NASHVILLE — "If you live by the charts, you die by the charts," Emmylou Harris, the silvery-voiced roots singer who dissolves genres and owns a dozen Grammys, says conspiratorially. "Let me tell you."
There are a lot of things that Harris can tell you about American music. Whether it's being the acolyte Gram Parsons left at the station when he overdosed, the muse for Bob Dylan, Conor Oberst and Willie Nelson, or the nurturer of writers and musicians including Rodney Crowell, Patty Griffin, Ricky Skaggs and Lucinda Williams, Harris has been siren for much of what is good about the music that exists beyond the mainstream.
It's mid-afternoon, and the sun pours into a living room filled with chintz upholstery and floral wallpaper. It's a cozy, welcoming place where Harris, 60, lives with her mother, Eugenia, and daughter, Hallie, from her first marriage. Three generations under one roof and the house is bustling with cats and dogs, guitars and the last of a photo shoot that's spilled over from earlier in the day.
Harris, who's been a major part of records with Neil Young, Mark Knopfler and Elvis Costello over the last year, is taking a year off. Laughing, she says, "Sometimes just changing your routine is the same as taking a sabbatical, Johnny Cash told me once."
Though she toured this year -- and has another Southland stop planned for Oct. 10 at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts -- the time between her own albums has given her the opportunity to consider the breadth of her musical odyssey, one that's exhaustively documented on the four CDs and single DVD of "Songbird: Rare Tracks & Forgotten Gems," a collection of rarities, demos and collaborations coming out Tuesday. She embarked on a folkie path out of college, was swept up in Parsons' iconoclastic hippie-hard-country axis, had a run as the woman making country safe for the rock 'n' roll masses and participated in the trio projects with Linda Ronstadt and Dolly Parton and in the ethereal Daniel Lanois-produced or -influenced post-Nashville projects.
"Look what she's accomplished: She freed country music from stereotypes and showed rockers that country was OK," says Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum Director Kyle Young.
"And she showed country people rockers weren't infiltrators. . . . She sang country without irony when country, rock and folk were worlds apart because she does it without fear, without an agenda. It's just the things she likes, the cast of musicians, songwriters and artists she brings with her. . . whether it's the Louvin Brothers or Buck Owens, Sam Bush, Buddy Miller, Gillian Welch or Patty Griffin.
