Cowgirl's Prayer is the seventeenth studio album by American country artist Emmylou Harris, released on September 28, 1993, by Warner Bros. Records. Coming immediately after 1992's live acoustic At the Ryman album, Cowgirl's Prayer is a collection of similarly subdued material (with a couple of rockers thrown in, notably "High Powered Love", the album's first single). Released at a time when older artists (i.e. anyone over 40) were being dropped from country radio playlists, the album received little airplay, despite positive reviews, and its relative commercial failure is said to have served as a catalyst for Harris's decision to change course with the harder-edged sound of her subsequent work, beginning with 1995's rockish Wrecking Ball, thus rendering Cowgirl's Prayer Harris's last mainstream country album.
Despite the lack of radio airplay, accompanying videos for the album's three singles, "High Powered Love", the Cajun-themed "Crescent City", and Jesse Winchester's "Thanks to You", received considerable exposure on CMT.
The album's name is taken from the first line of the last song, "Say a prayer for the cowgirl". In Leonard Cohen's original song Ballad of the Absent Mare the subject is a cowboy, but for Jennifer Warnes' 1987 version Cohen changed the name of the song to Ballad of the Runaway Horse and the protagonist to a cowgirl.
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