‘Red Dirt Girl'

Emmylou Harris spins a quintessential story of a life, dark and yet enchanting

Welcome to the first edition of Slayed by Voices …

Song: “Red Dirt Girl”

Artist: Emmylou Harris

Year: 2000

Album: Red Dirt Girl

Writer: Emmylou Harris

Producer: Malcolm Burn

For the past two years, Emmylou Harris has been my muse.

I fell late, but I fell hard. My awareness of her does go back a ways, and two combo efforts in particular stood out — her “This Is Us” (no relation to the TV show) duet with Mark Knopfler, and “After the Gold Rush” with her longtime pals and collaborators Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt.

In the fall of 2019 came Ken Burns’ Country Music documentary for PBS, and though I wasn’t any kind of serious country music fan, I watched all of it. (I guess as far as Burns and PBS are concerned, mission accomplished.) In the immediate aftermath, I dug into several of the artists who passed through my television. Far more than anyone else, Harris embedded herself within me. And as I worked on my novel, she inspired me.

She has a song for every occasion, every emotion. Not every one of them is for me — even after this recent baptism, I’m not able to get completely countrified — but so many are so evocative and so moving. In fast order, I built a playlist of nearly 100 of her songs. I truly could not stop listening to her, as you can see this little piece of news from Spotify at the end of 2020 …

I could have chosen so many other songs of hers to showcase here. If you want to go down a rabbit hole, for starters check out “Boy From Tupelo,” “My Antonia,” “Bang the Drum Slowly,” “Not Enough,” “Strong Hand,” “My Songbird,” “Prayer in Open D,” “Michelangelo” or “Timberline.” She has done outstanding covers of Bob Dylan’s “Every Grain of Sand,” Townes Van Zandt’s “If I Needed You” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Tougher Than the Rest” and “Racing in the Street.” (Her version of “Born to Run,” by contrast, is not Springsteen.)

But for the launch of Slayed by Voices, it had to be “Red Dirt Girl,” the song that sealed the Emmylou Harris deal for me. I think it’s absolutely exquisite.

Let’s dig in …

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Me and my best friend Lillian
And her bluetick hound dog Gideon
Sittin' on the front porch, coolin' in the shade
Singin' every song the radio played
Waitin' for the Alabama sun to go down
Two red dirt girls in a red dirt town
Me and Lillian
Just across the line
And a little southeast of Meridian

Kicking things off, Harris sketches an incredibly vivid and lively opening illustration in nine lines. The dog, the porch, the shade, the radio (the two friends were slayed by voices, just like me), the Alabama sunset and most of all, the red dirt, which you’ll find Harris wields for different purposes throughout the song like a Swiss Army knife.

Red dirt, in case you don’t know, is really a thing in Alabama.

The red color is due to oxidized iron. The clay itself is the product of the weathering of volcanic rocks. Water reacts with feldspar in granite, and one of the products is clay. … Sometimes soil can be so filled with iron oxide that it coats other minerals in the soil and causes it all to look red. The bedrock below the surface is an iron-rich clay, making their dirt very red.

I also love the structure of “Red Dirt Girl,” including how Harris links the stanza-ending half-rhymes of Lillian and Meridian. In particular, the way Harris will make use throughout the song of Meridian, which is where the story doesn’t take place, is a marvel.

She loved her brother
I remember back when
He was fixin' up a '49 Indian
He told her, “Little sister, gonna ride the wind
Up around the moon and back again”
He never got farther than Vietnam
I was standin' there with her
When the telegram come
For Lillian
Now he's lyin' somewhere
About a million miles from Meridian

It doesn’t hurt that the Vietnam-era lines evoke one of the most near-and-dear episodes of television that I have ever watched, the pilot of The Wonder Years. “Red Dirt Girl” reminds us not only of the personal cost of war, but also the long-term effects of its horror. The love from older brother to younger sister is beautiful, but the journey from fantasy to reality is all too real.

But Lillian doesn’t give up hope. Instead, she’s determined.

