In the summer of 1982, I was 19, and the economy for teenagers wasn’t a whole lot better than it is today.

But I lucked out, and got a job – a full-time (48 hour a week) gig at a radio station in Carrington, North Dakota – a little town of about 2,000 people about forty miles north of Jamestown.

I held a lot of jobs at that little station over that summer; morning guy, afternoon guy, production guy, sometimes news and play-by-play guy…

…and in my “spare” time, “Music Director”; I added and pulled songs from the rotation, and kept things in some kind of rough order.

Now, I wasn’t a country-western kind of guy; I was more into Springsteen, the Clash, the Pistols, the Iron City Houserockers, that kind of thing.

And even if I had been a country kind of guy, it was a terrible time in the history of country-western music.  The dominant subgenre of the era, “Country Crossover” – an extended attempt by Nashville to get country to cross over to the pop charts and audience – led to some of the most dismal, sterile, vapid country-pop music in the history of the genre.   Kenny Rogers, Barbra Mandrell, Lee Greenwood, Crystal Gayle, Eddie Rabbit and a long slew of pseudo-pop crossover acts dominated the charts; the few “traditional” country artists – George Strait, Randy Travis, the Gatlins, and the just-emerging Judds  and a very young Ricky Skaggs – were outlying curios, while the “Outlaw Movement”, the paleotraditional mob led by Waylon Jennings, Hank Williams Jr., Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash, were vaguely threatening (but extremely successful – which should have told somebody something).

Now, being a rock and roll guy who’d grown up in a not-overly-music household, most of that was pretty opaque to me at the time, and didn’t become clear to me for quite a while.  Country, to the 19 year old me, had divided into two camps; poppy country and twangy country.  And to me, there wasn’t much to tie either of them to the larger American musical tradition.

Hey, I said I was 19.

At any rate, on a boring Sunday afternoon I was flipping through the stacks of old albums – and I found a copy of this record:

Roses in the Snow, by Emmylou Harris, which was released thirty years ago today.

I slapped it onto a turntable.

It was something…not “unfamiliar”, per se; I’d learned a little bit of bluegrass while learning the guitar a scant four or five years before.  But this wasn’t the generic rip-roaring “Hillbilly Techno” that I remembered; this was a meandering trip across middle America heard with a Kentucky accent with guitars and mandolins in the background.

And on about the second listen, it slammed into me like a runaway coal cart.

Emmylou Harris had had quite a career already; in the less-than-a-decade after she’d gotten into the music business (after starting out as a teacher), she’d played the Washington DC bluegrass circuit, recorded with and been the muse for former Byrd Gram Parsons, struck out on her own after his death, and had a brief but productive run at mainstream country chart success, doing ever-so-slightly traditionally-themed music that pushed country pop’s progressive envelope; Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town and Luxury Liner were brilliant, glossy records that had a sharp twang but an ear for the modern.  Harris was on the far modern fringes of the genre.

Roses In The Snow was her “back to basics” effort; a return to the bluegrass form.  But rather than diving straight back into traditional mountain music, Roses interpreted other genres – honky-tonk, pop, country swing, even top-forty pop – through a bluegrass lens.  Recorded with an all-star cast of traditional musicians – Brian Ahern  and Albert Lee on guitar, Emory Gordy on bass, Ricky Skaggs on a whole slew of instruments, and guest-vocal shots from Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash and Linda Ronstadt, and Willy Nelson sitting in on guitar – the album smoked with all the proficiency of her seventies-era “Hot Band”, but with a twang that came less from Texas than from up the holler.

And it was spectacular.

The title cut – a blistering-yet-poignant raveup written by Ruth Franks and featuring The Whites on backup vocals – set the stage; this was no dozey Barbra Mandrell record:

(This version from the early nineties, featuring her “Nash Ramblers” backing band)

The old traditional “Wayfaring Stranger”, the Stanley Brothers’ classic “The Darkest Hour Is Just Before Dawn”, a duet with Skaggs, and “Green Pastures”, with Skaggs and Dolly Parton, extend the title cut’s theme – traditional mountain country music is about the constant loss that pervaded rural American life until not all that long ago.

“I’ll Go Stepping Too” (sung with Skaggs and Tony Rice), Bill Halley’s “Miss the Mississippi” and the A.P. Carter paleocountry classic “”Gold Watch and Chain” are steps through the traditional country playbook; the traditional “Jordan”, featuring Skaggs, Rice and Johnny Cash, is an intricate, gorgeous standout.

But stuck at the end of Side 1 was the album’s standout; a cover of Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Boxer”.

(again, this is with the Nash Ramblers)

Where the original Simon and Garfunkel song was largely a vocal production piece that was both gorgeous and just a little bit hollow – nobody could possibly believe show-biz prodigy Simon could identify with the protagonist any way but literarily.  Harris’ version rings with the weariness a million boys and girls from the holler, and every other corner of rural America, who went to the big city in search of something better, or at least different, for their lives.  You can hear echoes of the Okies moving to California to find land and water andmountain folk moving to Cincinnati and Chicago for jobs, and World War II veterans knocking around port cities all over the place, “laying out their winter clothes, and wishing they were home”, awash in isolation and alienation…

It’s one of the rare cover versions that completely obliterates and excellent original.

Totally worth a listen.