If you stuck a slotted spoon in the iron-bottomed stewpot known as country music, you’d fish out the predictable: heartbreak, lonesome highways, hungover mornings, red sunsets in rear-view mirrors, rodeos and the occasional comic tussle with the law thrown in for spice.
It brings no dishonor to country music to point out its cliches, to note that one of the pure and everlasting pleasures of the genre — of any genre, for that matter — is the sweet satisfaction of expectations met. With country music, you pretty much know what you’re getting. It’s good, it’s honest, but it’s no surprise.
And then there’s Emmylou Harris, who performs Friday at the Vic.
Harris’ new CD, “Red Dirt Girl” (Nonesuch), not only confounds the expectations of country music — something she has been doing for decades, of course — but also has something new to say about an endlessly familiar topic: Vietnam.
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Why, you may well wonder, would Harris tackle Vietnam? So many others have tried their artistic hands at this most daunting of topics; treatments come and go, rise and fall, according to some inscrutable chronology of loss and redemption. After the plays of David Rabe, the films of Oliver Stone and the books of David Halberstam, after the novels and songs and documentaries, after all that and so much more, why would Harris weigh in — and why now?
Yet here she is, applying the rascally twang and lilting scribble of her inimitable voice to that most controversial of American conflicts, the one that tore up families and friendships, the one that — like a broken bone set wrong and never allowed to heal properly — still aches when it rains.
Remember, though, that Harris is a songwriter, not a politician. “Red Dirt Girl” is about people, not ideologies, so anyone looking to use it to bolster a polemical essay (or a campaign) will come away frustrated.
Harris writes and sings about the lingering legacy of the war, about what it still means in places that are a three-day bus ride over bad road from Washington, D.C.
In the title song, that place is a small town in Alabama, where the narrator and her best friend Lilian used to hang out, “two red dirt girls in a red dirt town.” Lilian’s brother was full of dreams about the far horizon, but “he never got farther than Vietnam/I was standing there with her when the telegram come.”
Most of the song is about Lilian’s slow slide; her brother occupies only a couple of lines. But he pervades the work, which reveals the delicate mechanism of Harris’ art: She’s a beautifully oblique craftswoman, always coming in at an angle instead of straight ahead, creating her powerful effects with a touch here and a touch there. Before you know what’s hit you, you’re wounded by a quiet grace.
The other songs in “Red Dirt Girl” are similarly subtle, with Vietnam as a hint and a shadow, a distant murmur: “Gone now is the day and gone the sun/There is peace tonight all over Arlington,” she sings in “Bang the Drum Slowly,” but the line doesn’t come until deep in the song, when suddenly its meaning is clear.
“Red Dirt Girl” is filled to its rusty brim with martial imagery, and the arrangements feature an insistent percussion that could be the thud of a mortar shell — or the beat of a heart.
Harris has been expanding the borders of country music for some time now, which is why she’s often classified as “alternative” or “progressive” country. So this new work ought to be no surprise. But somehow it is, in the way that all works of art are surprises.
A clutch of songs about Vietnam in 2000.
Sometimes you don’t know what you’re hungry for until it’s right under your nose. Then you wonder how you ever lived without it.