Reviewed by Ian Phillips.
By Emmylou Harris, Rhino Records 2018.
To celebrate her recent birthday (being a gentleman I won’t be rude and mention her age) Emmylou Harris has re-released one of her most personal albums.
Harris once described The Ballad Of Sally Rose as a country opera.
It was released in 1985 and the song cycle of the album was based loosely on her short time with Gram Parsons who died in 1973.
Up until this time, Emmylou Harris was known mostly as an interpreter of other people’s songs, however for this album she decided to compose all the songs.
The album became one of her biggest selling records and remains one of her all-time favourite recordings.
This release has been fully remastered and is presented along with 10 previously unreleased demos for most of the songs on the album.
For years Emmylou Harris used the alias Sally Rose while she was on the road touring, so when she started writing songs about a lover/mentor – a hard living, hard drinking musician – who is killed while on the road, the name Sally Rose was a natural fit for the album title.
Interestingly enough Emmylou credits Bruce Springsteen for providing the spark to force her to leave her comfort zone as an interpreter and follow Sally Rose into the unknown.
It was after listening to Springsteen’s Nebraska, and being stunned by it, that she realised she needed to challenge herself and move into unknown territory.
On listening to The Ballad Of Sally Rose for the first time in decades I’m surprised by how good it is.
There are no filler songs on the disc, each track progresses the story line, and most of them are remarkably short, often little more than two minutes long.
I’m also left wondering what Gram Parsons would have thought of it. I bet he would have been proud.
I’ve never been much of a country music fan but for some reason I find this album quite alluring.
The fact that Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt sing harmony vocals throughout the album and that her band included Waylon Jennings on lead guitar helps of course.
If you have the original album then you may decide you don’t need this re-release but if you don’t have the album and you’d like to have it, then this re-issue, along with the bonus tracks that are included, is good value.
