Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell at Damrosch Park

Country music purists Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell first met and began collaborating in 1974. Harris began recording many of the songs that Crowell wrote, and Crowell joined her backing musicians, the Hot Band, and toured with her for years before launching a solo career. Over the years, Harris recorded about 20 of Crowell's songs and sang backup on his debut album. They often spoke about recording a duet album. Nearly 40 years after those talks began, their duet album, Old Yellow Moon, was released in 2013 and won them Grammy and Americana Awards in 2014.

Fans overflowed even into neighboring spaces with no sight lines as Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell performed together tonight at a free outdoor concert in Damrosch Park, part of the Lincoln Center's Out-of-Doors AmericanaFest week. Harris sang lead on most of the songs, but Crowell sang many and harmonized alongside Harris on most of the other songs. The hidden star of the night, however, was their guitarist, Jedd Hughes, who lit up the opening song, "Return of the Grievous Angel," with the first of many fluid rockabilly leads throughout the evening. The Harris and Crowell shimmery harmonies became more evident in the second song, "Wheels," a country highway tune, and were plentiful thereafter. The rest of the 17-song set proved that Crowell is a gem of a writer (although not all songs were written by him) and Harris is a master stylist, as they interpreted lilting hard-luck tales as in "Love Hurts", slow country waltzes including "Old Yellow Moon" and country stompers like "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues." Harris added personality to the show by reminiscing about how she was a "horrible waitress" in New York and performed her first gigs on a New York stage at Gerde's Folk City and later with Gram Parsons at Max's Kansas City. The evening was a delight; hopefully it will not take 40 years to regroup the sterling pair of Harris and Crowell in a duet set.