First date, last dance: Emmylou Harris, possessor of one of country-rock’s most beautiful and evocative voices, opened the British leg of her farewell tour on Monday with a generous show at Liverpool's Philharmonic Hall. It was, of course, sold out, the audience on the older side (it was notable how many guys needed to take a comfort break as time wore on!) and Emmylou herself acknowledging, as she briefly massaged her left wrist, that “I’m 79… arthritis.” But she stood – in her customary cowboy boots, shoulder-length silver hair glinting in the spotlight, and playing her signature Gibson L200 – for the better part of two hours, singing throughout and with no lyric sheets or iPads in evidence.
I first saw her way back when on – where else? – The Old Grey Whistle Test, and on the way back from my Saturday job the following weekend splurged the day’s pay on Elite Hotel. I’ve followed her even since, seen her live a few times down the years, and there are at least a half-dozen tracks I have on repeat, most of them featured last night. Hers was a voice to break your heart, its tone and timbre recognisable from the first note, and she always had great taste when it came to picking songs. Inevitably, her voice has aged – sadly the years are harder on women than on men – and she has a tendency to be sharp, especially when reaching for notes. Opening with “Love Hurts” – a duet with support act Jim Lauderale, who she called on stage as he headed to the pub – was a bit of a bold choice, though a great song, of course. Wonderful as the Philharmonic’s natural acoustics are, she wasn’t helped by the sound mix, with both her voice and lead guitar often over-emphasized and sometimes on the point of distortion.
Niggles apart, it was an engrossing performance, with Harris dipping in to her vast songbook, taking us back through the years with numbers such as “One of These Days”, “Poncho and Lefty”, “John the Baptist”, “Luxury Liner”, and “C’est La Vie (You Never Can Tell)”. From her under-appreciated middle period came “Red Dirt Girl” and the exquisite “Michelangelo”. She chatted about playing Liverpool in 1976 (“Maybe some of you were there!”) and said she and the band had earlier in the day gone down to visit the Cavern. “This is where it all started, isn’t it? Where would we be without The Beatles?” Cue “For No One”, another early recording, the song’s sadness appealing to the young Emmylou. She talked about Paul Kennnerley, a Liverpudlian (Hoylake, to be exact) obsessed with the American Civil War and his concept albums White Mansions and The Legend of Jesse James, from which she plucked a number recorded by Johnny Cash. And she reminisced about working with Ricky Skaggs, Rodney Crowell, Mark Knopfler and of course Gram Parsons, who could be said to have launched her career and to whom she paid tribute with her classic song “Boulder to Birmingham” and a more recent and ruminative solo acoustic number.
It was a memorable evening, Emmylou and her excellent five-piece still hot, if no longer The Hot Band, and the audience would have let her sing all night. She broke the curfew to give us an encore, Buck Owens’ “Together Again”. It was an emotional moment.
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