ANSWER TO A ‘PRAYER’ : Emmylou Harris’ Latest Digs Deep Into Universal Lament of Superficiality

It’s safe to say that nobody has brought more diversity to country music than Emmylou Harris.

Since 1973, when she began to tour and record with the country-rock pioneer Gram Parsons, Harris has performed everything from bluegrass to Beatles to Berry. Her no-borders repertoire encompasses old-time gospel music, Springsteen, honky-tonk classics and even a version of “On the Radio,” a ballad originally done by disco queen Donna Summer.

Harris has applied her pure voice mainly to wistful material that she delivers with a deep but dignified ache. But she rocks often enough not to let herself be typecast as a maid of constant sorrow. Her bands have always been staffed by superlative players, with Rodney Crowell and Ricky Skaggs among the marquee names who served as Harris sidemen before going on to bigger things on their own.

Many a lesser artist has reaped far greater rewards from country music’s explosion of popularity over the past few years: Harris’ streak of gold albums and hot singles came between 1975 and 1985. But in terms of quality delivered, rather than units shipped, Harris is unquestionably the definitive country singer, male or female, of the Baby Boom generation.

At 46, she is still capable of making a new musical stretch--as in seventh-inning stretch. Last week, when her current tour took her to San Francisco, she went out to Candlestick Park and, during the traditional seventh-inning break, sang “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” from atop the dugout of the home-team Giants.

Harris figures it was her most unusual gig to date.

“There are some pretty strange clubs out there, but probably that’s the strangest place (I’ve sung),” Harris said over the phone from Ogden, Utah, a stop on a long summer trek that brings her to the Coach House on Saturday, Aug. 21.

Harris said some Giants fans seemed miffed that she wore a red baseball cap with an R on it--wondering whether she might not be showing sympathy for the day’s opponent, the Cincinnati Reds. But the R was for Rockford, as in Illinois.

“We went to Cooperstown (N.Y., site of the baseball Hall of Fame) this summer when we had a day off, and I got this great baseball cap, a Rockford Peaches cap,” Harris said. The Peaches are the 1940s all-female baseball team whose history was recounted in the film “A League of Their Own.”

When Harris recruited her current all-acoustic band, the Nash Ramblers, she not only got an assemblage of hot players--including the remarkable mandolinist Sam Bush and Dobro pro Al Perkins--but a bunch of men willing to foster her interest in diamonds.

“It was the Ramblers who got me more into baseball,” said Harris, who also was scheduled to sing the national anthem Wednesday before the California Angels game at Anaheim Stadium. “Only in the last couple years have I gotten really into being a baseball fan. The guys in the band are very much into it, and you start to learn a lot about it; you see the poetry of the game. And if you’re out (on tour) for extended times in the summer, the only thing on television that isn’t going to give you a headache is baseball. It’s there for you.”

Harris plays a bit, too.

“We have a whiffle ball game at my parents’ house every summer. The tree is second base, and we have to have special rules (for) when the ball gets caught in the branches.”

Under the ground rules she has adopted for her musical career, touring is Harris’ real summer game.

“My priorities are that I tour in the summer so I can be home with my daughter” during the school year. That daughter, Meghann, 14, spends most of the summer with her father, the second of Harris’ three ex-husbands. An older daughter, Hallie, in her 20s, lives in Nashville, Tenn., and works at a record store where, Harris reports, she is heavily into ‘60s rockers such as Pink Floyd, the Who and the Rolling Stones.

“I miss both my daughters, but I do have to work,” said Harris, who lives in Nashville and tries to keep most of the year clear for family life. “It’s the same with any working parent.”

As a consequence of her summers-are-for-touring policy, Harris finds herself in the somewhat awkward position of having a new album finished but not released, minimizing the plug-the-record impact of her recent travels.

“I like to do things a little backward,” she said, chuckling through hoarseness that she said was the result of two months on the road.

“I don’t really feel bad, but the miles wear on you after a while,” explained Harris, whose next appointment after the interview was with a hypodermic needle--a shot of something (“vitamins, who knows? It’s probably just a placebo”) aimed at getting her voice in shape for that night’s concert.

