There have been many iconic pairings in country music and about half of them involve Emmylou Harris. Gram and Emmylou. Willie and Emmylou. Skaggs and Emmylou. Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou. The list could go on through a litany of country greats and each one would probably remember their collaboration with Harris as among the highlights of their career. One of the most powerful harmonizers in the genre, her delicate singing style had a thread of iron running through it, a strength that gave her mournful twang a heartrending power that made her contributions to ballads and breakup songs essential to the evolution of country as a whole. It’s a shame then, that her solo career should be, while overall consistent, somewhat of a letdown, with a string of minor classics early in her career followed by a slew of releases that never really lived up to everything she offered as a singer. There are, to my mind, two albums that fully live up to the enormous artistic talent Emmylou’s displayed over the years: the titanic comeback that was 1995’s Wrecking Ball, and Roses In the Snow, perhaps the most complete expression of Emmylou’s potential and the perfect closer for the early period of her career.
Roses In The Snow, for the most part, stays true to bluegrass convention, although the music occasionally tends toward gospel and her country roots, two styles which have always had significant overlap with bluegrass. Ranging from wellworn classics to new compositions, she effortlessly makes each piece her own, indelibly marking her takes on the old classics and claiming the new cuts as incontrovertibly her own. Her take on Wayfaring Stranger, one of the archetypal examples of traditional American song, instantly becomes the standard against which all other iterations of the song are measured, the doleful hymn to the hope of a better world beyond this one a clear highlight in Emmylou’s career. No less astonishing is her take on Simon and Garfunkel’s The Boxer, which, by staying largely faithful to the original within her bluegrass framework, she more than lives up to, although she can’t quite lay claim to the song like she can with Wayfaring Stranger. From: https://www.sputnikmusic.com/review/78184/Emmylou-Harris-Roses-in-the-Snow/
