I never suspected THIS writer had ever even heard of country music!
Ya never know. No inside reports from Salinger on how Franny sounded with Zooey
though.
>From this morning's Sunday NY Times:
April 4, 1999
The Lure of Same-Sex Harmony in Country
By JOYCE MAYNARD
>From the days of the Carter Family and the Louvin Brothers, close
melodic harmony singing has served as one of the defining elements of
traditional country music. In the mining country of Appalachia or the
hollers of Tennessee -- places where one might be lucky to own a washboard,
a string bass or a Sears, Roebuck guitar -- the prettiest instrument a person
had might well be her own voice, intermingled with one or two others,
bringing forth gospel music or traditional ballads.
The history of country is filled with stories of artists, raised in rural poverty,
whose chief and perhaps only form of entertainment and joy growing up was
church singing and gathering round the living room or the radio listening to
the Grand Ole Opry and singing along.
Sometimes, in country music, the combining of voices serves as a kind of
musical dialogue between a man and a woman, low voice and high, as it does
in the duets of George Jones and Tammy Wynnette or Porter Wagoner and
Dolly Parton. Male-female harmony singing, in classics like Mr. Jones's and
Ms. Wynette's "Golden Ring" or Mr. Porter's and Ms. Parton's "Oh, the Pain
of Loving You," seems almost to use the contrast of two enormously
different but compatible voices as a kind of metaphor for the continuing
tension in relationships between men and women (sometimes playfully
resolved, sometimes heartbreaking and irresolvable).
But the purest examples of country harmonizing are probably still the ones
practiced by singers of the same sex, in which the range of voices blended
remains tantalizingly close.
The Louvins are a prime example, but the lesser-known sound of Kieran
Kane and Jamie O'Hara -- of the O'Kanes -- comes to mind as my own
particular favorite of the male harmony-singing combinations.
A reassuringly innocent, familial sense emerges when you listen to country
harmony singers of the same sex -- not sexual tension but kinship. Because
the hallmark of a great country harmony is the absence of a single, dominant
voice, there tends to be a certain humility to the sound of country harmony:
every voice raised in the service of the song. Though I've listened to Louvin
Brothers music all my life, to this day I couldn't tell you which brother is
which.
The last 20 years have seen a proliferation of new and unexpected
configurations of vocal talent, from the groundbreaking album "Will the
Circle Be Unbroken" in the mid-70's to the brief and wonderful union that
brought together the voices of Tom Petty, Bob Dylan, Jeff Lynne, George
Harrison and Roy Orbison in the Traveling Wilburys. The common element
present in the best of these recordings is the sense that the artists have
invested themselves not so much in their individual performance but rather in
the joy of collaboration.
"We've lost the feeling of the living room," Emmylou Harris is heard to say
between cuts on one such get-together recording.
"Today we got the living room back."
It would be hard to imagine a more perfect assemblage of voices than those
of Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt, brought together for
the first time on "Trio" (1987), an album that remains for many one of the
finest examples of traditional harmony singing produced in recent years.
Now, more than a decade later, the much-anticipated sequel, "Trio 2"
(Asylum, CD, 62275-2), has finally been released.
Dolly Parton grew up singing traditional ballads and gospel songs with her
11 brothers and sisters.
She brings to the mix not only one of the purest, cleanest sopranos in country
music but also a talent for songwriting for which she has never been given
her due. She can also put more authentic feeling into a single breath or a
vibrato than some of the current crop of country hit makers deliver in a
whole CD.
She can sound suicidal one minute and amused the next, but what never fails
to come across is her intelligence and heart.
Emmylou Harris found country music somewhat later in life and began her
own career harmonizing with Gram Parsons. After his death in 1973, she
moved on to build a career in which she both continues to celebrate
traditional music as well as to interpret the songs of artists as diverse as Paul
Simon and Daniel Lanois.
It's always difficult, listening to her deliver a heartbreak song, to separate the
sound completely from the ethereal beauty of the woman producing it. Her
voice conveys a rare combination of strength and fragility, and though she
can belt out a lyric when called for, her greatest gift may be her willingness
to pull back her solo vocal power to provide some of the prettiest backup
tracks in country music.
Linda Ronstadt came out of the Southwest, with a background in Mexican
and Spanish music, and began her career singing rock-and-roll, but, like Ms.
Harris, she gravitated to country in the 70's.
Possessed of the biggest voice of the three women, she brings less of a
country style and flavor to her material than the other two, but like them she
invests a lyric not only with vocal power but with the strong interpretive
abilities of a woman who sounds as if she is hardly unacquainted with the
experiences she sings about.
