In mid-2018, Rhino Entertainment re-released Emmylou Harris’ 1985 album The Ballad Of Sally Rose. A commercial flop at the time of its initial release, the album, which was Harris’ first LP comprising her own original songs, has seen renewed interest in recent years and has since proven to have been ahead of its time, encapsulating much of what has made Harris a living legend in country and Americana music: quality songwriting, vulnerable storytelling, exceptional musicianship.
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A concept album, The Ballad Of Sally Rose follows the titular character and her musician lover, the latter loosely based on the late Gram Parsons, through romance and tragedy. Songs like “White Line,” which still charted well despite the album’s lower sales, show Harris to be as formidable a songwriter as she had been a vocalist, and hold up today as the work of an artist with stories of her own to tell.
The Ballad Of Sally Rose is but one bright point in Harris’ ever-growing constellation of achievements. To boot, last October the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville opened the new exhibit “Emmylou Harris: Songbird’s Flight” to honor Harris and her still-evolving legacy as one of American music’s most important figures. Running through August of this year, the exhibit traces Harris’ landmark career from her childhood in the Southeast to her present day endeavors through photos, memorabilia and short essays.
Harris and the museum celebrated the opening of “Songbird’s Flight” on October 2 at a special ceremony that included many of the country luminary’s close friends, family and collaborators. Buddy Miller and Patty Griffin were both on hand to honor Harris with intimate acoustic performances of some of her best-loved songs.
“She was, and is, a force on rhythm guitar, and one of America’s most badass bandleaders,” Country Music Hall of Fame and Musem CEO Kyle Young told the crowd during the opening celebration. “She writes remarkable songs, such as ‘Boulder To Birmingham,’ “Prayer In Open D,’ and ‘Red Dirt Girl,’ and she has the song finder’s equivalent of a jeweler’s eye.”
Addressing the crowd before performing Harris’ beloved 1993 track “Prayer In Open D,” Griffin shared that Harris once offered her a humorous piece of vocal performance advice: “You don’t need to know the words, you just have to get the vowel sounds.” Harris herself offered a poignant speech, tracing her early days in Nashville (at one point, she subsisted on fortune cookies and food stamps) through her long string of achievements, joking that her decades-long tenure with record label Warner Bros. makes her “just like Chipper Jones of the Atlanta Braves.”
Shortly after Harris’ remarks, guests were invited to tour “Songbird’s Flight.” One of the first items visitors to the exhibit encounter is Harris’ first guitar, a Kay 1160 Deco Note acoustic given to her as a gift by her grandfather when she was a young girl. The guitar is one of several meaningful instruments throughout the exhibit, including the Gibson J-200N acoustic guitar gifted to Harris by the late Gram Parsons.
“I wanted a guitar because I had been at Christmas up in Maryland and one of my cousins had gotten a guitar,” she says, seated inside the exhibit to speak with American Songwriter. “The folk music revival was kind of happening. This was like ’63, ’64, around Washington, DC. There was a great radio station from American University, WAMU, and they played folk music every night. I’d just sit in my room and try to copy some kind of chord book, three-chord stuff. I didn’t realize that the strings were not supposed to be really high. I still have the scars. I just wanted to learn every song that I could. I listened to Joan Baez, Dylan, all the stuff that they were playing. There was some old traditional stuff, a lot of the new writers, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Judy Collins.”
Music was one piece of what Harris describes as a fairly charmed childhood. Born in Birmingham and raised in and around North Carolina and Virginia, Harris grew up in a military family and pursued music from an early age. The exhibit features several early photographs of Harris as a child, as well as mementos from her teenage years, a highlight of which is a handwritten letter Harris wrote to Sing Out! quarterly journal at the age of 18.
“We didn’t really travel that much,” she says. “We never went overseas. We never went anyplace exotic. So, for me, it was a very normal family life, very loving parents. We spent time with his family in Maryland on vacations, my mother’s family in Birmingham. You know, it was a very normal, extremely happy childhood. I have friends who don’t believe it. And I say, ‘No, it actually was very happy.’
One poignant highlight of the exhibit is Harris’ father Walter “Bucky” Harris’ military decorations from his time serving in both World War II and the Korean War. Walter, a recipient of the Legion of Merit, was an officer in the Marine Corps and was held as a prisoner of war in Korea in 1952, when Harris was just five years old.
