Exploring God's Country

By RICHARD CORLISS

PERFORMER: EMMYLOU HARRIS

ALBUM: COWGIRL'S PRAYER

LABEL: ASYLUM

THE BOTTOM LINE: In songs sacred and secular, the conscience of country folk finds God in the strangest places.

Country music is usually city: Nashville, that is. For all its studied plaintiveness, its "real feel," commercial country carries the undertones of car-horn aggressiveness and jackhammer ambition. The Nashville road is paved with compromise, as songwriters search for a marketable hook and singers for the perfect perm.

Emmylou Harris' music is something else: defiantly rural, timeless -- true country. It has the sound of mountain streams, a ride out from the ranch, a chapel in the fields. Mostly the chapel, for Cowgirl's Prayer, her 22nd album, is boldly spiritual. It looks to God as the first and best of life: wisest parent, firmest friend, ultimate lover. And it sings out with unabashed fervor and clarity. If Deliverance had been about redemption and not about ( degradation, then the music you'd have heard on that backwoods porch could have been Emmylou's.

After a quarter-century of blurring the line between folk music and country, Harris has grown out of the wispy reed of a voice that made her sound frail and ethereal -- a kind of Bonnie Wraith. Now it is more mature, more intimate, readier to confront what's at stake in a lyric. The voice sounds learned in the world's ways, and weary of them: not lovelorn so much as lifelorn, and yearning for an answer, from inside or above.

The songs shift between the secular and the sacred, between what may be renounced (Loving You Again, about a compulsive affair) and what must be embraced (The Light). At times, one mood blends into the other. Beneath High Powered Love's gripe about body-beautiful narcissism ("Now is there anyone left with teeth just a little uneven/ Who won't spend more time with a mirror than he does with me") is the resolve that "I can't turn my back on a mission." And the bluesy Thanks to You sees God as "someone who will smile and say/ You're a mess but you're my child."

This is a funky theology. It might be expressed through cynicism, as in David Olney's Jerusalem Tomorrow, where a fake messiah runs up against the real thing. God could take the shape of a last hope (Prayer in Open D) or a best-loved animal (Leonard Cohen's majestic Ballad of a Runaway Horse). Harris' art is flexible enough to meet each song on its own terms. She makes the archaic cadences of Tony Arata's beautiful I Hear a Call ("I see a light/ Now will I follow/ I feel a touch/ Now will I hold on/ I hear a call/ Now will I answer") seem a reasonable response to the vacuity of much modern life and to the pinprick of hope at the center of that black hole.

If this gets Harris airplay on religious radio stations or a guest spot on The 700 Club, so be it. Cowgirl's Prayer still doesn't sound like a reactionary career move; the music is too tasty, too hip, to be narrowly pious or regional. Her country is a nation wide, and as high as you can get on heavenly love.