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Foreword
An Appreciation
I first heard Porter and Dolly coming through the speakers of
my brother’s late model Road Runner convertible. It was 1968 and
he was driving me from Washington, D.C. to New York City, where
I would join the unsuccessful line of young women hoping to
become the next Joan Baez. My brother had been, for as long as
I could remember, a serious fan of country music, back when it
really wasn’t cool, and I think it gave him some perverse broth-
erly pleasure to point out that the song we were hearing,
The Last
Thing On My Mind
, was penned by Tom Paxton, an artist revered
by folkies like myself who looked down on the likes of people
dressing in rhinestones and spending way too much time on their
hair.
But even to me, then, an upstart living in a musical and
cultural bubble, I knew instinctively there was something special
happening between those two unique and seemingly disparate
voices – Dolly’s soprano, pure and crystalline, lilting and lovely,
with Porter’s earnest baritone planted firmly on solid ground,
lifting her up like those ballet dancers that appear to defy all
physical and natural law, in a sonic dance that took your breath
away.
It would be years later before I was truly humbled by the high
art and soul of duet singing and its power to tell the story of the
human heart, broken and otherwise, but Porter and Dolly
became the gold standard for me and remain so to this day.
At a time when the airwaves and ipods spew out bloodless and
over-calculated offerings of a once venerable genre, this is the
real deal, my friends – country music the way God intended. And
if there is a radio station in heaven, Porter and Dolly will always
be in heavy rotation.
Emmylou Harris
Nashville, January 2014
