Emmylou Harris - Blue Kentucky Girl [Bonus Tracks] (CD)

All Music Guide

1979's Blue Kentucky Girl was the first pure country record Emmylou Harris ever recorded. It has a stripped won sound that is as close to the country bone as anything issued by Nash Vegas in the 1960s. Harris made the record this way for two reasons: She had involved herself deeply in the studio mixing of Quarter Moon In a Ten Cent Town, and found it too glossy, and she was responding to the country purists who claimed the only reason she hit the charts so heavily with her albums was that she saturated them with pop songs. This is just crazy, but it was a gauntlet she chose to pick up. As was customary, husband Brian Ahern produced the tensong set, and Harris played acoustic guitar on all but two of the album's ten tracks while fronting the Hot Band. The material ranged from "Sister's Comin' Home," a duet with Tanya Tucker written by Willie Nelson, to Dallas Frazier's stellar nugget "Beneath Still Waters," to Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman's ""Hickory Wind," from the Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo album; Leon Payne's amazing "They'll Never Take His Love From Me"; the Louvin Brothers "Every time You Leave," with Don Everly singing duet, to a serious country read of Doc Pomus' "Save the Last Dance for Me." Honky tonk songwriter Johnny Mullins wrote the title cut, and, Harris took country back to its British Isles roots with a reading of Jean Ritchie's "Sorrow In the Wind," accompanied by the first family of bluegrass, the Whites. The set closes with Rodney Crowell's "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues," and takes it out with a shuffling sneer. The remastered edition by Rhino contains another pair of period tunes: Hank Cochran's "I Know an Ending When It Comes" and Rafe VanHoy's "Cheatin' Is," where Harris and Glen Campbell pair off and bet it. The strategy worked commercially, as Blue Kentucky Girl reached Number Three on the country charts, and hit 47 on the pop charts. In his liner notes, music critic Parke Puterbaugh argues that this is one of her finest moments, and it may be. Certainly her first seven albums for Warner are unassailable, but still as gorgeous as this set is one misses the eclecticism of her earlier efforts.

- Thom Jurek, All Music Guide