You Oughta Know: Emmylou Harris, BLUEBIRD

30 years ago today, Emmylou Harris released an album which – as the title of this column suggests – you oughta know…and if you already know it, well, that’s okay, this’ll just remind you that you haven’t revisited it in awhile, which means that you can go do that right now and leave us to fill in the folks who aren’t aware of how awesome it is.

Co-produced by Harris and Richard Bennett, BLUEBIRD is an album which finds Harris tackling a variety of songs from the country music realm, including compositions by Rodney Crowell (“You’ve Been on My Mind”), John Hiatt (“Icy Blue Heart”), Tom Rush (“No Regrets”), and Butch Hancock (“If You Were a Bluebird”), not to mention Johnny Cash’s classic “I Still Miss Someone.”

At the time, Harris scored a top-10 country hit with her original composition, “Heartbreak Hill,” but BLUEBIRD unexpectedly found new appreciation a decade and a half later as a result of her version of Paul Kennereley’s “Heaven Only Knows” being utilized in an episode of HBO’s The Sopranos. To those of you who found the album at that point, we say, “Bravo!” For those of you who are about to discover it as soon as you hit “play,” boy, are you in for a treat…