The icon Emmylou Harris sent fan mail to: “Meant so much to me”
Although it may not seem like it sometimes, our favourite musicians are fans too, even ones as accomplished and well-established as Emmylou Harris.
In fact, most musicians are at the level they’re at because they started as fans of something, whether it came in the form of watching their favourite band perform on a television variety show or stumbling upon a new vinyl in a record store that inspired them to pick up an instrument themselves.
When you dig deeper into the influences behind some of our most celebrated legends, this is almost always the case, and behind every Kurt Cobain, there’s always a Pixies; behind every Lady Gaga, there’s always a Kate Bush, and behind every Heart, there’s a Beatles, because the lineage of legends goes back far, and if this wasn’t the pattern, it’s anyone’s guess where the industry would be now.
As someone whose legacy includes covering other people’s songs, Emmylou Harris knows not only what it takes to draw inspiration from other legends but also how to become one in your own right by reimagining different visions. Along the way, Harris carved out her own niche, but those who shaped her included many leaders in their own spaces, from Merle Haggard, Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson to The Louvin Brothers and George Jones.
In fact, among those, barely anybody comes close to what Haggard did for music, and how he showed people like Harris the way when it came to injecting themselves in their own songwriting. As she once said, “If you had to pick one artist to represent country music and send it into outer space to let people out there in other galaxies know what you mean by country music, I think you could drop a needle on anything that Merle has ever done and get a pretty good representation.”
When she was first starting out, however, it was Pete Seeger whom she looked up to so much that she once wrote a letter to him asking for guidance. Recalling the moment in an interview with NPR, Harris said she couldn’t remember her exact words, but what she does remember is his response.
“I wish I still had that letter,” she said. “But basically, he said, ‘Don’t worry about suffering.’ You know, in his own very sweet way. Life will happen to you, and in the meantime, you know, read the books of Woody Guthrie. I mean, that just meant so much to me. That’s Pete.”
These were pivotal words for a young Harris, who took them as inspiration to keep pushing on, even when things felt uncertain, and she focused on what she had to offer and utilised her unique talent to bring an absolutely fresh perspective to old classics.
And she eventually earned a space beside Seeger on stage when the pair performed together at Madison Square Garden for his 90th birthday celebration, and it must be goddamn surreal when someone you look up to ends up in the same room, let alone on the same stage, but many musicians, like Harris, ended up living such dreams purely because they committed, pushing to share their gift with the rest of the world.
