Photo credit: Kelsea McCulloch
Emmylou Harris’ fondness for the Pabst Theater she played Tuesday night could lead her to extremes. She threatened to chain herself to the venue that has served as her frequent Milwaukee tour stop if ever anyone had a mind to demolish it to make way for a shopping mall, enlisting the five members of her Red Dirt Boys band in the protest if need be.
If the silver-haired Harris sounded passionate for the Pabst, her fervor may have fueled her throughout her performance. That her career starts at country rock’s late-1960s beginnings and included a decade-plus stretch as an eclectic commercial country radio hit-maker and her current status as a foremother of Americana allowed her an estimable body of work to draw from.
The closest thing to an album she was touring to support would be this year’s Rhino Records reissue of 1985’s The Ballad of Sally Rose—a semi-autobiographical country-rock opera that her record company at the time labeled a “concept album” (a corporate disparagement for an album bereft of hit singles, she snarked). From that, she performed “The Sweetheart of the Rodeo.” That title reprises the seminal country album The Byrds recorded with Harris’ early mentor, Gram Parsons. She summoned Parsons’ influence elsewhere throughout the evening, presenting his sprightly “Ooh Las Vegas” and Parsons’ Flying Burrito Brothers’ keening “Sin City.”
Parsons was far from the only artist whose work Harris recast. She introduced her rendition of bluegrass group The Country Gentlemen’s gospel-informed “Calling My Children Home,” given an acapella treatment with some of her Boys, with a non-partisan expression of concern for refugee children separated from their parents at the Southern U.S. border. More harrowing still was her own “My Name Is Emmett Till,” her recounting of the life and murder of the teenager whose 1955 slaying helped give birth to the Civil Rights movement. Harris humbly related how she felt like a vessel for a song that was destined to be written.
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Other songs were similarly melancholy. Numbering among her encores was a rendition of Townes Van Zandt’s sorrowful “Pancho and Lefty,” which she recorded several years before Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard made a hit of the song on country radio. Harris’ most quietly mournful song of the night, however, may have been her take on Steve Earle’s “Goodbye.” Her appreciation for Earle was evident earlier on when his ode to the tolls of life on the road, “Guitar Town,” became her second song of the night, following the opening salvo of one of her country chart-toppers, Delbert McClinton’s “Two More Bottles of Wine.”
Would that Harris dust off a few more of her radio biggies next time she hits town. Her run at that level of popularity exemplifies how country’s traditions and an artist’s desire to expand the parameters of the genre can coexist with commercial appeal and critical acclaim. Time will tell whether that kind of creative freedom could ever again generate success for Nashville’s country industrial complex, but Harris has rarely made an artistic misstep since her commercial heyday, too. Reflecting that consistency, overheard on the way out of the Pabst, one concertgoer could be heard saying to her partner, “That was special.” Indeed it was, and Harris is. May this be far from her last time in Milwaukee, whatever she cares to sing.
