"People keep asking me, 'What is country music?'" remarked Emmylou Harris late into a supremely spirited 13/4-hour performance with her band, the Red Dirt Boys, on Sunday night at Lexington Opera House. "And so I tell them," lowering her voice to a barely discernible whisper, "This is."
With that, she sailed into a sterling cover of Old Five and Dimers Like Me, a sagely bit of honky-tonk wisdom by the great Texas songsmith Billy Joe Shaver. It's a masterful bit of writing, but unless the artist has the requisite years of hard learning under his or her belt, the song simply misses its mark.
"I spent a lifetime making up my mind to be more than the measure of what I thought others could see," Harris sang with a voice that has grown only more worldly with the years. And while her band maintained a sound slightly more cosmopolitan than the Lone Star State swagger the song grew up with, the very obvious sentiments of dance-hall merriment nicely balanced the lyrics' aged contentment.
It was a beautiful moment but a curious one. Harris still can run crop circles around most country stylists, even though she abandoned — or simply outgrew — country convention years ago.
Sure, she delivered classics like Hello Stranger, Making Believe and the regal Townes Van Zandt nugget Pancho & Lefty, which Harris helped introduce to the country and pop mainstream more than 35 years ago, with a satisfying Americana flair. But a sizeable portion of the show was devoted to music from her two most recent albums, 2008's All I Intended to Be and 2011's Hard Bargain. Much of that material flirted with loss and mortality, themes that typically scare the daylights out of country radio.
Some of these selections were country by default, such as Merle Haggard's Kern River (from All I Intended to Be). This was no barroom serenade, but a devastating chronicle of a drowning and the mourning that comes in its wake. "It's a mean piece of water, my friend," Harris sang against a stark arrangement that grew out of a haunting drone designed on fiddle, accordion and bowed bass.
More affirmative was Harris's placement of two Hard Bargain requiems (both Harris originals) next to tunes written by their subjects. Harris' The Road, a meditative recollection of country renegade Gram Parsons, prefaced the giddy Parsons classic Luxury Liner, which left serious instrumental space for fiddler Rickie Simpkins and guitarist Will Kimbrough in which to unwind. Later, a lovely trio arrangement of Darlin' Kate, Harris' tribute to Canadian singer Kate McGarrigle, led into the show's highlight, a reading of Kate and Anna McGarrigle's Talk to Me of Mendocino that seemed to dance with a balletlike elegance.
The show had its lighter segments, too. Big Black Dog, which Harris used as a jingle of sorts to promote animal rescue, sported a playful, childlike bounce. The singer even brought Bella, the canine that inspired the tune, onstage at show's end. The wag factor was high.
Oddly enough, the performance kicked off with its most appealing spiritual postscript, a modestly rocking Hard Bargain self-eulogy called Six White Cadillacs, a tune that outlined Harris' preferred means of transport into the hereafter.
How appropriate. Harris is setting herself up to be the same class act in the Great Beyond that she has always been here with us.
