Live in 1978

Live in 1978 is an unofficial CD issued in Europe in 2013 by the All Access label (AACD0117), credited to Emmylou Harris with the Hot Band and Ricky Skaggs. It was not made as an album: it collects two FM radio broadcasts from 1978. The first fourteen tracks come from a WXRT broadcast of Harris’s set for the PBS series Soundstage on 19 October 1978. The last six come from a KFAT broadcast from the Catalyst in Santa Cruz, California, on 15 June 1978. A vinyl edition followed in 2014 on the UK label Let Them Eat Vinyl.

The Soundstage set opens with “Two More Bottles of Wine,” one of the five songs Harris had taken to number one on the country charts by 1980. It goes on through “Luxury Liner,” “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,” “My Window Faces the South” and “Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” and ends with “The Angels Rejoiced Last Night,” “Leavin’ Louisiana in the Broad Daylight” and “Hallelujah I’m Ready to Go.” The Santa Cruz set includes “If I Needed You,” “Satan’s Jewel Crown,” “Keep on the Sunny Side” and “Under the Weepin’ Willow.”

Skaggs spent a few years in the Hot Band, singing harmony and playing mandolin and fiddle, and he arranged Harris’s 1980 album Roses in the Snow. He launched his own career in 1980 and left the band around 1981, when Barry Tashian replaced him.