For a moment, I’m worried I’ve offended one of our greatest living country artists. Emmylou Harris has hung up on me, less than a minute into our call. A moment later, though, she’s back, apologising. No offence caused (phew), just a snafu with her computer. “I get a little freaked out by technology,” she admits.
It’s hard to believe Harris could be fazed by anything. Just look at her career: a beacon of the country music scene in the 1970s and 1980s, she ultimately proved too adventurous for the tradition-fixated genre, leading it towards new and innovative frontiers... whether it followed or not. “I haven’t fit into country since I turned 40,” she tells me. “I was too old, apparently, for country radio, and they stopped playing me completely.” Fortunately, she points out, “I never had to live and die by the charts.”
