Country Music International - Trio II

Ever since Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris recorded their 
acclaimed Trio album in 1987 aficionados have been awaiting the highly-touted 
follow-up. The wait is finally over, but the newly released Trio II could have 
been issued almost five years ago. Alan Cackett investigates just why the 
completed album has spent that Time gathering dust in the vaults.

Released in 1987, The original Trio album scored platinum sales, collected a 
Grammy, an Academy of Country Music Association award and produced four hit 
singles. It also marked the first time that three major female superstars had 
collaborated on a musical project, and became an inspiration for a generation of 
women performers to come. In all it had taken almost ten years from when the idea 
had first been mooted to come to fruition, so it comes as no surprise that the 
followup, Trio II, should take another dozen years to see the light of day.

Just why Dolly, Linda and Emmylou wanted to team up in the first place is complex, 
but comes from a unique admiration of each other's vocal and musical skills. Linda 
first met Dolly in 1970. At the time Ronstadt was visiting the Grand Ole Opry in 
Nashville and was struggling to get her feet as a performer. Two years later, she 
attended a Gram Parsons concert in Texas and heard Emmylou Harris sing.


"What she was doing just blew me away," Ronstadt recalls. "She had it all. When I 
met Emmy I asked her 'Who's your favourite singer?' She said 'I really like Dolly 
Parton." Jolene was on the radio then and we both really liked that."

Collaborations have always figured strongly in all three singer's careers. 
Ronstadt added harmonies to Shel Silverstein's Queen Of The Silver Dollar, one of 
the tracks on Harris' Pieces Of The Sky album, while Harris returned the 
compliment by singing on Ronstadt's I Can't Help It (If I'm Still In Love With 
You).

"When Emmy was in LA, she called me up and said 'Dolly Parton is at my house, come 
over," continues Ronstadt. "It was just a fluke that we got to be in the same room 
with Dolly and began to sing with her. We were just sitting on the sofa in her 
living room, and when we sat down and started to sing it was really good. All I 
remember is the sound - It was beautiful. It gave me goosebumps."

"That was the first time all three of us had been together at the same time," 
recalls Dolly. "The first thing we did was grab a guitar and start singing old 
Carter Family songs. It was beautiful, a real Appalachian sound. We all looked at 
one another and said 'Wow! What a great sound' I can remember Emmy saying 'We have 
to do a record'. The seeds of Trio were sown."

That was in 1975. Later that year, Linda cut Dolly's I Will Always Love You, 
Emmylou recorded Coat Of Many Colours and three of them got together on Emmylou's 
Christmas single, Light Of The Stable. The following year Linda and Emmylou went 
to Nashville to introduce the trio sound on Dolly's syndicated TV show Dolly!

The threesome first went into the studio the following year and laid down 10 or 12 
tracks, including and early version of Dolly's Do I Ever Cross your Mind, My Blue 
Tears, which wound up on Linda's Get Closer album in 1982, and a revival of Mr 
Sandman, with which Emmylou scored a hit single in 1981. But due to scheduling, 
the whole project was abandoned, though they continued to guest on each others 
recordings., most notably Emmylou's Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, which featured 
all three.

The trio reconvened in the studio in 1986 and the long anticipated album appeared 
a year later. They made a number of media appearances, including the 1986 CMAs 
Awards Telecast, issued a string of hit singles and resolved to continue their 
collaboration. "It seems like when we did the Trio record nobody was interested in 
traditional music," says Ronstadt, "But that record was pretty successful, and at 
that point Ricky Skaggs was extremely successful. Trio is something ultraspecial 
in my life. When I hear those records it makes me really happy because I know that 
we succeeded in doing exactly what we set out to do. The sound just always charms 
and captivates me."

The next major obstacle was how to recapture the magic of that album, and how to 
overcome scheduling problems so that all three singers, could not only find time 
to get in the studio together, but meet up beforehand to discuss song ideas, 
musical arrangements and vocal harmonies. While there were a few false starts, no 
progress was made beyond informal talks until 1993.

"We got together in the Fall in San Francisco to pick songs," recalls Emmylou. 
"Then we started recording and were done by the late Spring of '94. We thought we
 should really promote Trio II, but everybody's schedule was crazy, so it never 
happened, the wind went out of the sails. Everything just got shelved."

Emmylou makes it sound pretty straightforward, but Linda saw it differently. As 
she recalls, the second trio album grew out of her and Emmylou wanting to make 
some kind of duet album with guest artists. "Emmy and I did quite a lot of singing 
together," Ronstadt explains. "We had a great time. We started out with this idea 
to do a record together where we could use some guest artists."

"I really felt we should talk to Dolly as a courtesy. At first she said she was 
busy with Tammy Wynette. Then she changed her mind. We asked her to guest, but she 
wanted a full-on Trio or nothing. I'm the one who talked Emmy into it. Who knew 
when we were going to get another opportunity to do it?"

