Pieces Of The Sky

Emmylou Harris turned the death of her mentor Gram Parsons into a debut that made country music safe for a rock audience without softening a single vowel of the tradition.

"Boulder to Birmingham" is the wound at the center — an elegy she co-wrote after Parsons died, where her voice climbs into the chorus like someone trying to outrun a memory and not quite managing it. Around that ache she proves she can inhabit anyone's song: the Louvin Brothers' "If I Could Only Win Your Love" arrives as bright, aching harmony, and Dolly Parton's "Coat of Many Colors" is handled with a plainness that trusts the story to do the work. What holds it together is her refusal to treat these old songs as museum pieces or as jokes. The record became the template for a career built on impeccable taste in other people's writing, sung as though the words were her own confessions.