Folk Fest Wrapped Up in Style
September 26, 2003
The culminating act of the 2003 Boston Folk Festival, and quite possibly the biggest name ever to grace the field stage, received a warm welcome on a lovely Sunday afternoon. The sun shone on a hundreds of festival goers seated on the field in front of the school, comfortable in the balmy, short-sleeves weather. The crowd was thoroughly warmed up by previous performer Paul Brady, whose set went long, and greeted Emmylou Harris with enthusiastic applause.
“It’s perfect weather for a folk festival,” she commented, going right into a soft, soulful rendition of “My Songbird.” Harris worked her audience with gentle banter between songs, saying, “I’d like to introduce my band,” gesturing to her lone companion, “This is [guitarist] Buddy Miller.”
“We’re going to try a song with a lot of chords in it, one we haven’t done in a while. It’s a James Taylor song with the word ‘Massachusetts’ in it,” she said, drawing chuckles from those present, by way of introduction to “Mill Worker.”
Picking and choosing from her 26 albums, Harris played a mix of new and old, original and borrowed material. Her own hits, such as “Red Dirt Girl” about the life and tragic suicide of an Alabama girl, were blended with those of others, including a mellow and, well, folksy version of the Everly Brothers classic “Love Hurts.”
Harris is a diva of country, blues and folk, and a twenty-year veteran of the music business. Eight of her albums have gone gold, she’s won countless Grammys and has been honored numerous times at the Country Music Awards and Nashville Music Awards, won Billboard’s Century Award, and was inducted into the Alabama Music Hall of Fame and the Grand Old Opry. Recently she lent her voice to one of the sirens on the wildly popular “O Brother Where Art Thou” soundtrack, and her latest album, the third featuring her own writing, Stumble Into Grace, was released Wednesday, September 23. Impressive enough for any performer, but when the fact she taught herself to play guitar from music books and records is taken into account, it’s a rather staggering resumé.
Her prestige in the world of country hasn’t led her to ignore her fans, however. Responsive to the crowd’s call for an encore, she received a standing ovation when she returned to sing “Boulder to Birmingham,” a song about a spurned lover willing to walk from Boulder, CO to Birmingham, AL to see her beloved’s face again.
After the two-hour show, which ended shortly after 7pm, Harris was happy to chat with a few fans, smiling as they posed in pictures with her. One particularly enthusiastic woman who’d been a fan “since the beginning” jokingly offered to write down her phone number, “You know, in case you wanted to call me sometime.” To which Emmylou responded laughingly, “You know, I’ll get it from Wayne,” indicating one of her entourage.
As the sun set behind Huru, casting long shadows on the stage and tingeing performers’ faces with red and gold, it also went down on this year’s Folk Fest. The crowd started toward the exits with ears still full of Emmylou Harris’s smooth voice and soft southern twang, seeming satisfied, soothed and suffused with a cheerfulness brought on by a good dose of, ironically enough, the blues.
