MEDIA & THE ARTS
Redemption Songs
Emmylou Harris and the moral center of American music
BY ERIK REECE
On A bEAuTIful SuMMER nIgHT,
Emmylou Harris is taking the stage at the
Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, and it is
quite a thing to see. In black cowboy boots
and flowing black raiment, she lets the applause die down, then eases straight into a
song about a woman dressed in black, who
aims to shake the devil o= her back — one
of these days. I’ve been listening to Emmylou Harris sing “One of These Days”
for going on thirty years, ever since I first
dropped a needle on her record Elite Hotel
and well, you know, fell in love.
I bought almost every Emmylou Harris record after Elite Hotel, and there have
been a lot of them. What all those years
of listening taught me is this: if you are
looking for the moral center of American
music, you can always find it pretty close
to wherever Emmylou Harris happens
to be standing. I’m speaking of integrity
here, and let’s face it, most of what passes
for country music these days is the sorriest
nonsense to ever come from a car stereo.
Over a long career, Emmylou Harris has
always and only recorded the best songs by
the best songwriters in the folk-country-
bluegrass tradition. Tonight, the last line of
this first song — “There’s gonna be peace of
mind for me, one of these days”—carries
a new resonance because Emmylou Harris,
along with the Natural Resources Defense
Council, has organized this Music Saves
Mountains concert to call attention to the
mountaintop removal strip mining that is
decimating southern Appalachia.
mandolin, Alison Brown on banjo, Buddy
Miller on guitar, among others. Over the
next three hours, they all wove in and out
of various ensembles, performing some of
the region’s greatest, and inevitably sad-dest, songs.
After rendering a characteristically sad
and beautiful version of Utah Phillips’s
“Green Rolling Hills of West Virginia,”
Ms. Harris said this song about homesickness and displacement has taken on a
new meaning for her since she first heard
Robert Kennedy Jr. speak about the menace of mountaintop removal, which has
decapitated over five hundred peaks and
poisoned thousands of miles of streams
