Angel of Country Pop

She has been described as an "angelic cowgirl." At times the phrase fits. Dressed in fringed shirt, jeans and high boots, working over a Merle Haggard favorite like Bottle Let Me Down, she can produce a brassy twang. But Emmylou Harris' emotional singing style owes more to melancholy Appalachian bluegrass than to western swing. Despite its range, her voice is most telling because of its feathery delicacy, an almost tentative dying fall capable of stirring deep emotions. "I would rock my soul in the bosom of Abraham," this evocative voice promises in her best song so far. "I would hold my life in his saving grace." As the melody begins to rise, she floats a light true soprano above the whining steel guitar: "I would walk all the way from Boulder to Birmingham if I thought I could see, I could see your face."

Harris, 28, has been singing professionally on the country-folk circuit for about ten years, most of the time for little more than $10 a night. But hers was the land of music most likely to be drowned out by the loud sound and often witless lyrics of the past decade. Lately the public has grown more easy with loneliness and love gone wrong as celebrated in country music. Now, with the release of her LP Pieces of the Sky (Reprise), Emmylou Harris seems about to swim into the rich mainstream of popular music. As Emmylou sums it up: "After all the auditions in plush New York offices for men wearing sunglasses, all of a sudden the music I have always done is becoming accepted."

Emmylou is the daughter of a career Marine family. She grew up in Virginia, worked hard at school and was considered a "real prig." Says she: "High schools are real hip now, but there was no counterculture in Woodbridge, Va. in 1963. You were either a homecoming queen or a real weirdo. I was a 16-year-old Wasp wanting to quit school and become Woody Guthrie." She entered the University of North Carolina in 1965 on a dramatic scholarship. "It was a time when the golden girls got married to med students," she recalls. More fearful of regimentation than impelled by ambition, she began singing in local bars. She drifted out of college and eventually on to New York's Greenwich Village and Nashville. She was married, had a child, got divorced and returned home to Maryland, to live with her parents and raise her daughter. She was singing local dates there when, in 1971, she met singer-guitarist Gram Parsons.

Hint of Passion. At 25, Parsons was already a star of longhair country, who was stretching folk material across thudding rock rhythms. Emmylou had a gift for penetrating to the heart of a lyric. Parsons taught her to sing honky-tonk ballads like his Sin City, and soon invited her to Los Angeles to do back-up harmonies for his albums (GP and Grievous Angel). When Parsons died in 1973, she was personally and professionally devastated. "Gram turned me on to root country, to George Jones with his East Texas twang," she says. "I still try to learn Gram's songs and copy his phrasing." Parsons' musical vision did not produce superhits. Though her records only hint at the kind of passion she sometimes shows in performance, Emmylou seems bound to do so.

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