Emmylou Harris concert review
Orlando Weekly (Feb 20, 2023)
As Emmylou Harris was introducing “Gulf Coast Highway” about midway through her Sunday night set at the gorgeous Sharon L. Morse Performing Arts Center in the heart of the Villages, she took a moment to both acknowledge the song’s author — the great Nanci Griffith, who passed away in 2021 — and, in doing that, noted the very real fact that we are losing more and more musical greats these days.
Of course, one can read all sorts of portents into calling out mortality while playing highlights from a half-century career in a Central Florida community largely populated by retirees, but the fact that Harris did it in her inimitable way — warm, matter-of-fact, slightly self-effacing — made it seem more like truth-telling than any sort of attempt at corny melancholy.
The 23-song set — played with a dextrous five-piece band — was a fantastic overview of her career, balancing its focus between the work that made her a legend in the ’70s (“Blue Kentucky Girl,” “From Boulder to Birmingham,” “Two More Bottles of Wine,” “Oooh Las Vegas”), her late ‘90s/early ’00s creative renaissance (“Orphan Girl,” “Red Dirt Girl,” “Michelangelo”), renditions of songs that she has become as closely associated with as their original performers (“Pancho and Lefty,” “Rose of Cimarron,” “Guitar Town,” “One of These Days”), and a clutch of dependable country classics (“Get Up John,” an a cappella take on “Calling My Children Home”). With her old-lady jokes (“I recorded this back when I was a brunette”) and relaxed presence (“Willie recorded [‘Pancho and Lefty’], but I recorded it first,” she laughed),
Harris gave the sold-out crowd exactly what they came for. Although the performance didn’t yield too many surprises beyond a few bum notes at the beginning of James Taylor’s “Millworker” and a shout out to her older brother who was in the crowd, the high level at which the 75-year-old Harris continues to perform made a show like this — when so many of her peers are shuffling off this mortal coil — that much more of a gift.
