Road Trip Music in Alabama: bluegrass, faith, & architecture

Fishing boats on Mobile bay, the home of the Crimson Tide in Tuscaloosa. rocket scientists in Huntsville, farmers in the wiregrass, civil rights history and civil war history: all this is Alabama. The state has a top country group as namesake, as well as a classic rock song. Here is a soundtrack featuring two artists with Alabama in their personal histories, Claire Lynch and Emmylou Harris.




Claire Lynch’s base is in bluegrass -- she’s been nominated for Grammys and won a number of top bluegrass awards for her work -- but it is a solid starting point, not a limit, for her musical taste and imagination. Her most recent recording, Whatcha Gonna Do, makes that point clearly. The range of her art includes traditional bluegrass, progressive bluegrass, a couple of contemporary faith based songs, some swing, and a touch of country. Lynch chooses from all these genres and writes her own material as well. Lynch lived for some years in north Alabama, and among other things wrote a really nice homecoming from the road song called Hills Of Alabam which country star Kathy Mattea recorded some years back. Whatcha Gonna Do makes a fine companion for the winding roads of Alabama, but you won’t go wrong with any of Claire Lynch’s recordings.


The same could be said of Emmylou Harris. Through her career as a pioneer of Americana music and contemporary folk, Harris has been most associated with California and with Nashville. She was born in Birmingham, though, and that deep south background comes through in her work. Her album Red Dirt Girl is anchored in thoughts of Alabama, both in songs she’s written, and songs she’s covered. Another fine Alabama road trip companion from Harris is her often overlooked recording of gospel songs and hymns, Angel Band














While you are thinking about or traveling though Alabama, you may also like to listen to An Architecture of Decency, a podcast from Speaking of Faith. It tells about an innovative project at Auburn University which involves love, compassion, architecture, and rural Alabama. Close to the end of the program, they play a bit of Harris's song Red Dirt Girl, too, quite an inspired connection of narrative and lyric.




photograph of Emmylou Harris on left copyright Kerry Dexter

you may also wish to see
Music Road: Claire Lynch: Crowd Favorites
Music Road: Music Road trip in West Virginia
Emmylou Harris: Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town
more music from the road trip


This is part of The Great American Road Trip, in which I originally partnered up with A Traveler’s Library to add musical ideas to the book and film suggestions for journeys through the regions of the United States which you’d find there. The Library is closed now, but I think you will still find the journeys through music interesting.
For more about the road trip (and a look at some great road songs) see Great American Road Trip: Music begins

-->Your support for Music Road is welcome and needed. If you are able to chip in, here is a way to do that, through PayPal. Note that you do not have to have a PayPal account to do this. Thank you.

Mary Black & Emmylou Harris on a hillside journey

The Appalachian mountains have always reminded me of the mountains in Donegal, and Derry, and Cooley, and those Irish hills have reminded me of Appalachian landscapes as well. Mary Black, from Ireland, and Emmylou Harris, from the United States, sing The Green Rolling Hills of West Virginia. Take a listen.






In a few weeks, the Great American Road Trip will get to West Virginia, where there will be more powerful music of the hills to share with you.

There's also more music ahead here along the music road, from Ireland, and from America, and from places where they intersect. Stay with us.

you may also wish to see

Music Road: Reflections with Mary Black
Music Road: now playing: Emmylou Harris: Songbird: disc three
Music Road: Altan: 25th Anniversary Collection
Music Road's Irish music store at Amazon

-->Your support for Music Road is welcome and needed. If you are able to chip in, here is a way to do that, through PayPal. Note that you do not have to have a PayPal account to do this. Thank you.

