“Evangeline (With the Band)” is a midnight hymn to the South—half lullaby, half legend—where Emmylou Harris and The Band turn one woman’s name into a whole landscape of longing.
If you want the most important context first: this “Evangeline (With the Band) – 2008 Remaster” is the famed collaboration that grew out of The Band’s farewell-era world, tied directly to The Last Waltz. The Last Waltz concert took place on November 25, 1976 at Winterland in San Francisco, and the project was released as a film and soundtrack in 1978. The performance of “Evangeline”—written by Robbie Robertson—was recorded in that orbit and first released on The Last Waltz album on April 16, 1978 (with the recording history commonly listing the first recording date as November 26, 1976).
Now, the version you named—“2008 Remaster”—has its own “second life” story. The track appears on Duets, Emmylou Harris’s compilation released July 24, 1990 on Reprise, later issued in a 2008 remaster across digital and reissue editions. In 1990, Duets reached No. 24 on Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart—so while “Evangeline” isn’t a single-chasing radio statistic here, it’s very much part of a charting, widely heard release that preserved these collaborations as living documents.
Why does this particular “Evangeline” matter so much? Because it catches three kinds of American music meeting in one candlelit room: Emmylou’s crystalline country ache, The Band’s earthy root-rock authority, and Robbie Robertson’s gift for turning a name into myth. On paper, it’s just a song title. In the air, it becomes a character you can almost see—Evangeline as an emblem of Southern romance and sorrow, the kind of figure who lives somewhere between front-porch memory and riverbank fog.
Listen closely and you can hear why people speak about this performance the way they speak about places they once loved. The Band plays with that deep-pocket ease—music that doesn’t “rush” the story, it carries it—while Emmylou Harris floats above the groove like a spirit you trust. The magic is not volume; it’s balance. She never bullies her way into the song. She threads herself into it, letting the arrangement keep its weight while her voice supplies the light.
There’s also something quietly poignant about the timing. The Last Waltz was framed as a farewell: a closing chapter where a band that had shaped an era took a bow with friends at their side. So when Emmylou steps into “Evangeline”, it doesn’t feel like “guest star” sparkle. It feels like kinship—one tradition recognizing another. A country singer standing among rock-and-roll giants, and sounding not smaller, but essential—as if the song had been waiting for her voice to reveal its last secret.
And then, the afterlife: in 1981, Emmylou recorded “Evangeline” again for her album Evangeline (released February 4, 1981), this time with harmony vocals by Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt—another breathtaking constellation of voices around the same name. That’s how you know a song has real gravitational pull: it keeps returning, wearing different clothes, and still meaning the same thing.
So what does “Evangeline (With the Band)” ultimately mean? It’s a love song, yes—but also a song about how legends are made. About how the South, in American music, is as much a feeling as a geography: a place where desire and loss speak the same dialect. And in this performance—polished by the 2008 remaster but emotionally unchanged—you don’t merely hear a track from an archive. You hear a moment of shared breath: Emmylou Harris and The Band turning a farewell-era stage into a small chapel, and letting “Evangeline” drift out like a prayer you didn’t know you still remembered.
