With a career that has sold more than 15 million albums worldwide, garnered a remarkable 12 Grammy Awards and stirred music lovers for more than thirty years and counting, Emmylou Harris has been rightfully hailed as a major figure in several of America’s most important musical movements of the past three decades. A steadfast supporter of roots music and a skilled interpreter of compelling songs, she also has been associated with a diverse and dazzling array of admiring collaborators from Bright Eyes to Tammy Wynette and from Neil Young to Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash.

The songbird’s contributions to country-rock, the bluegrass revival, folk music, and the Americana movement are widely lauded, and in recent years Emmylou Harris certainly has carved out a sound that is uniquely her own. Her 1995 Wrecking Ball was a watershed album for her, combining several world-music elements with acoustic instruments, driving percussion, and a folk/roots flavor, and in general catching audiences by surprise, as Harris yet again reinvented her sound. The new style would evolve on a number of Harris’ subsequent releases, including 1998’s Spyboy, 1999’s Western Wall (a collaboration with Linda Ronstadt), 2000’s Red Dirt Girl and 2003’s Stumble into Grace.

Billboard magazine honored Emmylou Harris with its prestigious Century Award in 1999, aptly calling her a “truly venturesome, genre-transcending pathfinder. The Los Angeles Times praises the unfaltering quality of her work, saying, Emmylou Harris “has made consistently outstanding musical choices over her 35-plus-year career.” But perhaps even more outstanding than her selections, is her beautifully crystalline voice, about which the New York Times says, it “inhabits her songs like a wraith, intangible but omnipresent.”

In 2007, Rhino Records celebrates Emmylou’s distinguished career with a 4-CD, 1-DVD boxed set featuring previously unreleased material, demos, studio tracks, collaborative work with other artists, and a DVD of videos and performances beginning with The Hot Band in the 1970s. Songbird: Rare Tracks and Forgotten Gems releases September 18, 2007. Her forthcoming studio album will release on Nonesuch records in the spring of 2008.