Speakers & VIPs

Emmylou Harris

With a career that has sold more than 15 million records worldwide and lasted more than 30 years, 12-time Grammy award winner Emmylou Harris has been rightfully hailed as a major figure in several of America’s most important musical movements of the past three decades. A steadfast supporter of roots music and a skilled interpreter of compelling songs, she also has been associated with a diverse array of admiring collaborators.

The songbird’s contributions to country-rock, the bluegrass revival, folk music, and the Americana movement are widely lauded, and in recent years Emmylou Harris certainly has carved out a sound that is uniquely her own. Her 1995 Wrecking Ball was a watershed album for her, combining several world-music elements with acoustic instruments, driving percussion, and a folk/roots flavor. The new style would evolve on a number of Harris’ subsequent releases, including 1998’s Spyboy, 1999’s Western Wall (a collaboration with Linda Ronstadt), 2000’s Red Dirt Girl and 2003’s Stumble into Grace.

Harris took up guitar as a teenager inspired by the folk music of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, and Judy Collins. Starving-artist stints in Greenwich Village and Nashville led to regular club work in Washington D.C. Country-rock visionary Gram Parsons discovered her there and brought her to Los Angeles to become his duet partner in 1972.

After Parsons’ untimely passing, Emmylou emerged as a solo star with Pieces of the Sky in 1975. The album electrified the country-music world, becoming the first of her eight consecutive gold or platinum records.  Her next three releases made her an unquestioned country-rock leader.  Today, Emmylou Harris is regarded as a key figure in a movement that united rock audiences with country traditionalists. She made country music “hip” and brought it to a vast youth market for the first time.  Then she led the way back to neo-traditionalist sounds with 1979’s Blue Kentucky Girl. The following year’s Roses In the Snow paved the road toward the bluegrass revival.

By the 1990s Harris changed her sound again with the acoustic band The Nash Ramblers and honored one of country music’s most legendary concert halls with the Grammy-winning Live at the Ryman CD of 1992.  Just three years later, Emmylou took a leading role in yet another musical revolution—the Americana movement that gave country music its “alternative” wing. She and Daniel Lanois completely reinvented Emmylou’s sound for her 1995 watershed album, Wrecking Ball, for which she earned another Grammy award.

The wide range of her repertoire is mirrored by the musicians who have sought her out as a collaborator. She has recorded with artists from such diverse points on the musical compass as The Band, Johnny Cash, Elvis Costello, Bright Eyes, Bob Dylan, Little Feat, Tammy Wynette, Neil Young, Bill Monroe, Lyle Lovett, Roy Orbison, Bonnie Raitt, Garth Brooks, Lucinda Williams, and George Jones. Stars such as Ricky Skaggs, Vince Gill, Rodney Crowell, Jon Randall and The Whites have emerged from the ranks of her bands.

Billboard magazine honored Emmylou Harris with its prestigious Century Award in 1999, calling her a “truly venturesome, genre-transcending pathfinder, while the L.A. Times praises the unfaltering quality of her work, saying, “(Emmylou Harris) has made consistently outstanding musical choices over her 35-plus-year career.”  But perhaps even more outstanding than her selections, is her beautifully crystalline voice, about which The New York Times says, “Ms. Harris’s voice inhabits her songs like a wraith, intangible but omnipresent.”

In July 2005, Emmylou’s first single-CD career retrospective was released by Rhino Records. Heartaches and Highways: The Very Best of Emmylou Harris and won a Grammy Award for “The Connection.”  In 2007, Rhino further celebrates Emmylou’s distinguished career with a 4-CD, 1-DVD boxed set featuring, previously unreleased material, demos, studio tracks, collaborative work with other artists, and a DVD of live performances beginning with The Hot Band in the 1970s.  Songbird releases September 18, 2007.