Favorite Love Songs: Tuning Up for Valentine's Day

As it’s coming up on Valentine’s Day, that has me thinking about love songs. My favorite ones include






from Kathy Mattea
Goin' Gone

Untold Stories
Asking Us to Dance


from Cathie Ryan
The Farthest Wave

What's Closest to the Heart

from Carrie Newcomer
Tornado Alley

Only One Shoe

Hold On

From Tish Hinojosa
Amanacer
Everything You Wish

from Eddi Reader
Wild Mountainside


from Danu
Follow On

from Emmylou Harris
Someone Like You

from Maura O’Connell
Blessing



What they have in common, I think, is recognition that deep true love includes the hard stuff as well as the joy, and that part of the gift of love is helping us live with and through the humanness of all that. I’m not sure the artists who wrote or who sing all of these necessarily thought of them as love songs, either, but for me they work that way. See what you think, and please share some of your favorites by leaving a comment if you’d like.

Emmylou Harris chosen to join Country Music Hall of Fame

It was announced today that Emmylou Harris, along with Tom T. Hall, Pop Stoneman, and the Statler Brothers, will be the newest members of the Country Music Hall of Fame. Here's what Harris had to say about that in a press release from the Hall. and below that, a look back at a post on the recent box set release Songbird.


Tom T. Hall said that induction is almost a spiritual experience. Has it been for you as well?

It will now. It's still got to sink in a little bit. There's that aspect of it, where you feel honored. What an amazing thing it is to be a part of that tradition, especially for somebody who didn't come to it naturally. I wasn't raised in Country Music, even though I'm from the South. We moved around a lot, and music wasn't a big part of my life until I discovered folk music. That's where my musical passion was until I started working with Gram [Parsons], and then I became this almost obnoxious convert.

Everything about Country Music, there is a certain reverence, so I would use that word as well as what he said, "spiritual." There's a reverence about the music because to me it's not just music that was played a long time ago. The good stuff is always resonant. For me, it always fuels my passion for Country Music moving forward, obviously not trying to just recreate what the early artists did. But you're infused with it, and you go on to hopefully add something to it.

How do you feel about being part of this Class of '08, with all that it reflects about Country Music?

Oh, well, it's great. Of course, I never met Pop Stoneman, but he's a part of that education for me. Also, the D.C. area, there's that connection, even though we were there at different times.

I was telling the Statlers that in that arrogant period of my youth, when I disdained Country Music, my brother was a huge Country Music fan way before it was cool in certain circles. I loved the Statler Brothers in spite of myself. You can't but smile when you hear "counting flowers on the wall."

And, of course, Tom T. Yes, you had the songwriting of Bob Dylan, which infused me and still does. But Tom T., cutting to the chase with simplicity of lyrics and storytelling that goes back to folk and the best of Country. So, I'm a huge fan of Tom T. Hall. When the original Hot Band was out, our motto was: "Faster Horses!" Rodney and I used to warm up with "Negatory Romance." And now, of course, Buddy Miller has recorded "That's How I Got to Memphis" with Solomon Burke. It's great to be a part of this class.




Songbird

Rodney Crowell, George Jones, Mark Knopfler, Patty Griffin, Linda Ronstadt, and John Starling are duet partners who show up with Harris here. It’s a fitting range of voices and connections for the adventurous singer, who is known to love to sing harmonies and to look for newer writers and singers, which both Crowell and Griffin were when first she knew them. Her harmony work doesn’t show up much here, by Harris’ choice: she felt it was important to include material on the project where her voice was the leading one. Makes these collaborations all the more interesting, both in themselves and in the reminders of other collaborative projects in which she’s participated.

Six of the seventeen cuts on this disc see their first release here, and there’s a live version of The Pearl, as well. Highway of Heartache and Snowin’ on the Raton, and First in Line, the duet with Starling, are three of the unreleased tracks.

Harris takes a bluegrass/country turn with Randy Scruggs and Iris DeMent on Wildwood Flower, and her song with George Jones, Here We Are, marked the first time she’d recorded with a singer who’d been a longtime inspiration for her own work. The last song of this seventy eight track trip finds Harris again with her friends Ronstadt and Parton, singing When We’re Gone, Long, Gone.

The ten cuts on the dvd span Harris’performing career from Together Again with the Hot Band through Love Hurts with Elvis Costello. I Ain’t Living Long Like This, with Spyboy, is especially notable. It’d have been nice to see some of Harris’ Austin City Limits performances, or her gigs at Merlefest; with nine cuts to span forty years, what is there are varied choices. The tenth video is Harris making a plea for a cause she believes in strongly, animal rescue.

She believes strongly in music, too. “The possibility of one song gets me out of bed in the morning,” she says.

All things considered, it’s as interesting see what Harris chose to include in this package as it is to hear the music.

more about Songbird There's a series of posts about the music on Songbird. Follow the links at the bottom of each post to see the others, as well as related material.

-->Your support for Music Road is welcome and needed. If you are able to chip in, here is a way to do that, through PayPal. Note that you do not have to have a PayPal account to do this. Thank you.

now playing: Emmylou Harris: Songbird: disc four and the dvd

Songbird

Rodney Crowell, George Jones, Mark Knopfler, Patty Griffin, Linda Ronstadt, and John Starling are duet partners who show up with Harris here. It’s a fitting range of voices and connections for the adventurous singer, who is known to love to sing harmonies and to look for newer writers and singers, which both Crowell and Griffin were when first she knew them. Her harmony work doesn’t show up much here, by Harris’ choice: she felt it was important to include material on the project where her voice was the leading one. Makes these collaborations all the more interesting, both in themselves and in the reminders of other collaborative projects in which she’s participated.

Six of the seventeen cuts on this disc see their first release here, and there’s a live version of The Pearl, as well. Highway of Heartache, Snowin’ on the Raton, and First in Lne, the duet with Starling, are three of the unreleased tracks.

Harris takes a bluegrass/country turn with Randy Scruggs and Iris DeMent on Wildwood Flower, and her song with George Jones, Here We Are, marked the first time she’d recorded with a singer who’d been a longtime inspiration her own work. The last song of this seventy eight track trip finds Harris again with her friends Ronstadt and Parton, singing When We’re Gone, Long, Gone.

The ten cuts on the dvd span Harris’performing career from Together Again with the Hot Band through Love Hurts with Elvis Costello. I Ain’t Living Long Like This, with Spyboy, is especially notable. It’d have been nice to see some of Harris’ Austin City Limits performances, or her gigs at Merlefest; with nine cuts to span forty years, what is there are interesting choices. The tenth video is Harris making a plea for a cause she believes in strongly, animal rescue.

She believes strongly in music, too. “The possibility of one song gets me out of bed in the morning,” she says.

All things considered, it’s as interesting see what Harris chose to include in this package as it is to hear the music.

more about Songbird

now playing: Emmylou Harris: Songbird: back to disc one

Songbird


For Emmylou Harris, the roots of music run deep into folk tradition, and the branches stretch out to country, Americana, bluegrass, and a range of singer and songwriter ideas and other genres. It’s the folk and country sides which are the focus of the twenty one tracks on the first disc of this box set. It’s Harris’ own view of these sounds, of course, and her choice of highlights from the many such songs she has recorded.

Among other things that means there’s as much from songwriters like Rodney Crowell, Gram Parsons, and Dolly Parton as there is material from any historic source. The disc opens with an alternate take from her first album Gliding Bird, showing Harris in the early days of developing her vocal style, and her song writing chops too. A studio track and a live cut with Gram Parsons give a good look at their collaboration in just the space of two songs. Sorrow in the Wind evokes the Appalachians as well as western spaces, while Rough and Rocky walks a line between lullaby and lament.

The box set’s title track, My Songbird, is here, and so is Ashes By Now, which its writer, Rodney Crowell, and country star Lee Ann Womack have both taken to well deserved chart status. Harris puts yet another spin on the song. There’s a Springsteen song, Racing in the Streets, in which Harris keeps both the folk and rock sides of the Boss in evidence. The Green Rolling Hills is, Harris remarks in the liner notes, “a direct line back to displacement, people leaving, longing for home...we all feel that way in different situations. That sense of longing has always been the thing that pulls me into songs.”

