The Indigo Girls are a folk-rock duo from Atlanta known for their inventive blend of Appalachian, pop, and rock influences.
Emily Saliers was born July 22, 1963, in New Haven, Connecticut, and moved with her family to Decatur when she was in the sixth grade. At Laurel Ridge Elementary School she met Amy Ray, who was born April 12, 1964, in Atlanta, and was in the fifth grade. The two formed a friendship, and eventually discovered their complementary musical talents—Ray’s brooding voice and edgier style balanced Saliers’s vocals and folkier leanings. In 1981 they played for their first live audience: their high school English class.
After graduation Ray moved to Nashville, Tennessee, to study English and religion at Vanderbilt University, and Saliers settled in New Orleans, Louisiana, to major in English at Tulane University. They both returned to the Atlanta area in 1984 and later graduated from Emory University.
By 1985 they were frequently performing at local clubs while promoting their independent single, “Crazy Game.” In 1986 they released a six-track extended-play (EP) recording and followed it the next year with their first full-length album, Strange Fire.
A representative from Epic Records heard the duo at the Little Five Points Pub in 1988, and the Indigo Girls signed a recording contract with the major label. Their debut album on Epic, Indigo Girls (1989), featured what would become their biggest-selling single, “Closer to Fine,” and a guest appearance by R.E.M. vocalist Michael Stipe on the track “Kid Fears.” The album won a Grammy Award for best contemporary folk recording and earned the duo a nomination in the best new artist category.
In 1990 they released their sophomore album, Nomads Indians Saints. That same year, Ray decided to honor her roots in Atlanta’s independent music scene by founding Daemon Records in Decatur.
Following a live EP, Back on the Bus, Y’all (1991), the duo released two increasingly sophisticated works, Rites of Passage (1992) and Swamp Ophelia (1994). Their second live recording, 2000 Curfews, came out in 1995, and by 1996 all their records had been certified gold or better.
In 1997 the Indigo Girls released their sixth full-length Epic album, Shaming of the Sun, and made the first of several appearances on the Lilith Fair tour, which spotlighted female musicians. In 1999 they released a collection of all-new material, Come on Now Social. The double CD Retrospective (2000) brought together a decade of the Indigo Girls’ best-known work.
Ray released a solo album, Stag, on her Daemon label in 2001, followed by Prom (2005), Didn’t It Feel Kinder (2008), Lung of Love (2012), Goodnight Tender (2014), Holler (2018), and If It All Goes South (2022). Saliers released her first solo album in 2017 titled Murmuration Nation under the label Emily Saliers Music.
The duo released several albums in the first decade of the twenty-first century, including Become You (2002), All That We Let In (2004), Rarities (2005), Despite Our Differences (2006), and Playlist: The Very Best of Indigo Girls (2009), and were inducted into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame in 2003. The 2010s saw the release of the studio albums Holly Happy Holidays (2010), Beauty Queen Sister (2011), and One Lost Day (2015), followed by Love Long in 2020.
The group experienced a cultural resurgence in 2023 when a trio of films featured their earlier work. A documentary, It’s Only Life After All, provided a portrait of the pair’s personal and public struggles and triumphs—especially as two openly gay women performing and touring in the eighties and nineties. Glitter and Doom, a musical romance, featured a soundtrack composed of Indigo Girls hits spanning several decades. And finally, the Academy Award-winning Barbie included the band’s best-known work, “Closer to Fine.”
Saliers and Ray are noted for their activism around Native American land rights, environmental issues, gun safety, death penalty abolishment, and gay, trans, and lesbian rights.
