Calvin College
Festival of Faith & Music
Emmylou Harris 
Emmylou Harris has been hailed as a major figure in several of America’s most important musical movements of the past three decades. Harris’ contributions to country-rock, the bluegrass revival, folk music, and the Americana movement are widely lauded, and in recent years she also has carved out a sound that is uniquely her own. Her Grammy-winning 1995 Wrecking Ball was a watershed album for her, combining several world-music elements with acoustic instruments, driving percussion, and a folk/roots flavor.
Between 2000 and the present, she has appeared on the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack and its spin-off Down From the Mountain tour; collaborated with the Chieftains on their Down the Old Plank Road album and TV special; performed concerts on behalf of a Landmine Free World; and sang with Bright Eyes, Dave Matthews, Bill Mallonee, Ryan Adams, Willie Nelson, Bruce Cockburn, Neil Young, Gillian Welch, Steve Earle, Sheryl Crow, Tracy Chapman, the Dixie Chicks, and Patty Griffin, among others.
Emmylou Harris is invited to perform everywhere from the massive Bonnaroo jam-band rock festival to bluegrass concerts: “That just delights me,” she admits. “It proves what I’ve always thought: that people are eclectic in their tastes, just like me. Most people don’t listen to only one kind of music. For the most part, I think people just want to hear good music.” That is a credo she has lived by throughout her career.
Harris took up guitar as a teenager inspired by the folk music of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Judy Collins and Peter, Paul and Mary. Starving-artist stints in Greenwich Village and Nashville led to regular club work in Washington D.C. Country-rock visionary Gram Parsons discovered her there and brought her to Los Angeles to become his duet partner in 1972. After apprenticing Parsons, she emerged as a solo artist with Pieces of the Sky in 1975. The album electrified the country-music world, becoming the first of her eight consecutive gold or platinum records.
Today, Emmylou Harris is regarded as a key figure in a movement that united rock audiences with country traditionalists. She made country music “hip” and brought it to a vast youth market for the first time. Billboard magazine honored Emmylou Harris with its prestigious Century Award in 1999. At the time, she was lauded as a “truly venturesome, genre-transcending pathfinder” who being given the award “to acknowledge the uncommon excellence of (her) still-unfolding body of work.”
