women we love: emmylou harris

I feel that the world is divided between people who name things – cars, plants, future imaginary children – and people who think that’s horrifyingly gauche, or twee, and will have no part of it. I’m going to hope our readers are namers, because I have already decided to name my first-born daughter Emmylou. No, I’m not joking. It’s a beautiful name, and I also plan on having children beautiful enough to pull it off. *cough*

Note: I may also have a tiny weakness for brunettes.

If anything Emmylou is discounted too easily by too many people as “the world’s greatest backing singer”, as though that’s some kind of alternative to being brilliant or being special, rather than a cause. Emmylou was no wallflower. In front of the Hot Band she was a star. But even then she was connected to everyone in the band on stage, and they loved her for it.

Being alone is easy.

Hold an Australian Idol audition and there are a million people who want to stand at the front of the stage and be stared at. How many of them can actually make anything magical happen?

Name me any Ryan Adams song more haunting than ‘Oh My Sweet Carolina’, any Bright Eyes song sadder and lovelier than ‘We Are Nowhere And It’s Now’.

Surely there is no song ever even sung that is more heartbreaking than Emmylou and Gram Parsons singing ‘Love Hurts’.

And she gave him a beautiful farewell in‘Boulder to Birmingham’.

As Gram’s singing partner Emmylou never even wrote down her meldody parts for their songs. If she had, it would have been futile. Gram couldn’t sing a song the same way twice if he tried.

Instead she leaned in close to the shared microphone and watched his lips and his eyes, trying to sense his next notes from his expression and his breath. They sung organically, watching each other’s faces.

I think I have a feeling for music – I think I’ve always had it – and it was Gram who brought it out in me. I don’t think I have the vision that Gram had, I think quite a lot of my music was learned from him, a combination of an instinct that he brought out in me.

As far as our musical relationship goes … I was the energy source, and he was always the visionary and the real leader. He needed my energy and I needed his direction.

He always carried those songs around in his head. He just needed a little prodding to get them out. That’s all I did.

I was Ginger Rogers to his Fred Astaire … he was leading and I was following, but it just was as natural as breathing.

Sigh. Isn’t she lovely?