Word: emmylou
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Dates: during 1975-1975
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Ronstadt is one of the most innovative and sophisticated country singers around. If anything can save country music from the mindless banality of the Conway Twittys and Bill Andersons who now dominate the industry, it is Ronstadt and other "progressive" country singers like Willie Nelson and Emmylou Harris. Teaming up with Harris, Ronstadt is by now so self-assured that she can lay back and let her partner carry half the load on "The Sweetest Gift," a touchingly simple balled about a mother who visits her son in jail, with an uncontemporary message...
...been described as an "angelic cowgirl." At times the phrase fits. Dressed in fringed shirt, jeans and high boots, working over a Merle Haggard favorite like Bottle Let Me Down, she can produce a brassy twang. But Emmylou Harris' emotional singing style owes more to melancholy Appalachian bluegrass than to western swing. Despite its range, her voice is most telling because of its feathery delicacy, an almost tentative dying fall capable of stirring deep emotions. "I would rock my soul in the bosom of Abraham," this evocative voice promises in her best song so far. "I would hold...
...music most likely to be drowned out by the loud sound and often witless lyrics of the past decade. Lately the public has grown more easy with loneliness and love gone wrong as celebrated in country music. Now, with the release of her LP Pieces of the Sky (Reprise), Emmylou Harris seems about to swim into the rich mainstream of popular music. As Emmylou sums it up: "After all the auditions in plush New York offices for men wearing sunglasses, all of a sudden the music I have always done is becoming accepted...
...Emmylou is the daughter of a career Marine family. She grew up in Virginia, worked hard at school and was considered a "real prig." Says she: "High schools are real hip now, but there was no counterculture in Woodbridge, Va. in 1963. You were either a homecoming queen or a real weirdo. I was a 16-year-old Wasp wanting to quit school and become Woody Guthrie." She entered the University of North Carolina in 1965 on a dramatic scholarship. "It was a time when the golden girls got married to med students," she recalls. More fearful of regimentation than...
Hint of Passion. At 25, Parsons was already a star of longhair country, who was stretching folk material across thudding rock rhythms. Emmylou had a gift for penetrating to the heart of a lyric. Parsons taught her to sing honky-tonk ballads like his Sin City, and soon invited her to Los Angeles to do back-up harmonies for his albums (GP and Grievous Angel). When Parsons died in 1973, she was personally and professionally devastated. "Gram turned me on to root country, to George Jones with his East Texas twang," she says. "I still try to learn Gram...