Emmylou Harris

A Marine's daughter

Emmylou Harris was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on 2 April 1947. Her father, Walter Harris, was a Marine Corps officer and pilot who was shot down in Korea and held as a prisoner of war, and the family moved from base to base, to Cherry Point in North Carolina and then Quantico and Woodbridge in Virginia. She was valedictorian of her high school class, got a thirty-dollar Kay guitar from her grandfather for her sixteenth birthday, and won a drama scholarship to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she learned Dylan and Baez songs. In late 1967 she left for Greenwich Village.

She sang in folk clubs, made one album for the small Jubilee label, Gliding Bird (1970), credited to Emmy Lou Harris, and watched the label go bankrupt. A try at Nashville went nowhere, and she settled in the Washington, D.C., area, singing in clubs while raising a young daughter.

Gram Parsons

Around 1971 Chris Hillman and Gram Parsons heard her sing. Parsons brought her to Los Angeles to sing harmony on his first solo album, GP, and in early 1973 she toured with him and the Fallen Angels; their first date, she recalled, was in Boulder, Colorado, where the club was closed by an injunction and they ended up in a bar in Nederland and got fired after one night. The two voices together became one of the defining sounds of country rock. She said later that she had been on a downward spiral, that Parsons showed her the treasure in traditional country music, and that he was her teacher.

Parsons died at the Joshua Tree Inn on 19 September 1973, aged twenty-six. Grievous Angel, on which she sings throughout, came out the next year. Her grief went into Boulder to Birmingham, which she wrote with Bill Danoff and which became the emotional center of her first major-label album.

The Reprise years

Reprise signed her in 1975 and paired her with the Canadian producer Brian Ahern, who recorded in his own mobile studio, the Enactron Truck, and later became her second husband. Pieces of the Sky (1975), generally treated as her real debut, mixed Louvin Brothers and Merle Haggard songs with the Beatles and new writers like Rodney Crowell, and its single If I Could Only Win Your Love became her first big country hit. For her road band she hired Elvis Presley's guitarist James Burton and pianist Glen D. Hardin and insisted the session players tour with her: the Hot Band, which over the years also included Crowell and Ricky Skaggs.

Ahern produced every album through 1983, among them the number-one country albums Elite Hotel and Luxury Liner, and the bluegrass-leaning Roses in the Snow. She moved to Nashville in 1983, wrote her own concept album, The Ballad of Sally Rose (1985), with Paul Kennerley, and in 1987 made Trio with Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt, her best-selling record. In 1991 she formed the acoustic Nash Ramblers and recorded At the Ryman in the then-derelict Ryman Auditorium, helping to bring the old home of the Grand Ole Opry back to life.

Wrecking Ball and after

Wrecking Ball (1995), produced by Daniel Lanois with U2's Larry Mullen Jr. on drums, wrapped songs by Neil Young, Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams, Gillian Welch and Jimi Hendrix in Lanois's atmospheric sound, and won a Grammy. It made her an Americana figurehead for a new generation and introduced many listeners to Welch's Orphan Girl, which became one of her own most played songs. Red Dirt Girl (2000), her first album of mostly her own songs since Sally Rose, won another Grammy.

Later records include Stumble into Grace (2003), All I Intended to Be (2008, reunited with Ahern), Hard Bargain (2011), the duet albums Old Yellow Moon and The Traveling Kind with Rodney Crowell, and All the Roadrunning (2006) with Mark Knopfler, followed by the live Real Live Roadrunning. She founded the Concerts for a Landmine-Free World in 1999 and, after her dog Bonaparte died in 2004, the Bonaparte's Retreat dog rescue in Nashville. In 2026 she made a farewell tour of Europe, calling it her way of saying thank you.

Honors

She has won thirteen Grammys, including the Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018, and has had twenty-seven top-ten country singles. She was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2008, received the Polar Music Prize in 2015, and joined the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2025. Rolling Stone ranked her seventy-ninth among the greatest singers of all time. An all-star tribute concert in Washington in January 2015, with Lucinda Williams, Steve Earle, Alison Krauss, Sheryl Crow and Mavis Staples among others, closed with Boulder to Birmingham.