in the Snow -- constitute a remarkably sure- handed run of records. Luxury Liner, released in early '77, is her apex: superbly chosen songs, hot picking and a definitive representation of her plangent, romantic sensibility. Harris' aching sincerity -- there's not a trace of coyness or irony on Luxury Liner, save for the comic relief of the Chuck Berry cover "(You Never Can Tell) C'est la Vie" -- is etched all over these tunes.

Astute song-finding has always been one of Harris' talents, and Luxury Liner is freighted with jewels. She unearthed Van Zandt's "Pancho and Lefty," a now-classic tale about a pair of grifters for whom there is no happy ending. The Parsons-penned title track originally appeared on an obscure album by the International Submarine Band, his early group. Encapsulating Parsons' recklessly doomed sensibility ("I've been a long-lost soul for a long, long time"), this galloping opener features ripping guitar solos from Englishman Albert Lee. Luxury Liner ultimately turns on Harris' eloquent voicing of sentiments from influences old (the Louvin Brothers, the Carter Family, Kitty Wells) and new (Van Zandt, Crowell, Parsons). Where others couldn't see, Harris found not conflict but continuum in the country realm.