Emmylou Harris Linda Ronstadt

Harris' second hits collection is highlighted by a pair of chart-toppers, "Beneath Still Waters" and "(Lost His Love) On Our Last Date." It also includes the Top Five smashes "Born to Run," "I'm Movin' On" and "Save the Last Dance for Me."…

Emmylou Harris is an artist with the rare sort of voice that communicates an honest and firmly grounded humanity while possessing a crystalline purity that verges on the angelic. In short, she was a singer born to make a great Christmas album, and in 1979 she did just that with Light of the Stable, in which she fused the high-lonesome traditional sound she'd been exploring on Roses in the Snow and Blue Kentucky Girl with songs that honored the spiritual and emotional roots of the holiday season…

Rhino Records asked producer Brian Ahern to select his favorite tracks from the Emmylou Harris albums he helmed – he produced her first 11 studio offerings for Reprise Records. That's quite a daunting task when you consider that some of those recordings were Elite Hotel, Luxury Liner, Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town, and Pieces of the Sky, just to name a few. But Ahern rose to the task and put together a solid, aesthetically perfect set here, highlighting many different aspects of Harris' career at the time: from her trademark, utterly pure singing voice, to her song selection, to the sound of her band and the studio she recorded in, this is a top-notch set from start to finish and serves as an excellent introduction to her early work for the newcomer…

Linda Ronstadt's generically titled four-CD, five-hour, 86-track box set retrospective attempts with considerable success to encompass the many types of music she's sung from the mid-'60s to the late '90s. The album is divided into five unequal parts, with 31 tracks given over to an "Album Retrospective," followed by seven tracks from "The Nelson Riddle Sessions," her three albums of classic pop, then five songs "En Español," drawn from her three Spanish language albums. That takes up the first two discs, with the third disc consisting of 20 "Collaborations" and the fourth 23 "Rarities".

By nature, Linda Ronstadt isn't a solo singer. She started her career in the Stone Poneys and during the height of her fame she was happy to harmonize on records by friends; later still, she joined Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris in the group Trio. Duets, a compilation released on the eve of her 2014 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, doesn't concentrate on this considerable legacy as a harmonizer, preferring instead to pick 14 previously released duets from throughout Ronstadt's career, adding an unreleased version of "Pretty Bird" with Laurie Lewis as mild collector bait…

Portraits is a three-disc, 61-track box set covering Emmylou Harris' entire career for Reprise and Warner Records, which spans from 1974 to 1992. Not only does the box select highlights from classic albums like Luxury Liner, Roses in the Snow, and Blue Kentucky Girl, but it also features her early duets with Gram Parsons and selections from the Trio album she recorded with Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt.