(Credits: Karen Miller)
As an artist who has spent the biggest chunk of her career covering other people’s songs, Emmylou Harris knows exactly what makes a music legend when she sees one.
Of course, much of it has to do with the distinctiveness of their voice and the quality of their writing. But more than just the bread and butter, there has to be a sense of charisma, power, and inimitability that makes someone truly sparkle in the sea of diamonds in the business, and be in it for the long run.
Harris is no stranger to this herself, having built a career for the best part of three decades based on putting her own spin on tunes originally performed by other artists. But the mark of her genius is that she did so while also managing to spearhead genres, from country rock to Americana, all while never releasing any of her material until well into the 2000s.
Yet, no matter where the winds of her career take her, Harris’ real heart will always lie with the country canon, where she made her name but also learned the ropes from the best of the best. To this end, she has many a country hero, but only a select few who make it into the top leagues of her greatest acclaim. Among them, Merle Haggard takes the pole position.
However, even though the country stalwart has enormous respect from Harris, he isn’t the only one who scores high in her estimations of country legends. Indeed, when asked in a previous interview if Haggard is her singular favourite country artist of all time, she responded: “That’s really hard, because I love Merle Haggard. And really, if you had to pick one artist to represent country music and send it into outer space to let people out there in other galaxies know what you mean by country music, I think you could drop a needle on anything that Merle has ever done and get a pretty good representation.”
However, this is not to say that there aren’t still a plethora of other stars who wouldn’t also make it into that galaxy. “I’m a huge George Jones fan, Kitty Wells, Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson. The Louvin Brothers,” Harris enthused, adding, “You can go on and on about the greats of country music.”
And she’s not wrong. Between the foundations of the genre and the powerhouses of female artists, like herself, who have reinvented it down the line, country truly is one of the most multifaceted categories to ever exist.
But through it all, Haggard remains the ultimate king of the scene. Besides being a supreme singer, songwriter, and musical trailblazer, it’s his heart that captures Harris’. “You’ve got someone who sings with a social conscience, but also speaks to the common everyday experience, like the way the poets see themselves,” she said, and in many ways, there have never been truer words spoken.
If we were to imagine a country version of one of those really tacky imitation mock-ups of Jesus’ table at the last supper, Haggard would undeniably be front and centre. But orbiting around him would also be many of the greats, from Wells to Parton to Nelson, all of whom have been utterly transformative, not only for the genre but music at large. Yet Harris also quite rightly deserves her space at that table, for worshipping all these giants and being one of their prolific contemporaries.
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