The Red Dirt Girl

It s a funny old rock n roll world. But the thing is, country s even funnier. Rock n roll likes its icons young n febrile, malleable as marla, boxed, catalogued and priced in less time than it takes to channel hop from one Barbie dolled station to another. Country, on the other hand, tends to opt for a more long-range stake in its trailblazers. Sure, there s still no shortage of soundbyte-friendly artists with a Nashville twang (the likes of Shelby Lynne and Shania Twain), but they still leave room for the seasoned roadsters who hit their prime long after their roots start showing.

Emmylou Harris may have passed the half-century but she s only beginning to build up a head of steam now as a songwriter to be reckoned with. Long revered for her magnificent voice, her uncanny ability to wrap herself within the folds of other peoples songs, she s only now giving herself a wide enough berth to air her own songs and stories.
With over 30 albums already under her belt, and contributing to no less than five parallel projects between 1995 s Grammy award winning Wrecking Ball and this year s Red Dirt Girl, Emmylou Harris is not a woman who lets the grass grow under her feet.
And so she s gone and produced one of the finest recordings of her career, safe in the knowledge that consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, and that predictability is the last refuge of the tired traveller.
These days Emmylou Harris is travellin hard, defying the rules and giving us exactly what we always wanted anyway, which is a peek into her own creative universe, where poetry and pathos collide to stunning effect.

It s hard to credit that the woman who wows the crowd in Joe s Pub in New York s East Village is 53 years old and on the road for over three decades.
Discovered , or so the apocryphal tale goes, by one Gram Parsons in a folk club in Washington D.C. way back in 1971, she went on to collaborate with Parsons on his seminal debut, GP, and from there proceeded to carve an enviable niche for herself in the world of country/folk music.
She settles down in the dressing room of Joe s Pub, her mother, Eugenia seated to the side, a cherished talisman who helps buffer Emmylou against the vagaries of the road. Mother and daughter bear an uncanny resemblance to one another, one that stretches far beyond mere genetic inheritance and somehow whispers of a worldview so conjoined as to be seamless.
Emmylou s decision to contribute all bar one of the dozen tracks on Red Dirt Girl is in no small part due to her increasing comfort with her own musical identity, and in her own writing. Long known for pushing the outside of country music s envelope, she now seems intent on pushing out her own personal boundaries to places they ve never been before.
I guess it was the last frontier , she smiles, comfortable with the metaphor that marks her place far closer to the Mississippi than the Hudson. So far I suppose, anyway. I guess I just wasn t ready to write and Wrecking Ball was the push. I guess it was timing too, all those seeds germinating, cumulative things, finally being able to pull from that pool of things.
Red Dirt Girl is a densely packed collection of songs, many of which could hold their own in a poetry collection, so distilled are the images and emotions. Take Tragedy , a parched tale, mesmerisingly echoed by Patti Scialfa and Bruce Springsteen s desiccated backing vocals: I drew the best hand you d ever hold/Then cashed my winnings in long ago/Settled for silver, how could I know/You were waiting/With the gold . These are no baby done left me lyrics for the faint-hearted
You know I ve been singing them dense-lyric songs for a long time , she smiles. Certainly they set a standard for me as a writer. I was competing against my song choices over the years. But that s good, you know. It was good for me when I had to take up my own pen.
After the massive critical success of Wrecking Ball back in 1995, Emmylou decided to take some time out to consider her next album.
Wrecking Ball was a very strong record for me. It really shook things up for me in a good way. The down side of it was: what do you follow it with? But in a sense it was a no-brainer. You re going to have to write, to raise the stakes, to work a little harder. Because singing other people s songs has become almost second nature - it s almost like breathing, and I have fantastic, talented people to produce and play on the record. All I have to do is show up and sing. This time I knew I had to do work beforehand. Besides gathering songs, I had to write them myself. Then I could get to that point where all I had to do was watch them unfold in the studio.
From 96 on I was aware of what I needed to do , she continues, and I knew I needed to have some time to write, outside of the time I was spending touring Wrecking Ball. Ideas were coming, I was always jotting things down in a notebook, but I never really took time off when I was doing absolutely nothing else but writing.
Damn right she wasn t. In between her last two albums, she toured, recorded a live album with her band, Spyboy, worked with Willie Nelson on his Teatro CD, won a 9th Grammy for her Trio 11 with Linda Ronstadt and Dolly Parton, produced a Gram Parsons tribute album and collaborated with Linda Ronstadt on Western Wall.
Because all of those projects were collaborative projects, all the responsibility wasn t on my shoulders. I think I still kept a space for songwriting, and I still found periods of time to create a sacrosanct space in which I could try different things, follow different leads, and follow ideas I d kept on the back burner for quite a while. After I got into building those songwriting muscles, maybe it enabled me to follow them through.
Despite her total immersion in and emergence as a songwriter on Red Dirt Girl, Emmylou Harris finds that she doesn t quite slink into her new role as though it were an old cosy coat. Songwriter is still a title that doesn t sit comfortably on her shoulders.
It s still a very mysterious process, and it s still hard for me to talk as though I m a songwriter just because I happen to have written this album , she insists. I haven t been putting in the work day after day, or year after year that other artists whose body of work I have been able to draw from. I still feel like I haven t got my stripes I guess!
Being an Alabama native, and now a Nashville resident, does Harris feel her southern roots are getting stronger as she embraces the role of writer as well as singer?
I don t know the answer to that , she ventures, after a lengthy pause, that s still very subliminal, or as George W. Bush says, subliminable He doesn t have a real good command of language. I think it s probably very evident in Red Dirt Girl (the song) which has images that only southerners would know about like blue tic hound dogs and boiled peanuts, which don t really exist north of the Alabama line! But certainly those things become part of the poetry of your life, without even thinking about it.
Red Dirt Girl has its genesis in an interesting trail of events that loop around Hilary Swank, Nebraska and New Orleans.
Driving from Nashville to New Orleans, I noticed the sign for Meridien, Mississippi , Harris explains. And the song just came unbidden, where I started to think about a character called Lillian with a dog called Gideon. Then a couple of days later I went to see Boys Don t Cry, and I think the secondary story about those characters who were so trapped in their lives really struck me. Maybe it wasn t as dramatic as what Brandon Teena went through, but in its own way very poignant. It s hard to know how much that movie influenced the song, but it s inevitable that we re all influenced by books and films and so on.
Harris tribute to her late father, Bang The Drum Slowly has resonances that cross the American West and the Irish folk tradition seamlessly. Bang the drum slowly/Play the pipe lowly will cause bells to ring for anybody with even the remotest interest in folk music.
It s an old folk song , she explains, and certainly I ve absorbed so much music over the years that there s certain images that become almost like your bible for interpreters and folk singers. They re archetypal things. They re certain images and phrases which I ve allowed myself to almost shamelessly raid and fortunately I ve been able to get away with it! I guess everybody has done that in a way. It s all gumbo. I think that s what I ll tell people when they ask me what my music is like. It s all gumbo!

