By 1990, Emmylou Harris had been working the road for 15 years, ever since her groundbreaking albums Pieces of the Sky and Elite Hotel were both released in 1975. Over that time, she had released 25 singles that reached the top 15 of Billboard’s country charts — including five that went to No. 1. But she’d only had one top-10 single since 1984, and her voice was showing the wear of singing every night over The Hot Band, even if it was one of the best country-rock groups ever assembled.
“I was riding that pony a bit hard,” Harris says over the phone from her longtime home in Nashville. “My voice was getting worn down, and my spirit was getting worn too. I was whining to my friend John Starling, ‘I need to take a year off.’ And John said, ‘Sam Bush has just left the New Grass Revival. Why don’t you give him a call?’ And suddenly it made sense to ‘go back to bluegrass school,’ as Chris Hillman says.”
So she dissolved The Hot Band and formed an all-acoustic string band. Bush was on mandolin and fiddle. Harris’ fellow singer-songwriter Carl Jackson recommended the young singer-guitarist Jon Randall Stewart. She knew dobro player Al Perkins from her sessions with Gram Parsons. And Roy Huskey Jr. was, she says, “one of the greatest acoustic bass players of all time.” It resembled a bluegrass band, but Harris insisted on having a drummer. She had come to rely on that groove and wasn’t willing to give it up, so Larry Atamanuik sat behind a minimalist kit. Harris called her new band The Nash Ramblers.
Now there’s a new album capturing that group at the height of its powers: Ramble in Music City: The Lost Concert. The 23 songs were recorded during the band’s hometown debut at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center on Sept. 28, 1990, and then forgotten for 30 years. But when music archivist James Austin unearthed the tapes and played them for Harris, she knew they had to be released.
“None of us remembered that we’d recorded that show,” she admits. “That’s why I was so amazed when I heard it, because not a single note was out of place. I felt I owed it to that particular performance to put it out. What happened, I think, was this: All the songs on Ramble in Music City were material I’d already released. For my next album, we decided to work up all new songs for what became Live at the Ryman, like I had with The Hot Band on Last Date.”
To encounter songs such as “Beneath Still Waters,” “Blue Kentucky Girl,” “Leaving Louisiana in the Broad Daylight” and “Boulder to Birmingham” in their new string-band arrangements was to hear them afresh. “It was a way to make the old material new,” Harris says, “to give it a new coat of paint. I was worried. Would the songs have the same emotional impact? I shouldn’t have worried.”
No, she shouldn’t have, for bluegrass had been a prominent thread throughout her career. She started out as a Joan Baez-like folk singer, but when she was a single mom living in Maryland, she befriended Starling and the rest of his newgrass band The Seldom Scene. That grounding in bluegrass helped her make the transition from folk to country when she started working with Parsons in the early 1970s. After Parsons died and Harris signed with Reprise, her new producer Brian Ahern, whom she married a few years later, made a point of integrating mandolin, fiddle and banjo into the country-rock arrangements.
“Brian had a sixth sense about how to put things together,” she says of her now-ex-husband. “He knew I had come from a folk background and that there was still a folk element in my voice. He knew how to use acoustic instruments to create emotion; he wasn’t just throwing them in there. Just because the marriage didn’t work out doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate him. We have grandchildren together, and I always try to shine a light on his contributions.”
Harris’ first nine nationally distributed albums — including her two bluegrass albums from 1979 and 1980 but not counting her better-off-forgotten 1969 small-label debut — were produced by Ahern when the couple was still living in Los Angeles, ground zero for Parsons-inspired country rock. As the marriage fell apart, though, Harris decided to follow her friends Rodney Crowell, Rosanne Cash, Guy Clark, Emory Gordy and Hank DeVito and move from L.A. to Nashville in 1983.
“It was like Paris in the ’20s,” she says of her new town in those days. “A creative hub. It was the birth of Americana before the term even existed. There was a real songwriting thing going on here: part folk, part country, part rock.” She put down roots in the city, and when it came time to record an album of new material with The Nash Ramblers, she decided to record it live at the Ryman.
“The Ryman was about to be torn down,” she recalls. “There were only a couple of funky dressing rooms, and you couldn’t sit in the gallery because it was considered unsafe. We could only invite 200 people for each of the three shows we recorded, because they could only sit downstairs. No one had been doing any music there, but I got permission. I was so focused on making the record that I didn’t realize the importance of doing it there. But suddenly people got interested in the Ryman again, and they decided not to tear it down. They said, ‘Maybe we can renovate the old girl.’ ”
Recorded April 30 through May 2, 1991, the Live at the Ryman album was such a sensation that everyone forgot about the 1990 tape from TPAC. Now that the earlier recording has finally seen the light of day, we are reminded of the crucial role of the male harmony singer in Harris’ music. It all began with Parsons, of course, but an unknown Rodney Crowell was recruited for that job on the first four Harris-Ahern albums. Crowell was succeeded by Ricky Skaggs, Barry Tashian and Buddy Miller, among others.
“I discovered my voice by singing harmonies with Gram,” Harris explains. “That became a launching pad for everything. Rodney came in and filled that role in making the first record. It helped me a lot to have that voice to cling to. I’m not an educated musician; I don’t know what the baritone part is. Instead I think of harmony as an alternate melody that combines with the other voice to create a third voice.”
In The Nash Ramblers, that job was given to Jon Randall Stewart, who now performs as Jon Randall. (He joined Miranda Lambert and Jack Ingram on the recent collaborative LP The Marfa Tapes and has a self-titled LP of his own due Oct. 1.) The close-harmony chemistry between Harris and Randall is most obvious on their duets on Townes Van Zandt’s “If I Needed You,” with Randall taking Don Williams’ part from the original single, and The Carter Family’s “Hello Stranger.”
“Jon has a beautiful tone,” Harris points out, “and he can sing really high without losing that quality. A lot of the stuff we did in The Nash Ramblers was trios, with Sam singing the slightly lower part. With any bluegrass band, it’s all about trios — about that high, lonesome sound created by Bill Monroe and the Stanley Brothers. The Stanleys are the Rolling Stones of bluegrass; they have such a washed-in-the-blood sound. Ralph is almost scary, as if his voice were carved out of rock.”
When we talked, Harris was still mourning the death of Don Everly. The Everly Brothers were the culmination of the “brother duos” in country music: The Louvin Brothers, The Delmore Brothers, The Blue Sky Boys. But Don’s driving rhythm guitar helped transform that legacy into the rock ’n’ roll era and thus prepared the way for those Everly Brothers fans Simon & Garfunkel.
It’s no coincidence that Ramble in Music City includes a cover of Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Boxer.” Nor is it any accident that the peak of Harris’ all-too-brief partnership with Parsons was their version of the Everlys’ “Love Hurts.” Parsons was ostensibly the lead singer, but their voices melded so well that it was hard to hear where one started and the other ended.
“It doesn’t make a difference who’s the ‘lead singer,’ ” Harris says. “It’s all about creating that third voice. You start with an emotion, but it turns into something physical. Especially in duet singing, it’s intuitive; you’re free to move around. The lead voice is defining something that seems to work, and you move around that. It’s like you’re dancing together. Harmony singing is Ginger Rogers following Fred Astaire, but she’s doing everything backward in high heels.”
