Harris is from a [[Military brat (US subculture)|career military family]]. Her father, Walter Harris, was a military officer and her mother Eugenia was a wartime military wife. Her father, a member of the [[Marine Corps]], was reported missing in action in [[Korea]] in 1952 and spent ten months as a prisoner of war. Born in [[Birmingham, Alabama]], Harris spent her childhood in [[North Carolina]] and [[Woodbridge, Virginia]], where she graduated from [[Gar-FieldGarfield Senior High School]] as class [[valedictorian]]. She won a drama scholarship to the [[University of North Carolina at Greensboro]], where she began to study music seriously, learning to play the songs of [[Pete Seeger]], [[Bob Dylan]] and [[Joan Baez]] on guitar. She dropped out of college to pursue her musical aspirations, and moved to New York City, working as a waitress to support herself while performing folk songs in [[Greenwich Village]] [[coffeehouse]]s during the folkie boom.<ref name = "People-Arrington-1982-11-15"/> She married fellow songwriter Tom Slocum in 1969 and recorded her first album, ''[[Gliding Bird]]''. Harris and Slocum soon divorced, and Harris and her newborn daughter Hallie moved in with her parents in the [[Maryland]] suburbs near Washington, D.C.<ref name = "People-Arrington-1982-11-15"/><ref>"Charlie Rose Show" June 25, 2008</ref>
