Emmylou’s set (yes, she’s entitled to go by just one name) reflected her highly collaborative career on Friday at Macky Auditorium. Photo by Tina Hagerling.
brought her audience a blast from the past Friday night. Not solely with her songs, which traversed a 40-year career from Cheyenne to Tennessee, from Boulder to Birmingham, and back again. But also in her between-song references.
When she picked a football player to refer to, based on something she had seen on the NFL Network on her tour bus, she talked for a few moments about Y.A. Tittle — a star quarterback from the 1950s. She responded to a bandmate’s request to tell a joke, and told one that Bo Diddley used to tell. And she described her lead guitarist and opening act Buddy Miller as “the Stevie Wonder of Americana music.”
I guess describing him as “the Tiger Woods of Americana” wouldn’t have struck the proper tone.
But by wrapping herself in songs by Merle Haggard and Bob Dylan and Lucinda Williams — who, though contemporary, is from the “just don’t make ’em like that anymore” school — Emmylou carved out a lucid, languid space apart from the frazzled frenzy of modern music. She and her six-piece band performed for a mature crowd far more urbane than the small-town rural characters in her songs.
At 62, Emmylou (it seems absurd to use the conventional journalistic second-reference protocol of “Harris”) has a regal, benevolent demeanor. No doubt she’s had hurdles, but has successfully leaped so many that she has little left to prove. Her beautiful shoulder-length silver hair framed a tanktop and gypsy skirt, and her voice was, bless the sound mix, way, way out in front. It was at first jarring how loud and primary her vocal was, but then again, her voice was why we were there, and too often vocals get buried in live venues.
Boulder clearly was Emmylou’s type of place, and after a couple songs she related an early-career story about one of her first regular gigs, at a defunct Boulder bar with collaborator Gram Parsons. Emmylou and band were going to be fired from the gig because, as she tells it, “we didn’t play any songs that had a beginning, middle, and end.” As it happens, the bar soon shut down for other reasons, so while the gig was indeed lost, Emmylou was spared the indignity of being fired.
Emmylou has been a genre chameleon in recent years, with albums such as “Wrecking Ball” and “Red Dirt Girl” edging toward pop and a sort of stoner-lullaby adult contemporary, and affiliations with Bruce Springsteen and Conor Oberst conveying a musical eclecticism. But she began her career as a more conventional country artist, at home in the honky-tonks. In songs such as Robbie Robertson’s “Evangeline” and Rodney Crowell’s “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” Emmylou’s concert Friday was a graceful torchbearing for musical history, and for continuity.
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Jeremy Simon is a Lafayette freelance writer and regular contributor to Reverb.
Tina Hagerling is a Denver photographer and regular contributor to Reverb. Check out more of her .
