LONG before Joan Osborne, Sheryl Crow, Liz Phair or Courtney Love ever splashed across the American musical landscape, the Indigo Girls were singing and guitar-slinging their way into the hearts and minds of anyone willing to lend an ear to two of the hardest-working women in the music business. Stripped-down, folkie rock was not exactly prime radio fodder at the end of the eighties, but somehow the Amy Ray and Emily Saliers combination of thoughtful, semi-political topics, accessible melodies, and feminist posturing caught on, both with the college-radio crowd and a more mainstream audience. Add in the duo's indefatigable approach to touring, and you get a long-lasting formula for success.

When she was in sixth grade, Emily and her family moved to Decatur, Georgia, and she began attending Laurel Ridge Elementary School, where Amy was a fifth grader. When both were in high school, they started playing music together in preparation for a school talent show, and were soon performing at open-mike nights at local bars, calling themselves either "Saliers and Ray" or "The B-Band."

By 1981, Emily and Amy had completed their first basement tape (literally - it was recorded in Amy's basement) called Tuesday's Children, a collection of cover songs augmented with two original tunes. Amy continued her songwriting and, the following year, she recorded a solo tape of her own material called Color Me Grey. After high school, Emily became an English major at Tulane University, and the next year, Amy headed off to Nashville to study English and religion at Vanderbilt. But being away from home didn't sit too well with either, and by 1984 both were back in Atlanta as students at Emory University. In 1985, again performing together on a regular basis, they decided to go by the name Indigo Girls. In one of the time-honored traditions of rock, the name held no real significance - Amy chose "indigo" from the dictionary because the word sounded cool.

The first official release from the Indigo Girls was the independent seven-inch single "Crazy Game," and in 1986 they followed up with a six-track EP engineered by local singer-songwriter Kristen Hall. In 1987, Emily and Amy put out their full-length debut, Strange Fire, and while it didn't generate a great deal of interest, its release was impeccably timed. Tracy Chapman and Suzanne Vega had just broken through on radio and on the charts, and suddenly, the growing field of women singer-songwriters moved into the mainstream.

Epic Records saw potential in the Indigo Girls, and the label signed the duo in 1988. Their eponymous debut album on the label, released in early 1989, established the duo as a force on the national scene. They were initially bolstered by the instant cachet of a guest appearance by REM's Michael Stipe, as well as by having Irish rockers Hothouse Flowers as their backing band for several tracks. But it was the radio success of "Closer to Fine" that ultimately broke the album, and six months after its release, Indigo Girls went gold. By the spring, the Girls had been nominated for a Best New Artist Grammy and took home the award for Best Contemporary Folk Recording. The release of Nomads*Indians*Saints followed in the fall of 1990.

Having benefited from the help of other musicians in the Atlanta and Athens, Georgia, music scenes, Amy decided to use her own good fortune to give something back to up-and-coming local musicians. In 1990, she founded Daemon Records, an independent label focusing on Atlanta-area bands that continues to be an important outlet for the scene.

After putting out an eight-song live EP, "Back on the Bus, Y'all", in 1991, Emily and Amy released their next studio album, Rites of Passage, in mid-1992, the group's most heavy-handed effort. With 1994's Swamp Ophelia, however, Indigo Girls returned to their earlier form. The disc, featuring the duo's most elaborate arrangements to date, debuted at No. 9 on the Billboard album chart. Toward the end of the year, the duo took part in a wild, Atlanta-based production of Jesus Christ Superstar, with Amy playing Jesus and Emily taking the part of Mary Magdalene. A soundtrack to the production was later released by Amy's Daemon label.

A second live album, the two-CD 1200 Curfews, came out in 1995, and by the end of 1996, that album, along with all the group's other efforts, had been certified gold or better; Indigo Girls and Swamp Ophelia reached platinum. In April 1997, the pair released Shaming of the Sun and spent the summer on tour with Sarah McLachlan's Lilith Fair, which took them all over the US and Canada. Their participation in this festival of women's music was particularly meaningful, as Emily says, "because we are a part of an event that reflect women's growing role and visibility in the music business." They closed each set by inviting the rest of the performers onstage to join them in playing "Closer to Fine," a song which had opened doors for many aspiring women singer-songwriters.

On September 28th, 1999, the Indigo Girls released their seventh full-length Epic album, "Come On Now Social". The album is an energetic synthesis of serious contemplation and impassioned action. The title of Come On Now Social is taken from a line in an Amy Ray song that doesn't appear on the collection, but it seemed to capture the spirit of the album. "The title is me, speaking to myself, wanting to be more of the world, more activist and more with others," says Amy. It encourages "the idea that we're all still trying to evolve-to decide what, who and how we want to be," and it challenges "the idea that, when we're young, the world wants certain things from us-it prescribes our social acceptability."

The Indigo Girls tour regularly and often find novel ways to reach out to their fans. In 1993, they undertook a "Ten-Dollar Tour" of small clubs, with all tickets and tee shirts priced at ten bucks. In 1995 and again in 1997, Amy and Emily embarked on a series of benefit concerts called the "Honor the Earth Tour". Organized on behalf of Indigenous environmental activists, the tour included visits and performances on tribal reservations from Arizona to Alaska. In 1998, Amy and Emily initiated the "Suffragette Sessions Tour" - a loose, left-field amalgamation of female artists that Amy described as "a socialist experiment in rock and roll... no hierarchy, no boundaries." The participants included Gail Ann Doresey, Lisa Germano, Lourdes Perez, Kate Schellenbach, Jane Siberry, Jean Smith, Josephine Wiggs and Thalia Zedek. The duo has also continued their association with the Lilith Fair, participating in the tour for three consecutive years.

The Indigo Girls' achievements are impressive. Over the course of the last ten years, they have sold over seven million albums worldwide-including one double platinum disc, three platinum and four gold-and earned six Grammy nominations. But more impressive than the industry accolades and sales figures has been the way these two voices can consistently reach out in the darkness and make a bunch of strangers feel at home, understood, inspired.

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