Emmylou Harris tells Terry Gross about learning to sing by harmonizing

When you sing harmony you’re not thinking about yourself. You’re just paying attention to the other voice and that other melody and it also requires — I’m using this word “restraint” again — but I think that’s a really important part of country music and I think as a singer you must ultimately respect the melody first and then you can go on from there, but it just seemed like I concentrated on the words, the lyrics, the melody and you get outside of yourself somehow and you just enter a different place.

Video of Emmylou Harris and Barry Tashian dueting on the Townes Van Zandt song “If I Needed You.”

Emmylou Harris on Patti Scialfa and her song “Spanish Dancer”:

I became a fan of Patti Scialfa’s album that this song is from — it’s called Rumble Doll and I believe it might be as old as 20 years. The album just absolutely floored me. Patti’s voice. Not all great harmony singers — which she is — are good solo singers, but she definitely is. She is an exquisite writer. She writes about the female heart, the poetry of being female in a way that it just — every singer-songwriter, female artist that I know loves this record. It never got the attention it should have. I suppose it will always be overshadowed because she’s, you know, Bruce Springsteen’s wife, but it doesn’t take away from the art, her artistry.

Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell are on the show tomorrow talking about their new album Old Yellow Moon. I just listened to the interview and, well, I laughed and I cried. They’re both just so smart and talented and down-to-earth. I’ll just give the short list here of subjects discussed: Covering a song already covered by George Jones (interview here), Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell, having nice parents, the nature of harmony and duets, Gram Parsons, the Greenwich Village folk scene after its heyday, the fruits of long friendships, love, loss, divorce, and the Louvin Brothers.

Harris and Crowell have been friends and collaborators since they met in 1974. Above, is a video (circa the early 1980s I’m guessing, based on the perm) of the two of them singing the classic Louvin Brothers song “If I Could Only Win You Love.”

Here’s an interview with Charlie Louvin from 2010.

Fangirl dispatch from the office here: Terry just interviewed country music legends Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell about their new album Old Yellow Moon. The interview will air sometime next week. Harris and Crowell have been working together since the 1970s when Crowell joined Harris’s Hot Band and Terry has interviewed him before (see here), but this is the first time Terry has interviewed Harris. Which makes this very exciting.

Crowell co-wrote one of my top five favorite songs — “Leaving Louisiana In the Broad Daylight” — and Harris does my favorite version of it on her 1978 album Quarter Moon in A Ten Cent Town.

It’s just an ordinary story about the way things go

Round and around nobody knows

But the highway goes on forever

There ain’t no way to stop the water.

That, in my opinion, is some good songwriting.

Quarter Moon… has a bunch of good songs on it, really.

Mary Karr, known more for prize-winning memoirs such as The Liars Cluband Lit than for her excellent poetry, has taken a high-profile risk that’s paid off. Teaming with Rodney Crowell, who once name-checked her in a song, Karr has crafted a series of tunes that, while in the country tradition, convey a lot of Karr’s own obsessions with family. Not just songs about fathers and mothers and siblings, but memories of parents and siblings, and how memory and maturity alter the sense of one’s own history.

vrac-musique:

Rodney Crowell - I Walk the Line

Singing with your famous father-in-law is something not everyone can do when remaking this song…

Monday: Rodney Crowell.

‘He said, ‘Now, look, you can be a star or you can be an artist. You can be an artist and then become a star, but I don’t think it works the other way around. But they’re both okay. Pick one and get good at it.

— Country music singer-songwriter Rodney Crowell on the best advice songwriter Guy Clark ever gave him. Rodney Crowell’s memoir Chinaberry Dreams is about his rough-and-tumble childhood in East Texas. He performs songs based on that memoir on today’s Fresh Air.

Rodney Crowell (by Al Breitenbach)

Tomorrow’s guest, Rodney Crowell, performing “Sex and Gasoline”

(Source: youtube.com)