She said, “There's not much hope for a red dirt girl
Somewhere out there is a great big world
That's where I'm bound
And the stars might fall on Alabama
But one of these days I'm gonna swing
My hammer down
Away from this red dirt town
I'm gonna make a joyful sound”

So here’s the thing, and part of both the inspiration for Slayed by Voices and maybe the challenge I have in executing it. The words “joyful sound” truly resonate with me — really, not just with me, but within me. And yet, I’m not sure I convey that without you hearing that within the song itself. So what am I really doing here, except calling them out? And yet … I feel they need to be called out.

It’s all the more tragic how quickly that dream of the joyful sound dies.

She grew up tall and she grew up thin
Buried that old dog Gideon
By a crepe myrtle bush in the back of the yard
Her daddy turned mean and her mama leaned hard
Got in trouble with a boy from town
Figured that she might as well settle down
So she dug right in
Across a red dirt line
Just a little south east of Meridian

I guess the passing of Gideon was inevitable, but it doesn’t make it any less sad, underscored by the evocative burial spot. But there are two more words in this verse that burrow their way into me: Her mama “leaned hard.” It’s so unspecific, yet you can feel the pressure on Lillian as if she were a once-supple branch fighting for her life through a storm.

In the very next line, when Lillian gets pregnant, her drive and ambition are already gone. That she “dug right in” illustrates her toughness, but at this point, we’re just hoping she isn’t damaged beyond repair.

Yes, she tried hard to love him
But it never did take
Just another way for the heart to break
So she learned to bend

Lillian is losing count of all the ways she’s heartbroken. There’s a certain resignation — a hint of peace, maybe — but that’s only a tiny breath before this brutal truth.

One thing they don't tell you about the blues
When you got 'em
You keep on fallin'
'Cause there ain't no bottom
There ain't no end
At least not for Lillian

How many of us have felt that about the blues?

It’s devastating.

And the end is near — too near.

Nobody knows when she started her skid
She was only 27 and she had five kids
Could-a been the whiskey, could-a been the pills
Could-a been the dream she was tryin' to kill

Lillian isn’t idly drinking to avoid the blues. It’s an active act, with motive and execution.

The dream is fighting for its life, but it can’t win.

But there won't be a mention in the News of the World
About the life and the death of a red dirt girl
Named Lillian
Who never got any farther
Across the line than Meridian

Harris makes the sad case that Lillian, at the time of her death, is disposable.

The world simply spins on without her.

Now the stars still fall on Alabama
Tonight she finally laid that hammer down
Without a sound
In the red dirt ground

The power of the single word “sound,” no longer joyful, embodyies the journey from innocent aspiration to gutted desolation. I find it extraordinary the way that Harris spins the life story of her protagonist in those four minutes.

Here’s Harris’ take on the song, from an interview with The Guardian.

Although the red-dirt girl herself is a fictional composite, Harris sees much of herself in the story. “To me, there were always two red-dirt girls,” she says of the narrator and protagonist, Lillian, who kills herself in the end. “I could have just as easily been the other one who made some decisions and took their life down a road that wasn’t nearly as good a path as that other person. It doesn’t mean I’m better than that person. I was lucky.”

Perhaps more of a surprise would be the influence of the movie Boys Don’t Cry, as told to American Songwriter.

"I had driven to New Orleans with my dog Bonaparte and I passed the sign for Meridian, and I started making rhymes in my head. So I had this rhyme scheme but I didn't know what it was about. You get crushes on words and then the rhymes come. Anyways, right after I got there, I went to see the movie Boys Don't Cry. This story about the lost lives of these young people with nowhere to go and it turns into such negative things …"

Emmylou Harris - “Red Dirt Girl” (Live at Farm Aid 2005)

I haven’t talked about the music. It’s inadequate to say that it’s beautiful and poignant, at once stark and melodic. A few different versions of it are floating around — I’m not fortunate enough to have seen Harris live, but apparently it remains a concert staple to this day. In any performance, the music is a real showcase for Harris’ voice, beginning country blunt, rising with her endearing croak to something angelic.

For me, it’s a song that’s impossible not to love, and for me, this is the perfect song and artist to kick off what I hope will be an interesting if not inspiring series.