Folk/pop duo

The Indigo Girls are "ideal duet partners," announced Jerry Guterman in Rolling Stone. "Their voices soar and swoop as one.. .and when they sing.. .they radiate a sense of shared purpose." The duo, made up of Amy Ray and Emily Saliers, have enjoyed tremendous success with the release of their first album on a major label, Indigo Girls. "Closer to Fine," an upbeat single from the disc, has proved especially popular, and its accompanying video has seen much airplay on video stations such as MTV and VH-1. Despite the darker tones of many of the album's other numbers—tones which led a People reviewer to call listening to Indigo Girls "in one sitting a rather grim experience"—Ray and Saliers have received much critical acclaim for their 1989 effort.

Both women sing, compose, and play acoustic guitar, and both started practicing their arts as youngsters. Saliers, who spent her earlier years in New Haven, Connecticut, before her family relocated to the Atlanta suburb of Decatur, Georgia, began composing songs when she was nine. She confessed to a People reporter, however, that her lyrics "made no sense." Ray performed at parties given by relatives in her youth, and her grandmother tried unsuccessfully to gain her an audition for the country music variety show "Hee Haw." The future partners met during grade school in Decatur but had little to do with each other. "We had this unspoken competition because we both played the guitar," Saliers explained in People.

When the two young women reached high school, however, they began performing as a team. Calling themselves simply Saliers and Ray, they played in an Atlanta bar on amateur nights. Their repertoire at this point predominantly consisted of folk standards, but they would occasionally slip in their own compositions. Eventually, when they both found themselves attending Atlanta's Emory University—Ray studying religion and Saliers English—they decided to change their moniker. "I found [indigo] in the dictionary," Ray told People. "It's a deep blue, a root—real earthy."

As the women prepared to graduate from Emory, Ray was totally committed to a musical career, but Saliers wavered. Moira McCormick reported in Rolling Stone that Ray handed her partner "an ultimatum, and Saliers chose the group." As the latter told McCormick, "from then on, we were making career decisions." Saliers further explained that Ray then felt that "we needed to play rock & roll clubs instead of folk clubs," because the Indigo Girls were being stereotyped as pop-folk artists. Despite their good intentions, however, the perception persisted. A Stereo Review critic included in his assessment of Indigo Girls the compliment, "This is red-blooded folk music with no holds barred."

Wanting their music to remain completely independent of others' control, the Indigo Girls began recording on their own Indigo label. They cut "Crazy Game," a single, in 1985; an extended-play record in 1986; and an album entitled Strange Fire in 1987. This strategy "was working," Ray claimed to McCormick. "We were making a living. But we had so much to do, we were just falling apart." So the duo signed a contract with Epic Records in 1988, but only after the company had reassured them on the issue of artistic control. In the meantime, the Indigo Girls had acquired successful musicians among their growing number of fans, including the groups R.E.M. and Hothouse Flowers, both of which contributed their talents to the duo's first Epic album. Indigo Girls was helped in its accomplishment of selling over five hundred thousand copies by the fact that its artists served as the opening act for several R.E.M. concerts.

With the Indigo Girls' popularity established, Epic planned to reissue their extended-play effort and to release an altered version of Strange Fire. As for new material, according to McCormick, Saliers answers critics' charges of over-seriousness thus: "It's possible that in the future we'll write more songs with comic relief. But we've just been writing what we felt."

—Elizabeth Thomas