Emmylou Harris, Dolores Keane, & Mary Black: Sonny

From the Bringing It All Back Home sessions in 1990 in Nashville. An early celebration of the connections between American country music and the music of Ireland, this project brought several Irish musicians, including Mary Black and Dolores Keane, to Music City for collaborations with the likes of Harris and John Prine. This is a really grim song, not one of my favorites at all in the history of grim Irish family dreams gone wrong songs, but it's worth the listening to hear the three sing togther. The back up band has some well known players, too: see if you can name them. And though the song itself sounds very traditional, it was actually written by Canadian songwriter Ron Hynes.

Harris, by the way, has new box set due out in a couple of weeks. A career retrospective for which she was involved in selecting the tracks, it is called Songbird,