Country music seems to have more its share of independent-minded women in its midst, carving their own identities, free of the image-makers in pop music who mould and discard at will. Emmylou Harris admits to being nonplussed by the disposability factor.
Of course the whole thing with video is that they re youth dominated , she says. It s the same in country music. You re not going to see me or Lucinda (Williams) or even Loretta Lynn (even though she s recently made a video). I think it s a natural thing, but the older artists are going to be around. We ve got our audience and our constituencies, and we ve got staying power. We re never going to be accused of being flavour of the month. Then again, there are the exceptions like Tina Turner and Bonnie Raitt, who transcend all of that.
But I think there s always going to be an emphasis on youth, and while I think youth is great, it often doesn t have anything to say to anybody but the young. The true test is to mature and be able to speak to people as they get married, have kids, get divorced, lose their job. That s why there ll always be country music!
Harris own hero in this regard is a singer who has aged both gracefully and disgracefully, and is an icon across generations.
Bruce Springsteen has aged with his music and he s bringing to his music a sense of spirituality, commitment to community, family, but in a way that is just so rich. He s plumbing the depths of the human experience. He s got his finger on the pulse of so much that s happening. Even though he s this star , he s never lost his sense of the blue collar. I think he has an extraordinary gift. A lot of it has to do with just who he is.
At this point, Emmylou s manager interrupts to remind her of a photo shoot that s calling. She grimaces wanly at the prospect of donning the face for the lens.
Oh I guess I ve got to go and become her !
Harris longstanding political nous reveals a facet of her that s rarely up for view when she tours with her band. A long time social activist, she donates the proceeds of an annual concert to benefit the Second Harvest Food Bank, and is heavily involved in a rake of preservation issues including the Country Music Foundation. More recently she s lent her voice to the Campaign for a Landmine Free World. Amid the throes of a presidential campaign, what are her hopes for the November elections?
I ll tell ya, I m not real pleased with the campaign so far , she admits. I think the real important issue still is campaign finance reform, and I don t know if either one of the candidates is going to do much about that. I think it s an issue that s going to eat us alive if we don t do something about it. I think most voters are cynical and they don t believe that their votes mean anything, because as far as they re concerned, money can buy the presidency. That means that our highest national office is up for sale, and I don t think it should be that way. I haven t made up my mind who I m going to vote for yet though!

Emmylou Harris Red Dirt Girl is in the shops now.