The apparently difficult task of choosing the songs was actually fairly simple. 
"It's time consuming, but we all just bring in songs," Dolly explains. "Emmylou 
collects songs all the time, and she has the biggest and best batch of songs. I 
bring some things that I think will be good and so does Linda. We play them and 
try them out and see if they suit our harmony sound, so we do have a way of 
narrowing the songs down. Then we all try to sing lead and experiment with 
different harmonies. We never have ego problems, never fight or argue. The songs 
tend to speak for themselves and call out for who should sing them."

Given the singers' divergent careers it had seemed unlikely that they would ever 
reunite until all three co-ordinated their schedules and assembled a crack band 
that included multi-instrumentalist David Lindley, fiddle player Alison Krauss, 
mandolin wizard David Grisman, guitarists Carl Jackson and Dean Parks, drummers 
Russ Kunkel and Jim Keltner and bassists Roy Huskey Jnr and Leyland Skar. From the 
outset, however there were problems. "Dolly missed the first 10 days of 
recording." says Ronstadt. "It was hard for her to make this a priority. I think a 
lot of other things kept coming in that were tempting."

Parton eventually arrived and laid down her vocals, but after the album was 
completed and ready for pressing, her management began tinkering with the release 
date: they wanted the disc held until after Dolly's solo album had come out. A 
rift opened and the new Trio record fell in.

For all three singers, the mid 90's were a period of change. No longer where they 
fixtures on the radio or the charts, but each had reached that enviable superstar 
status where they could afford to take musical risks. Ronstadt had been exploring 
different musical directions from Mas Canciones, a Spanish-language album of 
traditional Mexican songs, through to Afro-Cuban influenced Frenesi to the 
contemporary pop of Winter Light. Harris had also been getting itchy musical feet 
after she found that mainstream country radio was rejecting her traditional-
slanted country music. She had discussed doing something musically different with 
Ronstadt, and would shortly team up with Daniel Lanois for the groundbreaking 
Wrecking Ball sessions.

Parton was finishing work on Honky Tonk Angels, a Trio album with Tammy Wynette 
and Loretta Lynn. At the time, her own albums were still reaching gold and 
platinum, and she and her management were not keen to follow one Trio project with 
another, even though the Ronstadt-Harris-Parton album was guaranteed heavy media 
attention. She was already planning her next solo album, Heartsongs, and it was 
that album she wanted as her next release.

"Emmy and I felt we couldn't wait to put out another Trio record and then wait 
another six months after that for our own solo records," Ronstadt says. "We would 
have wound up waiting two years to put our own records out. It didn't seem fair 
and it didn't seem possible to really trust that finally down the line there 
wouldn't we another change. So we decided to take the record apart."

"We had already decided that the Trio album was not going to come out," says 
Parton. "So I bought a couple of the tracks and Linda bought some, and we put the 
songs on our own album. We knew the Trio album wasn't going to happen because the 
record label didn't want to release it unless we were able to tour and promote it. 
I felt fine about that. Linda's album didn't sell anything and the album I put out 
didn't sell a thing either. So it didn't hurt anything at all."

So what originally had been planned as a duo album, then a trio album, turn out to 
be a Linda Ronstadt solo album. Linda put the arrangements of High Sierra, Feels 
Like Home, Lover's Return, The Blue Train and After The Goldrush on her 1995 Feels 
Like Home CD, and she also resurrected three songs that Parton and Harris had 
rejected for the Trio project, one of which was Matraca Berg's Walk On. With the 
original album having been dissected so thoroughly by Ronstadt, the possibility of 
the Trio II album ever seeing the light of day seemed totally out of the question.

Parton replicated After The Goldrush on her 1996 Treasures album and also recorded 
Just When I Needed You Most, a song intended for the second Trio album, with 
Alison Krauss and Suzanne Cox proving ethereal harmonies. "I thought that would 
sound beautiful with the Trio," Parton says, "but it just didn't work out. Even a 
song you think would be great doesn't always sound that good with the Trio. You 
just never know until you start to sing them."

"Last year Linda called and said she'd been listening to the Trio album and it 
sounded great," Parton adds, "She wanted to know what I thought about putting it 
out. I said that's a great idea. To me, it sounds as good and fresh now as it did 
back then."

The tracks were dusted off, reassembled and put together for an exquisite 
listening experience. The edge was taken off a little because half the album had 
been heard, albeit in slightly different arrangements on Linda's Feels Like Home 
album, but it is still assured of being a hit with fans of all three singers. Trio 
II is a solid slice of country heaven and a magical piece of musical serendipity 
that gives an impression of some informal back-porch picking and singing that has 
been perfectly captured on tape for posterity. "I don't know if any of us thought 
it would ever come out." says Emmylou. "Maybe after we were dead or something. but 
it was a lovely record and I guess somebody at the record company heard it and 
went, "Wow, Let's just put it out'!"