THE READING ROOM: Geoffrey Himes Posits The Opposite of Outlaw Country in New Book ‘In-Law Country’

What do Brian Ahern, Emmylou Harris, Rodney Crowell, Ricky Skaggs, Rosanne Cash, and Guy and Susanna Clark have in common? What unites them musically, or at least brings them together for songwriting rounds and guitar pulls and trading places in one another’s bands? What was it is about the years from 1975-1985 that helped produce a new sound in country music, producing songs that looked at marriage, divorce, sexuality, family, and community differently than the songs of Patsy Cline or Kitty Wells or Hank Williams looked at those same topics?

According to music historian and critic Geoffrey Himes, in his richly detailed and eloquent new book In-Law Country: How Emmylou Harris, Rosanne Cash, and Their Circle Fashioned a New Kind of Country Music, 1968-1985, this group of singers, musicians, and songwriters, “integrated some of the finest singing, songwriting, and picking of that era into a package that was enhanced by a mainstream country audience — and a larger audience beyond.”

Himes said in a recent interview about the book, “I was fascinated by this group of people who were writing and recording these smart, ambitious songs and succeeding with them in country music.” He continued, “One of the reasons this group got overlooked is that it didn’t have a catchy name.”

Taking his cue from the Outlaw Country which slightly preceded them, and with whom they share a “rebellious, transformational spirit,” he wrote in his book, Himes named the movement In-Law Country because of the quality of the music and, he said in the interview, “they married each other, divorced each other, played in each other’s bands.”

In both the book and the interview, Himes provided some of the defining features of the movement and the music. “Between 1975 and 1989,” Himes wrote, “a community that revolved around Emmylou Harris was able to take country traditions that had gone out of style on country radio, blend them with rock and folk innovations that had never been accepted by that format, and turn them into hits.”

Himes observed in the interview that, “Country music has traditionally been a marriage music — adults trying to pay bills and to stay together; it’s guitar music and small town music.” The In-Laws, he wrote in his book, composed songs that were all about “making long-term relationships work in the new world of post-1960 America. This was marriage music about a new kind of marriage where the woman was not a subservient sidekick but an equal partner someone with he own ambitions, her own ideas, her own needs…Not only was marriage the subject of the songs, but the artists were living out these new two-career marriages in public and creating the songs alongside their spouses in tandem with collaborators in similar marriages.”

In 1982, Rosanne Cash reflected on this need for country music to evolve as musicians and culture evolved: “Country music has to change when adult relationships change, and they are changing.”

According to Himes, “It was Cash’s ability to convey both romantic need and self-reliant firmness that made her the perfect singer for this new music. For the wives in her songs are in a tricky position; they must argue with their husbands to get what they need, but the husband is not the enemy; he is the loved one.” He analyzed her hit “Blue Moon with Heartache” to illustrate that the kind of marriage negotiation in the song is “presented in these shades of gray [and] is quite different from older country songs where the underlying morality was always black-and-white, either-or, God and the devil.”

While the singers and songwriters might have been at the center of the In-Law country movement, the instrumentalists providing the music also played a role in this emerging sound. Himes devotes an entire chapter to guitarist Clarence White: “No instrumentalist had a more profound effect on In-Law Country than Clarence White,” he wrote. White “established the guitar as a lead instrument not with quickness but with tone and phrasing. The notes came out full-bodied and warm and were allowed to breathe. His flatpicking style alternated between high and low notes, thus providing a top and bottom to his sound and avoiding the shrillness of guitarists who tarry too long among the higher frets…He always played enough of the melody to keep it fresh in your mind even as he varied it.”

According to Himes, Harris launched the In-Law Country movement, in part because of her relationship with Gram Parsons and his introducing her to traditional country music. As he said, “Emmylou is a gorgeous singer with exquisite taste in songs. She and Brian Ahern created a sound on Harris’ early albums that was completely different from the California country rock and roll of The Byrds and Flying Burrito Brothers. He brought a clarity to those albums, and the songs worked on country radio in ways that the looser rock and roll sound did not. Harris was also influential because a lot of major figures in In-Law Country such as Ricky Skaggs and Rodney Crowell got their feet wet playing in Emmy’s bands, so they were schooled in that sound.”

In his book, Himes observes that after Parsons’ death, Harris (as Parson’s duet partner) was able to pull off the successful fusion of country and rock that he had been unable to do. “As a good student with the wild side, she had the discipline; as a former folk singer who warbled about freedom, she had the idealism; As the former theater student, she had the grasp of character and storytelling. As Parsons’s singing partner, she had the grounding to country music’s past. She had the looks. She had the voice. Perhaps nobody but Emmylou Harris could have launched the In-Law country movement.”

As Himes said, “Emmylou Harris drew from both country music history and some of the best country songwriters of her generation (Crowell, Haggard). It proved that country music was connected to the past but not trapped inside it.”

In-Law Country is arranged chronologically, with each chapter taking its title from a song associated with various members of the In-Law Country movement (such as “Till I Gain Control Again” or “Seven Year Ache” or “Ballad of Sally Rose”). Himes’ book contains multiple facets that illuminate the gem-like quality of the music of the In-Law Country movement, and it repays multiple readings. And as he said in the interview, he hopes that readers will “go back and listen to the music, and pay attention to the sound as much as to the songwriting.”

In-Law Country provides an in-depth look into this overlooked movement and will continue to provide productive conversation about country music history.

In-Law Country: How Emmylou Harris, Rosanne Cash, and Their Circle Fashioned a New Kind of Country Music, 1968-1985 was published on December 10, 2024 via CMF Press/University of Illinois Press.