Red Dirt Girl — Emmylou Harris
#365Songs: March 20
Emmylou Harris has been around for a long time. She’s a genuine legend, and one of the rare artists who genuinely deserves the sobriquet “a national treasure.”
As closely associated as she’s rightfully been with the troubadour tradition, the reality is that, prior to Red Dirt Girl, she’d only ever released two albums that featured a majority of her own compositions.
Perhaps it’s the Daniel Lanois effect.
There certainly seems to be good reason to work with him, as everyone who does so ends up delivering some of their most powerful recordings—Willie Nelson, U2, and Bob Dylan, to name just a few high-profile collaborators.
Emmylou worked with Lanois on her album Wrecking Ball, which came out in 1998, and pretty much wrecked us all with its immense and beguiling beauty.
The thing about Lanois, though, is that there clearly must be something difficult or distasteful about working with him, as no one seems to want to do two records with him in a row—at least, not in close proximity. Even Peter Gabriel went four years between Lanois albums, and those were technically back-to-back (provided you don’t count Passion and Shaking the Tree. Which you shouldn’t).
Either way, what generally seems to happen is that people move on from Lanois, but retain the lessons they learned. While Willie Nelson’s switch to western swing after Teatro might not seem of a kind, the production aesthetic continues in the atmospheric and vibe-heavy mode that Lanois established on that brilliant release.
Dylan’s Love and Theft, the follow up to Time out Mind, even carried “Mississippi” over from the earlier, Lanois-led sessions.
Had Emmylou not taken the front songwriting seat, Red Dirt Girl might have seemed guilty of having taken a similar post-Lanois path. The whole album sounds like a Lanois production—it’s just minus the man himself.
At the end of the day though, the album is Emmylou’s and Emmylou’s alone. Her songwriting is simply fabulous, and she proves herself to be an outstanding storyteller who is every bit the equal of the legends she’s so often associated with.
The opening verse of the title track is a simply brilliant vignette—a complete short story in 9 lines …
Me and my best friend Lillian
And her blue tick hound dog Gideon
Sittin’ on the front porch coolin’ in the shade
Singin’ every song the radio played
Waiting for the Alabama sun to go down
Two red dirt girls in a red dirt town
Me and Lillian
Just across the line
And a little southeast of Meridian
… and the way she uses and varies the Meridian reference throughout is both hypnotic and heartbreaking as the song builds to its tragic conclusion:
Nobody knows when she started her skid
She was only 27 and she had five kids
Could’ve been the whiskey, could’ve been the pills
Could’ve been the dream she was trying to kill
But there won’t be a mention in the news of the world
About the life and the death of a red dirt girl
Named Lillian
Who never got any farther
Across the line than Meridian
This is such a perfect example of the kind of storytelling that makes the folk tradition so important and so magic and so … humane.
As a vocalist, Emmylou has long been a wildy potent empath, leveraging the winsome and fleeting creak of her wind-light voice to make you feel what she feels about what someone else has felt.
But with Red Dirt Girl, she leverages that power of the empath to tell her own stories, and in moving from interpreter to author, she steps one step deeper into our hearts.
~
Start following the #365Songs playlist today, and listen to each new song with each new article. “The Moon & The Scarecrow” by Brother Dege is Song #79.