The first "Trio" album featured a rich array of songs, from the traditional
"Rosewood Casket" and "My Dear Companion" to "I've Had Enough" by
Kate McGarrigle (a pre-eminent harmony singer herself, with sister Anna )
and "To Know Him Is to Love Him" by Phil Spector, as well as several
songs by Ms. Parton.
Backed by some of Nashville's top studio musicians, the singers blended with
such apparent effortlessness that this listener found herself picturing the three
of them back in that living room Ms. Harris had talked about, three
girlfriends, sitting around singing. When it was about love and heartbreak --
and most of the songs on "Trio" were -- the sense that emerged was of
sisterhood and sympathy.
HE success of that album, which sold 1.8 million copies, seemed to
make a follow-up inevitable.
But years passed and nothing appeared. Now and then, fans heard rumors of
new recording sessions and a second collaboration in the works. The women
had apparently got together to record back in the early 90's.
But there were reports that disputes among them delayed the release of the
album, and three years ago Linda Ronstadt released a solo album, featuring
several of the songs originally recorded with the trio.
Ms. Harris's voice was still present on backup, but Ms. Parton's was notably
absent, leaving the listener with a vague, uneasy sense of bad feeling among
the sisterhood.
Significantly, nowhere in the liner notes for "Trio 2" is there a photograph of
the three women together, nor are there the affectionate words about how
much fun everybody had recording these songs.
Their silence on that subject would seem to speak plenty, though they
performed together recently on late-night television.
The same formula used by the singers and the producer George Massenburg
on the original album is in evidence this time, with an intelligently assembled
group of songs that includes material as diverse as Neil Young's "After the
Gold Rush," Randy Newman's "Feels Like Home" and Ms. Parton's "Do I
Ever Cross Your Mind?" Once again, Nashville mainstays like the Roy
Huskie Jr., Carl Jackson, David Grisman and Leland Sklar appear (along
with the fiddler Alison Krauss, a transcendent harmony singer in her own
right).
But there are some differences in the mood of the new recording too. It goes
farther toward spotlighting an individual singer on each track, with backup
singing that seems in some cases considerably less integral to the texture of
the song as a whole than in the previous recording.
Part of the problem lies in the selection of songs.
With the exception of the A. P. Carter standby "Lover's Return," the new album
focuses on contemporary songwriters, whose lyrics and melodies lend themselves less
well to the harmony style than traditional material.
"After the Gold Rush," with its synthesizer, glass harmonica and string
arrangement, is a showpiece for Ms. Ronstadt, in which the voices of Ms.
Harris and Ms. Parton seem nearly superfluous (a fact borne out by the
version of the song on Ms. Ronstadt's most recent album, "Feels Like
Home," in which the absence of Dolly Parton's voice is barely detectable).
"I Feel the Blues Movin' In," featuring Ms. Parton on lead, seems to be the
kind of number that offers her plenty of opportunity for that old zesty,
defiant showmanship and self-deprecating humor for which she is famous.
Lines like "My state of mind is desperate/ and this hole that I'm sinkin' in /
gets deeper while I'm diggin' to get out" is the kind she can really go to town
on. But she's uncharacteristically colorless here so that when the voices of
Ms. Ronstadt and Ms. Harris join her on the choruses, the old sense of
girlfriends rallying round to comfort a heartbroken sister is mostly absent.
Ms. Parton yields the lead on her song "Do I Ever Cross Your Mind" to Ms.
Harris, who delivers a wistful rendition in which the string players -- bass,
guitar, fiddle and mandolin -- offer up the kind of bluegrass virtuosity that
distinguished the first trio album from much of mainstream country and
made it such a treasure.
For my money, the most successful songs on "Trio 2" are the first track and
the last. It's no coincidence that both songs -- A. P. Carter's "Lover's
Return," and "When We're Gone, Long Gone," by Kieran Kane and Jamie
O'Hara -- are themselves the work of traditional country harmony singers.
The latter song is a celebration of love as the one thing that endures after
trouble, hard times and death: the perfect theme for the gorgeously
intertwining harmony voices of three women who may have known their
share of heartache over the decades.
In the Carter song, the lead singer addresses a lover who once spurned her,
only to return years later to take her back.
"Oh no, I cannot take your hand," Ms. Ronstadt explains, in a voice that, like
those of her collaborators, shows no sign of fading with the passage of time.
When she adds, by way of explanation, that God never gives us back our
youth, we know she speaks with an authority neither Shania Twain nor
LeAnn Rimes could fathom, even if they were inclined (as they are not) to
tackle traditional material.
Only mature singers could bring the poignancy, texture and depth to this
beautiful song that Ms. Ronstadt, Ms. Harris and Ms. Parton deliver. At their
best moments, they create something that is not simply a compendium of
three great voices but a distinct voice of its own, the sound of perfect
harmony. Whatever the relationship between the three outside the recording
studio, here they are exquisitely compatible.
