Emmylou Harris, with Jim Lauderdale
Emirates Arena, Glasgow
★★★★☆

SAY what you like about Emmylou Harris – but she hasn’t lowered her live ambitions. Willy Nelson still puts on a stand-out show in his 90s, but he gives his voice box and fingertips a break every three or four songs. Even Jane Birkin, whose singing voice (and French accent) improved with age, gave up attempting the high-pitched shebams and whizzes of Serge Gainsbourg’s “Comic Strip” in later life.

Harris, however, performed continuously for almost two hours in Glasgow on Friday night. Turning 79 in April, her upcoming dates are billed as her final European tour – but she still attempts a full vocal range and the full complexity of the arrangements that have made her one of country music’s foremost interpreters. On occasion she missed. More often her high notes were compromised by the poor acoustics of a venue built for sport and about as intimate as Silverburn shopping centre. But the sheer magnetism of her presence and performance saved her every time.

Support act Jim Lauderdale, an acclaimed country singer-songwriter who credits his breakthrough to Harris’s support, built the mood with soulful classics and a forthcoming song he believes to be the first country track about its subject – Artificial Intelligence.

After Harris took to the stage, stetsons twirled in the stands to favourites like Orphan Girl and Two More Bottles of Wine. But her greatest numbers were those that she felt required the most explanation. “You have to suffer if you want to sing the blues,” she told us before the nostalgic Red Dirt Girl, “but I guess I made this one up.” It takes her particular twang and vocal flexibility to rhyme “when” and “Indian,” not to mention “thin” and “Gideon.” She paid a heartfelt tribute to Nelson – and chided him and Merle Haggard for stealing her arrangement – before Townes van Zandt’s Pancho and Lefty. Harris’s intonation, enriched rather than compromised by the gravel of experience, gave what is already one of country’s most powerful lyrics a fresh intensity.

For a first time performance, she chose not recent material but Help Him, Jesus, a track originally performed by Johnny Cash on the concept album The Legend of Jesse James – in which Harris originally played a different role. The self-reflective All the Roadrunning, written by Dire Straits’ Mark Knopfler for a joint album and tour 20 years ago, brought the concert full circle – lifting spirits on and off the stage while marking the sacrifices that lie behind the greatest art like no song since The Kinks’ This Time Tomorrow. Those who don’t like the danger, she sang, soon find something different to try.

UK tour continues in May. For tickets and information see: emmylouharris.com