SHE SLEPT IN HER CAR IN THE PARKING LOT OF THE JOSHUA TREE INN — SEPTEMBER 19, 1973. Emmylou Harris was 26. She was not Gram Parsons’ wife. She was not his girlfriend. She was the harmony singer he had pulled out of a Washington D.C. folk club eight months earlier and taught how to sing country music. He overdosed in Room 8 that night. She was in Maryland when the call came. She drove straight through, 200 miles, and stopped at the motel because she did not know where else to go. She had no right to be at the funeral. His widow made that clear. So she sat in the gravel lot until the sun came up, then drove home. Two years later she released her first solo album. The first track was a song Gram had taught her in a hotel room in Nashville. She has been singing his songs for fifty-three years now. What was the last thing he said to her on the phone three days before he died?
admin September 19, 1973, has become one of those dates that country-rock fans speak about quietly. It was the night Gram Parsons died at the Joshua Tree Inn in California, in…