Emmylou Harris

Since I find music so powerful and so eloquent, I often turn to it to help me express emotions that I can’t find words for. Many times, a piece of music will slither its way through my defenses and underneath my skin and wrap itself around some fundamental truth that I can’t reach any other way. When my father killed himself, the song that floated to the surface and made itself his anthem for me was the Beatles’ Blackbird, an uncommonly beautiful song that captures so much of my father that it’s difficult to believe it wasn’t written about him. For my wife, the song that holds the mystery of his death is this one, Emmylou Harris’ beautiful rendition of Lucinda Williams’ Sweet Old World. Written as a gently bittersweet scolding to someone who’s left the world early of his own accord, this beautiful song lists some of the countless reasons to celebrate life and to hang on through the dark nights that everybody encounters. Emmylou’s voice is perfect for this song, so full of knowledge and sorrow and hope, and the combination of her fragile tones, the beautiful harmonies, the heartbreaking lyrics, and the shadowy flutter of my father’s broken wings behind the crystalline production never fail to stop me in my tracks and fill me with a curious blend of sorrow, hope, and a sublimely calming peace.

Emmylou has been a fixture on the edges of country music for 30-some years and, although she’s never been hugely popular, she’s one of the most respected vocalists in the genre. Her career has had is waxes and wanes, and recently has blossomed thanks to the album Wrecking Ball, produced by the Midas-like Daniel Lanois, who reinvigorated the careers of U2 and the Neville Brothers, among others. Lanois has a wonderfully light touch, and deftly sets the purity and rawness of acoustic instruments in a subtle and lush electronic bed, influenced, no doubt, by his years of collaboration with Brian Eno. Rolling Stone dismisses Harris as being good at harmony singing but weak on her own. Her harmony singing is sublime, and one of her first milestones was singing duets with Graham Parsons, one of the first musicians who tried to combine pure country with rock. Their voices blend brilliantly and their unconventional harmonies worked wonders on such classic country tunes as Love Hurts. But to say she’s weak on her own is to miss the point. What makes her voice strong and distinct is the character of it, the all-too-human frailty floating just beneath the surface. The best thing about country singing – real country singing – is the unpolished humanity of it, the frayed edges and shaky cracks that reveal a life full of love and loss, a voice that speaks of lessons hard-learned and never to be forgotten. Emmylou has such a beautiful, frail, intimately human voice that it’s hard not to got caught up in it. She sings as though she’s confessing to you, her best friend, and it’s too late at night to keep the truth out any more.

G and I pulled together during the brutal months that followed my father’s death and she helped me grow the scar that covers the hole left in my soul by my father’s gun. Overcoming my fear of my father helped me realize that I wouldn’t be that kind of dad – that I couldn’t be that kind of dad. Eventually, I knew that I wanted a child of my own to help me heal my heart. Three years after my father took himself out of my life, Owen came into it and daily teaches me the joys and heartaches of being both a father and a son. I always wished he could of met my dad, but, ironically, it was probably the fact that he couldn’t that made his life possible in the first place. My son would never know my father, and my father would never know his beautiful grandson, raised the way my father never was, given the parental love and understanding he tried in vain to find for himself.

See what you lost when you left this world?