© 2008 CMA Close Up News Service / Country Music Association, Inc.

Listening to your typical greatest hits package is like strolling down Rodeo Drive or some other dream street for shoppers, where one familiar designer name after another gleams from well lit windows. That's not the impression that emerges from Songbird: Rare Tracks and Forgotten Gems on Rhino Records. This 78-track, five-disc Emmylou Harris retrospective is more like what one finds after rummaging through a corner of a grandparent's attic, where old hope chests and photo albums hide memories too rich for overexposure.

The 2008 Country Music Hall of Fame Inductee's story goes back further than these musical keepsakes, before those first recordings she made with the late Gram Parsons, whose impact on Country Music may only beginning to be fully understood. Born in 1947, Harris followed the path opened by other artists
of conscience from her generation, from a comfortable upbringing in North Carolina and Virginia into the coffeehouse world of Greenwich Village, immortalized and romanticized by Bob Dylan and still alive with the music of his inheritors as she arrived in the late '60s.

When Harris cut her first album, Gliding Bird, in 1968, Country Music hovered only on the outskirts of her imagination. "I was a folk singer," the 1980 CMA Female Vocalist of the Year explained. "I was hugely influenced by Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Ian and Sylvia, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Pete Seeger and of course Bob Dylan, in the way he looked at language and everything as well as music. I loved the folk blues: Mance Lipscomb, Bukka White. I had a pretty varied repertoire. But I completely snubbed Country Music. I just didn't think there was anything there. I chalk it up now to my youthful ignorance."

Enlightenment began during a brief relocation to Nashville and accelerated when a series of chance encounters led to her meeting Parsons in Washington, D.C. Their connection was instant, and after traveling with him to Los Angeles Harris made critical contributions to his first two albums, G.P. and Grievous Angel, both of which pointed the way toward fusions of Country and rock that have transformed and energized both genres to this day.

"Gram was a wonderful Country singer," she said, "but he really understood both rock and Country and could do both really well. Plus, he was a poet who wrote his own material, putting apocalyptic rock lyrics to a Louvin Brothers type of melody on songs like 'Sin City.' He opened me to tons of beautiful Country Music while I was working with him. I fell in love with the singing of George Jones and Merle Haggard, but there was something in the Louvin Brothers that was washed in the blood. Gram took me right over the deep end, and I became a real student and convert."

Harris realized quickly the difference between interpreting a folk lyric, with its sometimes literary rusticities, and the words to a great Country song. In a nutshell, it came down to saying more with less. "I mean, 'I Can't Help It If I'm Still in Love with You,'" she said, laughing.

"'It's Not Love but It's Not Bad.' It's very difficult to write a good Country lyric - and singing it requires a type of restraint, where you're basically letting the song sing itself."

Parsons' death from a drug overdose left Harris to set her own course, which by that time was bound directly for the heart of Country Music. Her album Pieces of the Sky from 1975 elevated a Louvin Brothers song, "If I Could Only Win Your Love," into the Top 5 on the pop charts. By year's end she had recruited Dolly Parton, along with Linda Ronstadt and Neil Young, to back her on the holiday single "Light of the Stable."

In the years that followed, she organized the Hot Band, which featured the fiery young Ricky Skaggs, covered scores of Country songs that even included a vocal adaptation of Floyd Cramer's romantic instrumental "Last Date," and earned a seat at the table of Country Music through albums including At the Ryman, Blue Kentucky Girl, Cowgirl's Prayer, Elite Hotel, Luxury Liner, Pieces of the Sky, Roses in the Snow, Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town and the influential Daniel Lanois production Wrecking Ball.

In all of her work, whether in the Country realm or beyond, on her earliest sessions or her upcoming album on Nonesuch Records, Harris begins with an assumption that the traditional and the adventurous, seemingly in opposition, are complementary if not essential partners. "I embraced the purity of the Grand Ole Opry because Gram loved George Jones and Charley Pride," she said. "He turned me onto the duet singing of George and Melba [Montgomery], George and Tammy [Wynette], not with the sense of 'we have to do this differently,' but 'let's learn how to do this the way they do it. And then, if we want to break the rules, we'll see.'"

This thread winds through Songbird from two duets with Parsons through recent solo and collaborative performances, including a rendition of "Wildwood Flower" with Iris DeMent, whose warbling harmony seems to reflect the title as well as spirit of this collection.

In different ways, each track is a surprise, whether because it's been too long since we've last heard it or because we'd never had the pleasure at all with previously unreleased performances, which include duets with Guy Clark on "Immigrant Eyes" and Patty Griffin on "Beyond the Blue."

Much of that owes to the plan she and James Austin, VP of A&R at Rhino Records, conceived when they started work four years ago on Songbird, which includes four CDs, one DVD and a booklet full of photos and text.

Harris' collaborations with Beck, Elvis Costello, Sheryl Crow, Rodney Crowell, Steve Earle, Vince Gill, Mark Knopfler and the Pretenders, among others, are also well represented on the boxed set.

"I proposed an idea," Austin said, "which was, if Emmy makes her selections, what would she like to have? What would be her dream box set? We came up with this idea of doing two discs that would be, for lack of a better word, 'orphans' from her Warner Bros., and Reprise careers, which perhaps didn't get a lot of attention even though they were songs she loved. And then she said, 'For the third and fourth discs, let's do songs I've done on tribute albums or on duets as a guest on other labels. Maybe there are some unreleased tracks.' She took the lead in selecting the music, and I'd look in the vault and try to find what she wanted."

The results offer insight not only into what Harris has achieved as a singer and creative force, but also into how her muse led her away from the mainstream of Country. She lives in Nashville, yet the world she conjures throughout Songbird differs at least as much as it resembles the music emanating from Music Row today.

"Music is always going to change," Harris said. "You're always going to have commerciality, which I don't believe is a bad word. Alison Krauss, for example, is an astonishing musician who has gathered together other great musicians to carry on the tradition. But she is contemporary and commercial too, because she's not just trying to repeat the past. She knows that would be a mistake. So every generation has to reinvent itself, poetically and musically and on every level. You're going to get some forgettable stuff, but you're going to get some fantastic stuff too. And I believe that the good music will always survive."

On the Web: www.emmylouharris.com