Emmylou Harris: Red Dirt Girl
(Nonesuch 79616-2. Malcolm Burn, prod., eng. AAD. TT:
55:58)
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 Five years
after her watershed Wrecking Ball, Emmylou Harris returns with a new studio album,
her first on Nonesuch, best-known as a classical label. It fits -- if Ms. Harris isn't an
American classic, I don't know who is. Red Dirt Girl is as serious as popular music
gets -- it doesn't look so much toward Elvis as it does toward Flannery O'Connor. Its
songs, like O'Connor's stories, are populated with characters who are desperate for some
form of salvation from ordinary lives filled with pain and suffering.
Pain and loss are recurrent themes on Red Dirt Girl.
"The Pearl" speaks of pain as vital to the creation of beauty -- using the
metaphor of the oyster and the pearl -- but its hopeful conclusion is far less convincing
than its description of unfulfilled longing: "We are aging soldiers in an ancient war
/ Seeking out some half-remembered shore / We drink our fill and thirst for more / Asking,
'If there's no heaven, what is this hunger for?' / Our path is worn, our feet poorly shod
/ We lift our prayer against the odds / And fear the silence is the voice of God."
On "Bang the Drum Slowly," she addresses her
recently deceased father: "I meant to ask you how to fix the car / I always meant to
ask you about the war / And what you saw across a bridge too far / Did it leave a scar? .
. . I meant to ask you how to plow that field / I meant to bring you water from the well /
And be beside you when you fell / Could you tell?" But she knows she's just talking
to herself; the song's chorus affirms the finality of the grave: "Bang the drum
slowly, play the fife lowly / To dust be returning, from dust we begin / Bang the drum
slowly, I'll speak of things holy / Above and below me, world without end."
And yet, even though the entire disc is suffused with a
sense of melancholy, it's not a downer. Part of this is surely due to its sonic landscape,
which bears a mild resemblance to Daniel Lanois' production of Wrecking Ball. Red
Dirt Girl was produced and engineered by Malcolm Burn, who collaborated with Lanois on
the earlier disc, but while he retains that record's open, layered soundscape and deep
bass foundation, his version of it is airier and sunnier. Burn makes use of ringing
guitars and soaring harmony voices to cushion Harris' startlingly direct voice.
That voice is another reason why the album isn't
depressing. There's nothing else like it in popular music. Ms. Harris' rich contralto,
like fine Bourbon whiskey, has aged exceptionally well -- it's sweet and dark and
intensely intoxicating. It's not the same instrument she had thirty years ago, but she's
always been one of the most intelligent singers around, and she continues to grow and
change as an interpreter.
On Red Dirt Girl, she's interpreting a different
songwriter -- herself. While she has written a song or two on several of her albums, she
has only written an entire album's worth of material once before, on The Ballad of
Sally Rose, an album that, fairly or not, is generally ranked among her weakest. It
deserves better, in my opinion, but there can be no doubt of the quality of the material
here.
Of course, Ms. Harris has always been a canny judge of
songs and songwriters, so it should come as scant surprise that she is such an
accomplished writer herself. She writes simply and directly, and her songs are filled with
keenly observed details that make her stories ring true.
The disc ends with Harris' "Boy From Tupelo," a
song about missed opportunities that invokes the shade of Elvis, the loser-king of wasted
promise. Knowing her history, it's impossible not to imagine that Harris is directly
addressing Gram Parsons -- thirty years on, she still feels his loss and aches at the
pointlessness of his death: ". . . it's a shame and it's a sin / Everything I coulda
been to you / Your last chance Texaco / The sweetheart of your rodeo / A Juliet to your
Romeo / The border you cross into Mexico / I'll never understand why or how / oh, but baby
it's too late now / Just ask the boy from Tupelo / He's the King and he oughta know."
...Wes Phillips
wes@onhifi.com
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