photograph by Kerry Dexter

You may also wish to see

more about Songbird

now playing: Emmylou Harris: Songbird: disc three

Songbird

Emmylou Harris has always had an ear for harmonies and and adventurous taste in what to do with them, whether she’s the one singing lead or the one adding to that. That’s led to many remarkable moments of music, some of which are revisited on disc three of Songbird. Harris, Linda Ronstadt, and Dolly Parton became friends more than thirty years ago “and we just liked the way our voices sounded together,” Harris says. So do a lot of other people. Two unreleased tracks from their sessions together over the years, the militant hymn Palms of Victory and the quiet Softly and Tenderly, as well as Jean Ritchie’s classic folk song Dear Companion, which was on the first Trio album, are included here. Beck, Sheryl Crow, Steve Earle, the Pretenders, Mary Black, and others turn up for musical partnership. There’s a good amount of solo work, too, including the heretofore unreleased Immigrant Eyes and one of Harris’s more personal songs, All I Left Behind, as well as Love Still Remains and Hobo’s Lullaby. Though many of the songs are sad -- “ a lot of these songs are ones we left out of projects, that’s one reason there are so many sad ones,” Harris explains in the liner notes -- one comes away from this disc with a clear sense of Harris the musician, a woman who enjoys all the possibilities that melody, harmony, word, and voices may offer.


more about Songbird


ahead, more on disc one, disc four, and the videos

now playing: Emmylou Harris: Songbird: disc two

Bang the Drum Slowly, with its reflection acceptance, pain, history, and hope is a centerpiece of the nineteen tracks on the second disc of Songbird: Rare Tracks and Forgotten Gems, the four cd/1dvd box set from Emmylou Harris released today on Rhino Records. Drum is a song Harris wrote after thinking about conversations she wished she’d had with her father.

Disc two traces the route from Sweetheart of the Rodeo’s road trip country shuffle (with Dolly Parton, Vince Gill, Linda Ronstadt, and Gail Davies on hand too) from The Ballad of Sally Rose to the spare generosity of Cup of Kindness (with Julie Miller and Kate McGarrigle backing Harris) from Stumble Into Grace. All three of these are songs Harris wrote herself, Drum and Cup appearing after a renewed commitment to song writing as “part of my job” which Harris has made in recent years.

That, of course, only shines more light on how well she gets at meaning in the songs of others she choose to interpret -- and interpret is an advised word when in comes to Emmylou Harris. One of those which stands out here the McGarrigle sisters’ Back to Harlan. It is from Wrecking Ball, a controversial album when Emmylou Harris and Daniel Lanois teamed up for it in 1995, and in some ways still so , but it is interesting to see how well the tracks Harris has chosen to include here fit in with the more country material that comes before, and the singer songwriter areas Harris continued to explore later on. Two other favorites from this disc: Brand new Dance -- that’s just such a good song, and Bright Morning Stars, which is gospel song from Angel Band, a set of tracks recorded informally in Harris’ living room. Get Up John from Live at the Ryman is a fine slice of the energy of that gig and that version of the Hot Band, too.

more to come on this boxed set. meanwhile

first impressions of Songbird

if you like Harris, find out more about two other artists you will enjoy:
Carrie Newcomer and Cathie Ryan

-->If you'd like to support my creative work at Music Road,
here is a way to do that, through PayPal. Note that you do not have to have a PayPal account to do this.Thank you.

now playing: Emmylou Harris: Songbird: first impressions

Emmylou Harris chose the tracks for this retrospective box set on Rhino, which is due out next week. It’s as interesting to see what she chose, and what she says about that in the liner notes, as it is to listen to the music. Each stands as part of the story. Forty years of musical story, and counting, from a woman who has really followed the music, followed the song where it leads her.

There are more than seventy songs, some previously unreleased, over four CDs, and there's a disc of video as well. To this writer what comes through very strongly is Harris’ art in spinning a story through words and music and unique individual voice -- both physical voice and in choice of material. It's about the telling, and the listening. Each of these songs is a part of that connection.

There will be more to say as this unfolds, still listening to the first disc. Highlights so far: Green Rolling Hills, Sorrow in the Wind, Satan's Jewel Crown, Darkest Hour is Just Before Dawn, Ashes By Now, Racing in the Streets.

to be continued....

and props to Peter Cooper. too, for an excellent job on the notes for this box set.