“It Was Almost Like a Burden”: How Emmylou Harris Got Close To Giving up Music

Even someone who seems naturally gifted at something will fail to see their talent reach its true potential if they’re in the wrong environment, which is how Emmylou Harris almost gave up music before becoming the country music icon we know her as today. It’s hard to imagine a world in which Harris didn’t help pass the torch for female country singers with hits like “Two More Bottles of Wine” or her take on Chuck Berry’s “C’est la Vie”. But if she had to take one more lesson on an instrument that didn’t speak to her, those songs might have never happened.

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Fortunately, her grandfather was around to take her to the pawn shop to pick out the instrument on which she would build her entire career.

Emmylou Harris Had a Love-Hate Relationship With Music

When a child displays an innate talent, it’s natural for parents to want to foster that gift. However, this overeagerness can often lead to the child going down the wrong path for their talents. This, ironically, can turn the kids off to the endeavor as a whole. Such was the case for Emmylou Harris, whose family picked up on her natural musical inclination from a young age. Because of her ability to carry a tune and her long, slender fingers, her parents enrolled her in piano lessons. It was a decent foray into music. But as Harris put it in an interview with Dan Rather, “I never felt it as anything special.”

“It was almost like a burden,” she continued. “Like I’m supposed to be musical. I hate practicing the piano. In school, you had to play song flute. Then, I graduated to clarinet in high school. I couldn’t close the holes on the clarinet. It was always squeaking. So, they put me on the saxophone. And you know, I dutifully was in the marching band, which I hated. It was the lowest rung on the social ladder in high school.”

As fate would have it, Harris went up to her extended family’s house for a visit shortly after her cousin received a gut-string guitar. One way or another (she posited she might have stolen the guitar from her relative), Harris ended up with the six-string. During the next family visit down in Alabama, Harris’ grandfather took her to a pawn shop to purchase her first real guitar of her own: a $30 Kay guitar, “which I still have,” she added.

The Future Star Looked to the Women Who Came Before Her

With her new guitar in tow, Emmylou Harris picked up a book of folk songs and began studying the likes of Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and Bob Dylan. “There was music played on the college radio station that I could get every night,” Harris told Dan Rather. “I taught myself these three chords, and that’s all I still know. Three chords. That’s all you need. I don’t know why that music resonated from me, but I could accompany myself and sing in the keys that were right for my voice.”

Although Harris was enjoying playing her three chords on the guitar, she continued her plan to go to drama school and pursue an acting career. However, while she was there, Harris said, “I realized that I was not cut out for it all. Music was where, if I had any true talent, that it was there.”

And if her millions of record sales, 13 Grammy Awards, multiple singles, and a Country Music Hall of Fame induction show anything, it’s that Harris was right—both in her decision to drop the saxophone and to pursue music over acting.

Photo by Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns