Emmylou Harris Made the Most of Time at the Longhorn Ballroom on Saturday

Time was everywhere you turned Saturday night at the Longhorn Ballroom.

It was there in the vintage photos lining the walls nearly from floor to ceiling at the entrance. It was evident in the colorful, historic murals adorning the exterior, or the modern art hanging in the suites ringing the perimeter of the restored room. You could even almost feel it, the sensation of the ghosts of legends lingering in the shadows.

It was fitting, then, that time was a central preoccupation — often indirectly — of the evening’s headliner, Emmylou Harris. Saturday’s sold-out show was the first of two nights the 76-year-old singer-songwriter is scheduled to perform at the Longhorn, and it marked, from all available evidence, her first solo headlining set in Dallas in nearly 15 years. (Not that her most recent turn on a North Texas stage, as an opener for John Mellencamp, was any fresher; it was almost six years ago at then-Verizon Theatre in Grand Prairie.)

Harris is a towering figure of song, having accrued nearly every accolade a musician can acquire over the span of a half-century-long career: Thirteen competitive Grammys, a 2008 induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame and a 2018 Grammy for lifetime achievement.

Trophies aside, Harris, armed with her gorgeous mezzo-soprano voice (which, it must be said, has scarcely diminished over the years), has also built a vast, influential career stretching far outside the prescribed boundaries of country, folk and rock music.

That elastic sensibility, combined with the formidable skill of her backing band, the Red Dirt Boys, is what made Saturday’s 95-minute showcase not an evening encased in amber, but rather fully alive, crackling with spontaneity and brimming with astonishing artistry.

More than a decade has elapsed since Harris' last solo studio album (2011’s Hard Bargain), and eight years have slipped by past since her last collaborative studio album (2015’s The Traveling Kind, with longtime collaborator and friend Rodney Crowell). Even her most recent archival release, 2021’s Ramble in Music City: The Lost Concert, was itself a document of a show more than 30 years in the past.

Given that freedom from any promotional responsibilities, Saturday’s setlist was a pleasurable survey of all phases and stages of her eclectic career, veering from the evening’s opener, 2006’s “Right Now,” to a cover of Steve Earle’s zesty, Cajun-spiced “Guitar Town” to a rollicking rendition of Delbert McClinton’s “Two More Bottles of Wine” to a spirited take on Rusty Young’s “Rose of Cimarron,” which Harris first cut back in 1981.

Through it all, Harris — her body nearly dwarfed by her acoustic guitar — was firmly in command of the five ace musicians arrayed beside and behind her: multi-instrumentalist Phil Madeira, fiddler Eamon McLoughlin, drummer Bryan Owings, bassist Chris Donohue and guest pedal steel player Steve Fishell. They each provided vivid color and texture from first note to last, collectively performing with the practiced skill of a unit honed over countless hours.

Indeed, it was more than a little moving to hear country and folk music again filling the Longhorn Ballroom, after a long stretch of  silence — the sprightly fiddle notes and luminous pedal steel runs and bouncing accordion flourishes laced with steadily strummed guitar strings and brushed drums spilled easily from the refurbished stage.

Although the venue is currently in a “soft launch” phase, the night, overall, looked and sounded sharp, with the sonic clarity, sightlines and atmosphere owner Edwin Cabaniss has fostered at Oak Cliff's Kessler Theater.

Such was the band’s ability that Harris could offer up rarely performed tunes like “Prayer in Open D” (“I haven’t done this song in donkey’s years,” Harris joked as she tuned her guitar, “and only amongst friends do I go above the third fret”), or “Casey’s Last Ride,” an outtake she first released on the 2007 compilation Songbird: Rare Tracks and Forgotten Gems, which required a restart when Harris spaced out in the middle of the first verse. “This is how the sausage is made, folks,” she deadpanned.

The Alabama native was a voluble presence throughout, offering brief introductions to most of what she sang (“I think the reason I don’t write more songs is I had a happy childhood — nothing to complain about,” Harris observed before digging into “Red Dirt Girl”) and providing connective tissue to the body of song she offered the appreciative capacity audience.

If time was a preoccupation for Harris and her bandmates, so too was Texas and its songwriters. Again and again, she returned to the well of Lone Star songcraft: Crosby native Rodney Crowell, Lubbock native Delbert McClinton, Saratoga native George Jones, Fort Worth native Townes Van Zandt, and, in the encore, Seguin native Nanci Griffith, whose gorgeous “Gulf Coast Highway” brought the evening to a close.
Harris described Griffith, who died in 2021 at age 68, as “wonderful [and] beautiful” before playing the last song of the night. “I haven’t had a chance to say goodbye [to her],” Harris said. “So, we’ll play a salute to this woman.”

Time, once again, made its presence felt. In this instance, it was the cruelty of its swift passage, and lamenting what has been lost.

Yet even in such a moment of sorrow and reflection, it was possible to glimpse time from a slightly different perspective, one of collective gratitude for sharing in such a gorgeous moment, from an evening filled with them. An appreciation for time spent in a room redeemed from long years of disuse, and with a treasured performer, whose presence on our stages is far too infrequent, but who made the most of her time with us Saturday night.