As with your grittier ballplayers, Harris said she has no problem performing when she isn’t 100% physically.

“I’m pretty tough. Tougher than the rest,” she said, borrowing a line from Springsteen.

In fact, the coming album “Cowgirl’s Prayer,” due out Sept. 28, finds Harris at times singing in a lower register and with some raspy touches to go with her trademark pure, sweet high sound.

“I think it depends on the song,” Harris said of her grainier-voiced performances on the album. “I couldn’t sing ‘High Powered Love’ “--a hard-rocking song issued to radio stations this week as the album’s first single-- “in my sweet, high, angelic voice. I do like using my lower register. I’ve always had that, but there were times I would only use it on the low harmonies. I’m still doing all the songs in the same keys I’ve done them over the years. But over the years my voice might get lower, and it might be nice to explore this lower range.”

Overall, the album includes a few new wrinkles--including a semi-spoken narrative in which Sweet Emmylou plays a hard-bitten con artist--but it marks no great departures from Harris’ typically diverse approach. The repertoire encompasses songs by highly regarded folk and roots-rock sources (Jesse Winchester, Lucinda Williams and Leonard Cohen), songs with religious overtones (in keeping with the album’s overall theme of spiritual and romantic striving) and a dip into the country past (a sweetly aching rendition of Eddie Arnold’s 1956 hit “You Don’t Know Me”).

Harris, whose songwriting is sporadic, contributes her first original tune in several years, “Prayer in Open D.” She said that she has been singing that one and “High Powered Love” on tour--limiting the new selections not because she is reluctant to challenge audiences with a lot of unfamiliar material, but because her hectic touring pace hasn’t afforded enough time to work up live arrangements of more of the new songs.

“High Powered Love,” written by Louisiana swamp-rock veteran Tony Joe White, is primarily a romantic song, but one telling verse can be taken as a swipe at the too-slick, too-shallow music that makes up the bulk of Nashville’s output nowadays, when it seems that being a hunk or hunkette with a hunk of burnin’ ambition matters more than bringing to the table a heap of truly felt emotion and an original artistic vision:

Sometimes it’s hard to keep believing,

Too many pretty faces all skin deep.

Now is there anyone left with teeth just a little uneven,

And won’t spend more time with a mirror than he does with me?

. . . Yeah, I need a high powered love,

I wanna feel the lightning streak.

High powered love, got to be down in the heart with me.

Harris said she doesn’t specifically intend this protest against shallow, unsatisfying relationships as a metaphoric broadside against shallow, unsatisfying music.

“I think it’s a general lament about superficiality,” she said. “I think everybody yearns for something deeper. That’s the theme of the whole album, not that I set out to do that. There’s that sort of dissatisfaction with so much that is around us all the time, the emphasis on looks, the emphasis on youth, the emphasis on success on a shallow, purely superficial level. But it’s not a sermon. It’s a fun song to sing.”

The new album finds Harris on the recently revived Asylum label, her first new record company since she signed with Warner Bros. in 1974. Although it wasn’t a hot seller, Harris’ last album for Warners, the live set “At the Ryman,” won her and the Nash Ramblers a Grammy (her sixth) this year as the best country album by a duo or group.

If there was any pressure to try something different to reignite the record sales and radio play that have died down for Harris over the past few years, it doesn’t show on the new album, which eschews radio-ready slickness and takes her usual varied, adventurous, anti-formulaic approach. Harris used the same team of producers, Richard Bennett and Allen Reynolds, that worked on her two previous albums.

“I didn’t feel any need” to change, Harris said. “I’ve never been dissatisfied with where I’m at, musically. If anything, Asylum encouraged me to stay in left field. I think that’s a reason they signed me. They were looking for the non-categorizable artists.”

“I’ve had to exist without country radio for quite a few years,” Harris noted. She characterized contemporary country radio, with its overriding emphasis on new performers, as “obviously a party to which (she’s) not invited. My records and what I’m doing is certainly good enough to be played, but there’s a reality that you’re competing against yourself. They’ll play something you put out 12 years ago, and feel you’ve (already) had your time on the radio.”

