Emmylou Harris

Emmylou Harris is an American singer, songwriter, and bandleader whose six-decade music career has produced 14 Grammy Awards, three Country Music Association Awards, and continuous influence on subsequent American country, folk, and Americana songwriters. She was born Emmylou Harris on April 2, 1947, in Birmingham, Alabama. Her father Walter Rutland Harris Jr. was a U.S. Marine Corps officer and her mother Eugenia Murchison was a homemaker. The family relocated multiple times across her childhood — North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland — following her father's military assignments.

Her early career across 1969–1971 produced her 1969 first album Gliding Bird (recorded for the small Jubilee Records label) and her early-1970s Washington, D.C. coffeehouse-folk-music engagements. Her 1971 meeting with American country-rock pioneer Gram Parsons — who had previously been a member of The Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers — produced her 1972–1973 vocal-harmony partnership with Parsons across his two solo albums GP (1973) and Grievous Angel (1974).

The September 19, 1973 death of Gram Parsons from drug overdose at age 26 — and her subsequent 1974 Reprise Records recording-contract signing — produced her 1975 first commercial album Pieces of the Sky. Her late-1970s and early-1980s commercial peak produced multiple defining American country and country-rock albums — particularly Elite Hotel (1975, which won the 1976 Grammy Award for Best Country Vocal Performance), Luxury Liner (1977), Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town (1978), and Roses in the Snow (1980).

Her 1995 collaboration with producer Daniel Lanois — and the resulting 1995 album Wrecking Ball — produced her 1990s Americana-genre commercial breakthrough. The album won the 1996 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album. Her subsequent career has produced continuous American country-and-Americana commercial activity — including the 1999 Trio II reunion album with Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt, and her later 2010s and 2020s collaborations with Rodney Crowell. She has been continuously cited by subsequent American country and Americana songwriters — particularly Lucinda Williams, Patty Griffin, and Gillian Welch — as a defining influence.

Her name Emmylou began as a personally-combined form of Emily and Lou (from the German Ludwig meaning "famous warrior"). Emmylou has been a rare but enduring American girls' name across the 20th century.