"I'll be your Emmylou and I'll be your June / if you'll be my Gram and my Johnny too," the band First Aid Kit sing in their 2012 song "Emmylou." The Emmylou of the title is of course Emmylou Harris and the Johnny, the legendary Johnny Cash. The June is June Carter Cash, the singer-songwriter and wife of Johnny for decades. But the Gram of the song is perhaps not so readily apparent; it's Gram Parsons, who had a musical partnership with Harris, one which never fully developed into a romance, as many artistic pairings do.
"Do writers only like to get with other writers?" a high school poet asked me years ago in a creative writing workshop I was teaching. I must have brought in work by Sylvia Plath and mentioned her marriage to Ted Hughes. Or taught Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Percy Shelley. Or Sandra Doller and Ben Doller, contemporary poets and partners who changed and combined their former last names (Miller and Doyle). Or any number of writers who did, in fact, get with other writers.
