Gig review: Emmylou Harris

DESPITE retaining the girlish sweetness to her voice and an elegant glamour in her bearing, Emmylou Harris finds herself in a nostalgic frame of mind, bidding farewell to old friends and reminiscing about songs she wrote when she was "still a brunette".

This concert featured tributes to dear associates Gram Parsons and Kate McGarrigle: Parsons is long gone but Harris revisited his memory in sedate style on The Road; Darlin' Kate, her lovely tribute to her late friend Kate McGarrigle, was the more affecting valediction of the two.

The latter was her only solo performance of the night. One might have wished for more, were Harris not accompanied by her ensemble the Red Dirt Boys, with whom she shares such an unforced chemistry that this gig felt at times like a campfire singalong. As well as featuring players as gifted as fiddler Rickie Simpkins, these Boys were beautifully, unobtrusively in vocal harmony with her, creating a lovely tonal blend on one semi-acapella bluegrass number.

Elsewhere, she satisfied her "Merle urge", scratched her Dylan itch and did justice to Ron Sexsmith's characteristically melancholic Hard Bargain. Her own new songs, such as My Name Is Emmett Till, a prosaic storytelling of the black teenager whose lynching in 1955 fuelled the civil rights movement, tended towards the pleasant, easy-listening end of country rock – never a chore to witness but lacking the dynamism she was able to muster elsewhere when she followed the gentle gospel elegy Green Pastures with the bluegrass hoedown Get Up John or the classic tear-in-her-beer atmosphere of her beloved ballad Together Again.