Emmylou Harris Delivers Spine-Tingling Farewell Show

For Emmylou Harris, it’s no cliche to say that every song is a story. The country legend has spent 50 years roaming between folk, bluegrass, rock’n’roll and Americana, curating her own songbook of deeply humanitarian music. On this first stop of her European farewell tour, she says goodbye to Scottish fans as part of the Celtic Connections festival, offering up a suitably career-spanning set-list accompanied by memories of Gram Parsons, Nanci Griffith, Bill Monroe, Townes Van Zandt and Willie Nelson, to name just a few. But the show hardly feels like an ending. “I turn 79 in April, so there!” she crows, after the rowdy honky-tonk of Two More Bottles of Wine makes the East End sports hall feel like a dive bar. Her voice is still spine tingling, now with a lived-in dustiness that only enriches her storytelling: Red Dirt Girl, her great blues tragedy, devastates now more than ever. It is majestic to watch her conduct three-part harmonies for an earthy, spiritual a cappella of Bright Morning Stars, and her delight in her band is infectious: “It’s alright to cheer the boys!” she urges, after a show-stopping mandolin solo from Eamon McLoughlin. She even throws in a brand-new cover of Johnny Cash’s Help Him, Jesus (“I’ve always longed to do it”), digging into her lower end with real swagger. She plays for almost two hours, pausing only to take a sip of tea, and a roaring performance of Parsons’s Luxury Liner ends with both her fists in the air: “What fun!” After an emotional standing ovation, she can barely rip herself away, and instead offers up Boulder to Birmingham, her majestic ballad about reckoning with Parsons’s death. And just as there’s scarcely a dry eye in the house, she chases it with Chuck Berry’s You Never Can Tell – “just for fun”, she winks. One couple in the crowd leap out of their seats to twist and rock’n’roll down the aisles, and dozens follow suit, twirling arm-in-arm. If this is Emmylou’s legacy – a night chronicling the low lows and rapturous highs of life – it makes it just a little easier to say goodbye.