On This Day in 1979, Emmylou Harris Released Song Saved From a Failed Recording Session With Two Fellow Stars

One person’s misfortune can sometimes be another person’s good luck, which certainly seemed to be the case for Emmylou Harris in 1979. What started as a leftover from a failed recording session turned into a track on Harris’ Top 10 country album, Blue Kentucky Girl.

“Even Cowgirls Get The Blues”, named after the 1976 Tom Robbins novel, was originally meant for a collaborative album between Harris, Dolly Parton, and Linda Ronstadt. The Trio, as they called themselves, took the mainstream musical world by storm when they announced their intent to work together. But eventually, all that buzz began to cause more harm than good.

“It was such an exciting idea that everybody got bent out of shape over it,” Parton told Cash Box. “It just got disjointed somehow.” Still, hope wasn’t lost for everything that came out of those sessions.

Emmylou Harris Turned a Loss Into a Win

The intense hype around their collaborative album—and all three of their already incredibly busy schedules—meant that Emmylou Harris, Linda Ronstadt, and Dolly Parton were under immense pressure to make their trio album as quickly as possible in only ten days. In hindsight, the musicians realized that this was a mistake.

“You can’t do that,” Ronstadt told Cash Box. “We finished the record by killing ourselves, and we felt the quality just wasn’t up there. We were tired. Our voices were ragged. We hadn’t thought out clearly enough what we wanted the album to be.”

Harris added in the same interview, “We did get some things finished that were very good. ‘Mr. Sandman’ and ‘Cowgirls’, those were all good luck for me because they ended up on my albums.”

And indeed, they were good luck. Harris released “Even Cowgirls Get The Blues” on her 1978 album, Blue Kentucky Girl. This version featured Parton and Ronstadt on backing vocals. Though “Cowgirls” didn’t chart as a single, Harris enjoyed great success with the album as a whole. Blue Kentucky Girl peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart. It also achieved moderate crossover success, reaching No. 43 on the Billboard 200.

Almost four decades after The Trio’s failed recording sessions and Harris’ Top 10 album release, an alternate version of “Even Cowgirls Get The Blues” came out on a 2016 compilation called The Complete Trio Collection—proving that sometimes, early misfortunes can also turn into positives for everyone involved. It just takes a little time.

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