It’s a big news week in the No Depression world! The Kinks are reuniting, Irma Thomas was named the honoree for the Americana Music Association’s 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award for Performance, and Trio are receiving a star on Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Trio — that’s Emmylou Harris, Dolly Parton, and Linda Ronstadt — put out two albums: Trio in 1987, which sold over 4 million copies, and Trio II in 1999. The Complete Trio Collection was released by Rhino Records in 2016.
As recounted in an oral history of Trio that ran in the Fall 2017 “Foremothers” issue of No Depression’s print journal, Harris, Parton, and Ronstadt were fans of each other’s music before they met in 1971. They recorded some songs together in the mid-’70s, with some of those songs finding homes on the individual artists’ solo albums over the next several years.
“They all really admired each other, and it wasn’t contrived,” Warner Bros. publicist Bob Merlis recalled for No Depression. “Sometimes, somebody guests on an album and it gets your attention, but that’s about it. But this wasn’t a marketing concept. It was something that three artists of equivalent stature decided that they wanted to do because they really liked each other, and it worked because they could hear it. You could hear their mutual respect. All three of them were really perfectionists, and they all did great work. Together, they did even greater work.”
The star for Trio will be Parton’s second on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. A date for Trio’s star plaque installation ceremony has not yet been announced. Others from the music industry receiving stars from the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce in 2019 are Michael Bublé, Cypress Hill, the Lettermen, Faith Hill, Tommy Mottola, P!nk, Teddy Riley, and Jackie Wilson.
A limited number of copies of our Fall 2017 “Foremothers” journal, with the complete oral history of Trio, are available here.
