Emmylou Harris
3Arena, Dublin
★★★★☆
Emmylou Harris’s music is full of sunsets and bittersweet goodbyes, but now she is saying au revoir for good, with a run of dates that mark the end of the country star’s travels across the Atlantic.
As she explains to her Irish fans halfway through her exhilaratingly melancholic show at 3Arena on Sunday night, she is shortly to turn 79, and all those air miles are starting to add up. “This is my farewell tour of making that long trip over. [I’m] just trying to conserve a little energy.”
Harris is a protean figure in country, having bridged the divide between the folk scene in which she grew up and the Nashville music to which she was introduced by her friend and collaborator Gram Parsons, of The Byrds and Flying Burrito Brothers.
In opening up country music to more mainstream audiences, the native of Birmingham, Alabama, also cleared the path for future generations, including Taylor Swift, who has described Harris as an artist for the ages.
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She brings all her years of wisdom and flinty wit to bear on this quietly breathtaking evening, for which she is backed by a low-key ensemble of keyboardist, fiddle player and rhythm section. She begins unaccompanied, her voice still as clear as a nightingale on an overcast morning, as she opens with My Songbird, a tune about the all-consuming qualities of love written for her by protest singer Jesse Winchester.
Harris jokes that she has always preferred to let others compose her songs, and it is true that her singing – light as a breeze, as heavy as tears – is her most powerful instrument. She is a skilful songwriter, too, however, as she demonstrates on Red Dirt Girl, a roiling ballad that came to her as she drove from Nashville to New Orleans and imagined the different lives she might have led had she not been raised by such loving parents.
She raises the emotional temperature even higher with a stunning take on Gulf Coast Highway, originally recorded by her dear friend Nanci Griffith. The mood then switches from sombre to spiritual as she and her ensemble gather around an open mic for the a cappella Bright Morning Stars, an Appalachian hymnal that has the beautifully shopworn quality of a piece of vintage furniture.
Her mood is sunny throughout. “I do such heartbreaking, sad songs on purpose because they make me happy,” she says. Yet there is no mistaking the heartache rippling through Boulder to Birmingham, her lament for Parsons, her platonic muse, who died from an overdose at the age of 26.
After all that heavy weather, she finishes with a sprinkle of sunshine in a jaunty run through Chuck Berry’s You Never Can Tell (best known to many as the song that John Travolta and Uma Thurman groove to in Pulp Fiction). If this is the end of Harris’s long love affair with Ireland – she has been performing here since the late 1970s – then it’s a spellbinding sign-off from one of the greats.
