American guitarist and singer of country and rockabilly, a nine-time Grammy winner in mixed categories, voted by the Country Music Association as Vocalist of the Year. She was a two-time winner of the Nashville Music Award , winner of the Nashville Symphony’s Harmony Award and an inductee into the Grand Old Opry. An innovative musician, Harris in noted for moving effortlessly among the genres of folk, rock, country, pop and alternative music. The common thread is her exquisite soprano voice and her ability to interpret the heart of a song. Eight of her albums have gone gold.
Harris and her brother Rutland, born in 1945, were the two children of Walter, an army pilot, and Eugenia Harris. Her father was shot down in the Korean War and held as a prisoner for 16 months and, when he returned home to Birmingham, welcomed with a hero’s parade before he traveled to Washington DC to be decorated with the Legion of Merit. The family moved frequently throughout the South in Harris’s formative years, finally settling in Woodbridge, VA where she graduated Garfield High with a 4.0 average, serving as class valedictorian. She entered the University of North Carolina as a drama major and, after her first year, worked as a singing waitress at a resort in Virginia Beach.
Looking north for artistic aspiration, Harris enrolled at Boston University for her second year of college, where she lasted two and a half weeks before she persuaded her brother to drive her to New York in September 1967 to pursue her new career as a professional singer and musician.
Supporting herself by waitressing, she cut her first album in 1969 , “Glittering Bird,” and played opening slots at the Bitter End in Greenwich Village. After a brief involvement, she married songwriter Tom Slocum in 1970. Their daughter Hallie was born that year.
Tired of being poor, the family moved to Nashville to seek recognition, but there, the marriage ended bitterly a few months later. Harris, now destitute with a baby, fled to her parents’ home in rural Maryland to regroup. One year later, she met Gram Parsons at the Cellar Door in Washington DC, who introduced her to the roots of country music.
“It’s like I snapped. I had been deaf and all of a sudden I could hear. Gram’s music got past my intense intellectual folk stuff and shot right through to my heart,” she said.
Leaving daughter Hallie with her parents, Harris and Parsons toured together for two years and made two albums, “GP” and “Grievous Angel,” that were reviewed together as ‘arguably the ultimate achievements in modern country music.’
After Parson’s death at age 26 of a drug overdose, 1973, Harris moved to Los Angeles to sign with Parson’s label, Warner Brothers, where she made 12 albums. She married Warner record producer Brian Ahern in 1975; their daughter Meghann was born in 1978.
The album “Blue Kentucky Girl” won Harris her first Grammy that same year. Continued success followed with the subsequent releases of albums including “Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town,” 1978, “The Ballad of Sally Rose,” 1985, “Thirteen,” 1986, “Portraits,” 1992 and “Wrecking Ball,” in 1995. Harris and Ahern divorced in 1983. Two years later she married British songwriter Paul Quenelle: they divorced in 1992. Currently living in Nashville, she maintains an optimistic outlook. “I’ve never felt a sense of competition with other artists. I am so fortunate in
that I have this constituency that buys my albums and keeps me a working artist and keeps me having a record deal without seeking publicity or being on TV any more than I have to.”
Despite winning a local beauty contest at 17, she did not start wearing make-up until she was in her 30’s, but she did color her hair. In her early 40’s, Harris let her hair revert to the natural gray that she’s had since she was in her early 20’s, and the contrasting streaks looked like high fashion.
In September 2000, Harris was in full preparation to kick-off a coast-to-coast tour in the fall.
Link to Wikipedia biography