Blue Kentucky Girl [Bonus Tracks]

1	Sister's Coming Home / Tanya Tucker 2:53
2	Beneath Still Waters 3:43
3	Rough and Rocky 3:52
4	Hickory Wind 4:04
5	Save the Last Dance for Me 3:41
6	Sorrow in the Wind / Sharon White 3:30
7	They'll Never Take His Love from Me 2:36
8	Everytime You Leave / Don Everly 3:00
9	Blue Kentucky Girl 3:17
10	Even Cowgirls Get the Blues 3:57
11	Cheatin' Is previously unreleased / Bonus Track 2:30
12	I Know an Ending When It Comes previously unreleased / Bonus Track 2:51

Barnes & Noble

Stung by critical barbs attributing her chart success to the pop elements in her music, Emmylou Harris responded in 1979 with a premeditated venture into pure, traditional country, Blue Kentucky Girl. By this time her Hot Band had solidified into a formidable unit, featuring the likes of Rodney Crowell and Albert Lee on guitars, Glen D. Hardin on piano, Ronnie Tutt on drums, Hank DeVito on pedal steel, Emory Gordy on bass, and Ricky Skaggs on fiddle, supplemented by perennial guests such as the legendary guitarist James Burton and vocalist Fayssoux Starling. With songs drawn from contemporary writers such as Crowell ("Even Cowgirls Get the Blues") and Willie Nelson (the album-opening stomp, "Sister's Coming Home," sparked by Skaggs' furious fiddling) and sturdy veterans such as Charlie and Ira Louvin ("Everytime You Leave," done as a torchy cri de coeur with Don Everly) and Leon Payne ("They'll Never Take His Love from Me"), Blue Kentucky Girl was instantly timeless and timely, as it is today. In both content and style its songs underscored a link between country's past and present (in spite of the mainstream trend, then and now), even as the subtle, low-key arrangements built on classic country sound signatures while injecting discreet, contemporary punctuation along the way. In the end, though, Harris's expressive voice tells the most important story, from the austere beauty of Jean Ritchie's "Sorry in the Wind" to the stirring, soul-deep ruminations on a vanished love in the extraordinary "Beneath Still Waters," a country chart-topper in 1980. Two bonus tracks supplement the original ten-song LP, one a duet with Glen Campbell on the bluesy "Cheatin' Is," the other a solid, Hank Cochran–penned lament, "I Know an Ending when It Comes" -- mere icing on a cake already rich in heart and soul. David McGee

All Music Guide

1979's Blue Kentucky Girl was the first pure country record Emmylou Harris ever recorded. It has a stripped-down sound that is as close to the country bone as anything issued by Nash Vegas in the 1960s. Harris made the record this way for two reasons: she had involved herself deeply in the studio mixing of Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town and found it too glossy, and she was responding to the country purists who claimed the only reason she hit the charts so heavily with her albums was that she saturated them with pop songs. This is just crazy, but it was a gauntlet she chose to pick up. As was customary, husband Brian Ahern produced the ten-song set, and Harris played acoustic guitar on all but two of the album's ten tracks while fronting the Hot Band. The material ranged from "Sister's Coming Home," a duet with Tanya Tucker written by Willie Nelson, to Dallas Frazier's stellar nugget "Beneath Still Waters," to Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman's "Hickory Wind," from the Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo album, Leon Payne's amazing "They'll Never Take His Love From Me," the Louvin Brothers' "Every Time You Leave," with Don Everly singing duet, to a serious country read of Doc Pomus' "Save the Last Dance for Me." Honky tonk songwriter Johnny Mullins wrote the title cut, and Harris took country back to its British Isles roots with a reading of Jean Ritchie's "Sorrow in the Wind," accompanied by the first family of bluegrass, the Whites. The set closes with Rodney Crowell's "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues," and takes it out with a shuffling sneer. [The remastered edition by Rhino contains another pair of period tunes: Hank Cochran's "I Know an Ending When It Comes" and Rafe VanHoy's "Cheatin' Is," where Harris and Glen Campbell pair off and bet it.] Thom Jurek