“Of course, there was the trauma of my father being a prisoner of war for 16 months,” she says. “But I think I blocked a lot of that out. I remember him going away and I remember him coming back. Of course, as I got older I realized how difficult it must have been for my mother. But he came back to us luckily without PTSD. He was physically weakened, but he got his strength back. He had been tortured. He just happened to be the senior officer in that camp at that time, so he was the subject of a lot of torture, physical but mostly emotional.”
Harris, who gave the Hall of Fame a lot of leeway when designing the exhibit, hadn’t planned to include her father’s mementos in “Songbird’s Flight,” but was moved by their inclusion. “That wasn’t my idea,” she explains. “That was actually quite touching. We had to look for them. My brother had them.”
While “Songbird’s Flight” offers many items — like performance outfits, sheet music and vintage photos — typical to such exhibits, the most striking artifacts on display are those, like her father’s medals, which showcase Harris’ deep connections with her loved ones and collaborators. Accordingly, the exhibit pays special attention to Harris’ short but monumental friendship with Gram Parsons, through both the aforementioned guitar and pieces of their correspondence and collaboration.
“It just shot me from one place clear across the universe practically,” Harris says of working with Parsons. “First of all, he turned me on to real country music, which I disdained as a folk singer. Working with a band? You don’t work with a band. You have to be pure. And I think I really found my voice by singing harmony with him. Of course, if he’d lived I would have probably gone on to make more records with him and whatever, but as it turns out, it was that leg-up to an international stage because he had one. By association, I kind of inherited that from him. Without Gram, I doubt if there would be an Emmylou Harris exhibit at the Country Music Hall of Fame.”
Parsons, of course, inspired The Ballad Of Sally Rose, which gets its own display case of memorabilia, including handwritten lyrics for “Diamond In My Crown” and “White Line.” Harris wrote that album with her then-husband Paul Kennerley, who also produced the LP.
“We put a lot of love and sweat and tears and blood in that record, and it was a flop, a commercial flop,” she says. “I suppose it never really had a chance. But I never regretted doing it. To be able to have an idea and fulfill it and flesh it out with the help of Paul, to tell that story, to see what it became — I never regretted it … Whatever happens with it, it’s nice to get those demos out there, and to give a little shout-out to Paul, and to Sally and that story. It was a lot of fun to put it together for its second coming, so to speak.”
Another highlight of “Songbird’s Flight” is its focus on Harris’ Trio project with Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt, another of her mid-career endeavors that has received renewed (and deserved) attention in recent years, particularly through a reissue of The Complete Trio Collection by Rhino in 2016. That project remains one of several which proved Harris to be a trailblazer, one whose left-leaning country inclinations were decades ahead of the Americana recent surge in popularity.
“We were probably all ahead of our time, all of us out there: Rodney [Crowell] and Guy [Clark] and Townes [Van Zandt],” she says. “We loved country and we honored country and we drew from the well of country, but we weren’t really suited for country radio. But that’s okay. It’s important that you do what turns you on and what feels true for you.”
When asked which of her myriad accomplishments she cherishes most when looking back on her career thus far, Harris is quick to bring up her work with animals. As we elaborated on in our September/October 2018 issue, Harris is a fierce advocate for animal welfare, particularly through benefit concerts like her annual Woofstock and through a non-profit dog rescue she runs in her Nashville backyard. She jokes that her work with animals is the only real “break” from making and performing music she’s taken since making her debut.
“It’s almost been an unbroken line of great bands and working with terrific people and making music,” she says. “It’s been a continuum for me. I don’t think I’ve ever really taken much time off, and if I did I was working on writing songs. I never really had a hobby.”
She’s also happy to talk about Sally Rose. Like walking through “Songbird’s Flight” itself, revisiting that particular album resonated with the deeply rooted parts of Harris which originally guided her as a young girl practicing folk songs in her bedroom.
“I’m glad it’s getting a second chance,” she says. “The thing that made me excited about the reissue was hearing the demos, because they were just so pure. It took you right back to the beginning of why you decided to do all this in the first place.”
