Harris comes from a military household. Her father, Marine Corps commander Walter Rutland Harris (1921-1993), was a wartime military wife, as was her mother, Eugenia (1921-2014). Her father was reported lost in action in Korea in 1952 and was imprisoned for ten months.
Harris was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and spent her childhood in North Carolina and Woodbridge, Virginia, where she graduated as class valedictorian from Gar-Field Senior High School.
Who is Emmylou Harris’s husband Tom Slocum?
Harris has had three marriages. Mika Hallie Slocum, born on March 15, 1970, was the result of her marriage to Tom Slocum, which lasted from 1969 to 1970.
She was married to Brian Ahern from 1977 to 1984, and they had one child, Meghann Ahern, on September 9, 1979. She was married to Paul Kennerley from 1985 to 1993.
She has a granddaughter born in 2009 and a grandson born in 2012.
She received a theater scholarship to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro’s School of Music, Theatre, and Dance, where she began to study music and learn the songs of Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez on guitar. She dropped out of college to pursue her musical dreams and relocated to New York City, where she worked as a waitress while performing folk tunes in Greenwich Village coffeehouses during the 1960s folk music boom.
Harris quickly returned to the stage, this time as part of a trio with Gerry Mule and Tom Guidera.
Members of the Flying Burrito Brothers, a country rock band, saw her perform in 1971; former Byrds member Chris Hillman had taken over the band and was impressed by Harris, and briefly contemplated asking her to join the Flying Burrito Brothers.
Hillman instead referred her to Gram Parsons, who was looking for a female vocalist to work with on his first solo album, GP. In 1973, Harris traveled with Parsons’ band, the Fallen Angels, and the two shone during vocal harmonies and duets.
Later that year, Parsons and Harris collaborated on their studio album, Grievous Angel. On September 19, 1973, Parsons died in his hotel room outside what is now Joshua Tree National Park from an accidental drug and alcohol overdose.
Grievous Angel was released posthumously in 1974, and three more tracks from his sessions with Harris were included on another posthumous Parsons album, Sleepless Nights, in 1976. Another album of recorded material from that time period, Live 1973, was published in 1982.
