Emmylou Harris, ‘Pop’ Stoneman receive country’s highest honor
By PETER COOPER
Staff Writer
Tones ancient and contemporary rang through the Country Music Hall of Fame’s Ford Theater tonight, as the country music industry celebrated the entrances of the late country patriarch Ernest V. “Pop” Stoneman and present-day songbird Emmylou Harris into the Hall.
The occasion was the Hall’s “Medallion Ceremony,” which has replaced an often-hurried segment of the Country Music Association Awards and become the event at which new Hall members are formally recognized as having achieved the genre’s highest honor. Stoneman and Harris each knew difficult days, and each of them rose to become towering musical figures whose contributions were significant and beneficial.
Tonight, Harris recalled her early days in Nashville, in the late 1960s, when she waited tables for a living. Back then, she was a single mother, walking to the grocery store with baby daughter Hallie on her back, secured into a backpack.
“The thing about hard times when you’re really young is that you don’t really believe they’re going to stay that way for long,” Harris said. “I was really fortunate.”
As with Stoneman, Harris’ fortune brought cultural riches for the rest of us. Thus far, she has inspired two generations of music-makers, including Vince Gill, Rodney Crowell, Tony Brown, Buddy Miller, Lucinda Williams, Patty Griffin, Ricky Skaggs and hundreds of others. She brought old music to new audiences, and new music to older listeners, reflecting and even accentuating the power and beauty of songs from sources as disparate as Kitty Wells, Buck Owens, The Louvin Brothers and The Beatles.
“When I heard her first album, I thought that for the first time I was pointed,” said Gill, who entered the Hall last year. “I heard that album and thought, ‘I could hear myself doing this.’”
Pausing to consider Stoneman’s import, WSM-AM air personality and country music historian Eddie Stubbs said, “We talk about some people as having paved the roads. Well, Pop Stoneman cleared the path.”
The 1927 “Bristol Sessions” are considered by many to be the “Big Bang” of country music, as producer Ralph Peer captured the songs and sounds of Stoneman, The Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers. But Stoneman was recording popular songs prior to those sessions, and in fact his notoriety was a carrot that Peer used to help attract other musicians to travel to Bristol and record their music.
“He’d heard a record somewhere and decided he could do better, so he did,” said Cowboy Jack Clement, who worked with Stoneman in the 1950s and ’60s. By then, Stoneman was known for songs such as “The Titanic” and “The Fatal Wedding,” and he had suffered as a result of the Great Depression. He and his family moved to the Washington, D.C. area, and Stoneman worked as a carpenter. Economic times improved with World War II, and Stoneman founded a family band that included many of his children.
“He used to get old, junked instruments, fix them up, tune them and tell us kids to leave them alone,” said daughter Patsy Stoneman Murphy, now 82. “So, of course, we learned to play them.”
The Stoneman Family became a much-recognized act, garnering a record deal with Starday and a syndicated television show called Those Stonemans. The group won the CMA’s Vocal Group of the Year prize in 1967, a year before Stoneman’s death.
“For 40 years, I’ve dreamed of this day,” said Patsy Stoneman Murphy. “If daddy was here, he’d say, ‘It’s about time.’”
The Hall induction was something Stoneman deeply wanted. On his deathbed, his children sought to encourage him by telling him that he had been admitted. Forty years later, their white lie has been made true. And Stoneman’s legacy endures in the music of young acts including Old Crow Medicine Show, the group that walked onto the Ford Theater stage tonight to sing and play a song that took place, “In a far and distant city, at the dying of the day.”
Harris herself has sung on album of the “dimming of the day,” and her music reveals a love of the kind of folk and country sounds that spread through pioneering artists such as The Stonemans and The Carter Family.
Yet Harris was most influenced by Gram Parsons, the country-rock innovator who helped her to grasp the beauty of George Jones, The Louvin Brothers and other classic acts. She played a prominent role as a harmony and duet singer on Parsons’ two solo albums, and after his death she determined to carry forth the vision he termed “Cosmic American Music.”
In so doing, Harris awakened millions of listeners to the charms of Parsons’ songs. Of course, there was much more than that.
She has become the most consequential harmony singer of the past 30 years, singing with Bob Dylan, Neil Young and many others. She has written songs of her own that have won the respect of master writers such as Crowell and Guy Clark. She has led some of the finest band’s in country history, and employed pickers such as Miller, Sam Bush, Jon Randall and Albert Lee.
Harris was Johnny Cash’s favorite female singer, she shone a light on country’s past greats and became a godmother of the subgenre known as “Americana.” And her Hall induction is no signal of a slowing down: New album All I Intended To Be is out in June.
Griffin, Miller, Williams, Clark, Bush, Gill and Randall sang in Harris’ honor tonight.
“Give me the roses while I live,” sang The Carter Family, the act that Stoneman knew so well. Stoneman’s Hall roses arrived too late. For Harris, Sunday night was right on time.
http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/ar...8/1836/TUNEIN02
Emmylou deserves this, and more!