Boulder to Birmingham

Harris wrote Boulder to Birmingham with Bill Danoff, who had co-written Take Me Home, Country Roads, after Gram Parsons died in September 1973. She has said it just fell into her lap, and that words can help you express something you otherwise cannot. The two places are her own: Birmingham is where she was born, and Boulder was the first stop on the road with Parsons, always a special place for her, and the alliteration helped. The lyric moves through a burning canyon and the trucks on Route 95, a singer on a bus who cannot outrun her loss.

It is the fourth track on Pieces of the Sky, recorded with Herb Pedersen on twelve-string, James Burton on electric guitar, Ben Keith on pedal steel and Ron Tutt on drums, arranged by Nick DeCaro and produced by Brian Ahern. It was not a chart hit, but Rolling Stone calls it her signature song and placed it among the two hundred greatest country songs in 2024.

Afterlife

It was covered almost at once: by the Walker Brothers in 1975, and in 1976 by Danoff's own Starland Vocal Band, by Dolly Parton, by Joan Baez and by the Hollies, whose version reached ten in New Zealand. Later versions include The Fray, with Harris singing, the Wailin' Jennys and Jessie Buckley in the film Wild Rose. Harris has sung it more than two hundred times, from Ebbets Field in Denver in June 1975 to her 2026 tour, and it closed the 2015 all-star tribute concert in her honor.

The hypersongs web holds three uploads: the 1975 studio recording in its 2003 remaster, the same recording in a fan lyric video of photographs of Parsons, and the 2006 live duet with Mark Knopfler from Real Live Roadrunning.