Emmylou Harris – Pieces Of The Sky / Elite Hotel / Luxury Liner / Quarter Moon In A Ten Cent Town / Blue Kentucky Girl

In 1974 Emmylou Harris was still alarmingly close to being nobody. Her first album, 1968’s Gliding Bird, evaporated when Jubilee Records went out of business a few weeks after its release. (Apparently, this is a blessing.) Her singing partner, friend and mentor, Gram Parsons, had been dead about a year.

Parsons, of course, had taught her to listen to country music with fresh ears. Late-night picking parties after his death with the Seldom Scene, back home in Washington, D.C., seem further to have opened that door, to have given her some assurance that she understood how to phrase and sing country.

Still, she was a single mother, and nothing was certain when she settled into a ranch house in Los Angeles’ Coldwater Canyon with producer Brian Ahern, signed to Reprise by A&R executive Mary Martin (whose own career bears further study, somewhere), surrounded by musicians who had played with Elvis and everybody, and with whom she had slowly to build a rapport.

One more thing: Between the 1975 release of Pieces Of The Sky and 1979’s Blue Kentucky Girl — Harris’s first five proper albums, leaving out a Christmas title — the rest of the pop music world was in the throes of prog rock, jazz fusion, disco, urban cowboy, and the birth of punk.

So the first song of her first real record — not the first single, but the first thing one would drop a needle on if one were a critic or a DJ or the guy behind the counter at a good record shop — came from the pen of an unknown writer named Rodney Crowell.

Remember all that, and not the poise and elegance and surpassing grace with which Emmylou Harris has ever after trod the stage and approached the microphone. Remember that everything mattered and nothing was guaranteed, but there is no fear in her choices, none at all.

The first single, a very Nashville Sound recording of Billy Sherrill’s “Too Far Gone”, went only to #73 on the country charts. The second, a spirited duet with Herb Pedersen of the Louvin Brothers’ “If I Could Only Win Your Love”, went to #4, and the race was on.

But go back to that first track, “Bluebird Wine”, for we took our albums very seriously in 1975. The singer’s career hung almost in the balance, and nothing at all was certain. Or, maybe, after that track everything was possible, for it’s one hell of a song, and she doesn’t seem to miss many of its possibilities.

Her voice nestles comfortably amid the other instruments, clear and precise and filled with longing, no small amount of sass, and maybe more than a bit of Dolly Parton’s phrasing (the liner notes remind that Harris put some of Parton’s album covers on the hearth for inspiration during the sessions). She would be an ensemble player, first among equals. And she would be a country singer ever after. No mistaking any of that.

Harris today has developed a soft, high, breathy voice — an interesting transition for a singer who began with a slightly deeper, sometimes rougher voice. No, not quite a belter, but — particularly on the live tracks — one can tell she’d spent her time on rock stages.

That distinctive style — her voice, as a singer — isn’t quite in place throughout these first few albums, and so there are more varied approaches. It’s not far from being there, but she and Ahern were, after all, inventing something. That is, she was in the process of healing the gaping wound “Okie From Muskogee” opened between country and rock. Or, amid the ascendency of Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne and Warren Zevon, she made country (and country songwriting) approachably hip to a broader audience. Exactly, they say, what Parsons had hoped to achieve.

You can hear what she would become on songs such as “Before Believing”, soft and gentle with vibrato, and rich with feeling. And you can tell why she would succeed simply by working through the songwriting credits on these first five albums. Not without reason is Harris known as one of the finest songfinders to emerge after A.P. Carter.

It’s not a formula, but a guiding sensibility that leads her from “Boulder To Birmingham” (her own elegy to Parsons) to Merle Haggard’s “Bottle Let Me Down”, from Lennon & McCartney’s “For No One” to Parton’s “Coat Of Many Colors”. That sensibility has served her well ever after.

Each remastered reissue adds two bonus tracks; liner notes indicate Harris and Ahern cut twenty songs for each album, then drew upon that library for future releases, which does beg the question if there’s more in the archive. Pieces Of The Sky is supplemented by two welcome Dallas Frazier co-writes: “Hank And Lefty” (#39 for Stoney Edwards in 1973 under its full title, “Hank And Lefty Raised My Country Soul”) and “California Cottonfields” (which, sure enough, Haggard wisely cut in ’71).

Harris was a success when Elite Hotel was recorded, with the chart hits and press clippings to prove it. That, too, is a bit nerve-wracking, for few wish to slip back into obscurity after finding their audience. The follow-up is a careful album built of familiar components: the Nashville Sound reworking of Buck Owens’ “Together Again” (#1 in 1976), the stunning reading of Rodney Crowell’s “Till I Gain Control Again”, the sadly graceful Parsons/Chris Hillman tune “Sin City”, a live version of “Sweet Dreams” (another #1). Bonus cuts offer a Crowell duet on “You’re Running Wild” and an unexpectedly tough take, with the writer, on Jo-El Sonnier’s “Cajun Born”.

Everything after that comes easily, seems assured. The core band Ahern had assembled gels, adding and subtracting players who would become legends with startling ease. Harris and Ahern’s working (and personal) relationship flourishes; songwriters bring her their best work. Not surprisingly, the albums remain as strong today as they first were. In fact, front to back, they make an astonishing, almost blemish-free collection. Still.

The third release, Luxury Liner, is apparently Harris’ favorite. It marks the addition of Ricky Skaggs to her Hot Band, and the arrival of Dolly Parton, her inspiration from the Pieces sessions, on backing vocals. It also marks the single most evocative reading of Townes Van Zandt’s “Pancho & Lefty” on record, and a glorious version of the Townes/Etheridge “She.”

It is beautifully played, to be sure. But even Chuck Berry’s “(You Never Can Tell) C’est la Vie” goes off at near waltz tempo, and quite clearly the drama of discovery is now over.

Liner notes also repeat Harris’ belief that she was too involved in the mixing of Quarter Moon In A Ten Cent Town, and perhaps that explains the over-careful production. Regardless, it’s still among my favorites, and arguably the strongest collection of songs she’s ever recorded. Quarter Moon, remember, moves from the Susanna Clark/Carlene [Carter] Routh tune “Easy From Now On” to Delbert McClinton’s “Two More Bottles Of Wine” to Dolly Parton’s exquisite “To Daddy” to Jesse Winchester’s “My Songbird” to Crowell’s “Leaving Louisiana In The Broad Daylight”. Hard to top, that. (Might’ve been interesting to hear a remix, though.)

Blue Kentucky Girl was apparently a response to charges that Harris was really just a pop singer, and so hews more carefully to the country canon: Willie Nelson, Dallas Frazier, Leon Payne, the Louvins. With, of course, “Hickory Wind”, Jean Ritchie’s “Sorrow In The Wind”, and Crowell’s “Even Cowgirls Get The Blues”. And a version of “Rough And Rocky”, a song her old friends in the Seldom Scene would record with one of her duet partners, Jonathan Edwards, almost a decade later.

But by then the really hard work had been done.