Harris said her departure from Warner Bros. wasn’t the result of “a souring so much as a growing apart. I still believe Warners was the only company that I could have been with (early in her career), that set a tone and enabled me to work in my own way. But it got to where the country division became very hits-oriented and was very successful with it.” Harris said she sensed that the label’s attitude became, “ ‘She’s had her success.’ I felt relegated to the trophy room.”

But Harris remains on good terms with her former company.

“They’re putting out a CD boxed set” due early next year, “and they want me very involved in the decisions on what’s included.”

Harris was born in Alabama and grew up mainly in Virginia, the daughter of a Marine pilot who flew combat missions during World War II and the Korean War. It was folk music, not country, that first inspired her to sing.

“Ian & Sylvia, Tom Rush and the folk blues,” she said, ticking off key early influences. “Bob Dylan, of course, is an enormous influence. At the same time, my brother was listening to Buck Owens, so I picked that up subliminally.”

Harris was a young mother eking out a living in folk music clubs in Washington D.C. when some members of the Southern California country-rock elite, Chris Hillman among them, heard her sing. As Harris recalls it, Hillman subsequently ran into Gram Parsons, his old partner in the Byrds and Flying Burrito Brothers, at a club in Baltimore. When Parsons mentioned that he was looking for a female singer for country duets, Hillman tipped him off to Harris.

A bit of luck was involved in making that connection, though, she said. Hillman and Parsons didn’t know how to get in touch with her, but as fate would have it, the young woman who baby-sat her daughter was backstage at the Baltimore club and happened to overhear them as they talked about her.

At the time, Harris said: “I did some country music, but on a pretty superficial level. I almost made fun of it. I did it sort of tongue-in-cheek. I didn’t understand the poetry of it. I didn’t relate to it and couldn’t see below the surface. There’s a lot of country music that’s pretty corny, but you have to get past that first level to see what’s going on there.”

It had been Parsons’ mission, as a member of the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers, to find a bridge between rock and country music. On such classic albums as the Byrds’ 1968 “Sweetheart of the Rodeo” and the Burritos’ 1969 debut, “The Gilded Palace of Sin,” he played a vital role in initiating the country-rock sound that, in more-polished versions by Linda Ronstadt, the Eagles and many others, came to be a commercially dominant style in the mid-1970s.

A great deal of today’s mega-selling country music sounds like an attempt to revisit the smooth Southern California country-rock blend of the ‘70s. Garth Brooks may rave about Kiss and cover songs by Billy Joel, but he owes a far greater debt to Parsons.

Harris toured in Parsons’ band and sang on “GP” and “Grievous Angel,” the two solo albums he recorded before his death in 1973. Parsons didn’t live long enough to establish credibility with the country music Establishment--something that Harris thinks he would have wanted.

“I never had a conversation about it with him, but I think it probably was” his aim to be accepted by country fans.

“He wasn’t one of these rebels that wanted to offend. He might want to shock and try to get people to think in a different way, but he was a country boy, a country gentleman (who would say) ‘Yes, ma’am; no, ma’am.’ He wanted to be accepted by the Opry and bring those (separate musical worlds of country and rock) together.”

Harris carried on after Parsons’ death, including some of his songs in her repertoire. Her 1975 album, “Pieces of the Sky,” embodied ideas about a tradition-conscious yet wide-ranging approach to country music that Parsons had championed. It became a big hit on the country charts and launched her on her own successful path. (A new Rhino Records compilation, “Conmemorativo: A Tribute to Gram Parsons,” features 17 of Parsons’ songs as performed by such college-alternative rock faves as Uncle Tupelo, the Mekons, Victoria Williams, Steve Wynn and Bob Mould.)

Harris doesn’t regard her success as a vindication of Parsons’ hopes of breaking through to the Nashville Establishment and a broad audience of country music fans.

“Gram is still never played on the radio. He’s still a footnote, and people don’t spell his name right,” she said. “I benefited from the ground he broke; I was definitely one of his converts. But he hasn’t been vindicated--he’ll be vindicated when his records are played.”