Happy Birthday to Indigo Girl Emily Saliers

Emily Saliers was born today, July 22, in 1963. She is an American singer-songwriter and member of the musical duo the Indigo Girls. Saliers plays lead guitar as well as banjo, piano, mandolin, ukulele, bouzouki and many other instruments.

Saliers was born in New Haven, Connecticut. Since approximately age 11, she was raised in Decatur, Georgia (in metro Atlanta). Emily attended Laurel Ridge Elementary School in Decatur, where she first met her future Indigo Girls partner, Amy Ray (right). She later attended Shamrock High School, which she did not like. As students at Shamrock, Salier and ray started performing music together at talent shows and local venues (including bars when she was still under age) under the band names of "Saliers & Ray" and the "B-Band."

When Saliers (the elder of the duo) left Georgia for college in Louisiana, Ray frequently visited her. They would play together for tips in New Orleans' French Quarter. Saliers and Ray eventually reunited when they transferred from their respective colleges to Emory University. At Emory they settled upon the band name Indigo Girls; Ray came across the word indigo in the dictionary and "thought it sounded cool."

She began her college education at Tulane University but transferred to Emory University, graduating in 1985 with a bachelor's degree in English.

In 2004, Saliers composed her first film score for the independent short film, One Weekend a Month. She occasionally performs solo at benefit shows or as a guest with friends' bands. She and her father Don Saliers performed together once at the Washington National Cathedral in 2007.

In 2014, she began working on her first solo album, Murmuration Nation, which was released on August 11, 2017.

Saliers is a co-owner of Watershed, a restaurant in Atlanta. She was also one of the initial investors in the Flying Biscuit Cafe. She was a co-founder of the (now-defunct) Common Pond environmental gift shop in Atlanta.

Saliers has co-written a book with her father, Don Saliers (right), a retired theology professor at Candler School of Theology at Emory University, called A Song to Sing, a Life to Live: Reflections on Music as Spiritual Practice. Emily and her father attended book signings and church appearances around the US in support of the book, including the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. in May 2005 and October 2007.

Saliers had a passion for wine collecting, with a wine cellar that was reported to be at 2,000 bottles, but in 2015 she announced that she had given up drinking.

Saliers married her longtime girlfriend, former Indigo Girls tour manager Tristin Chipman (right) at New York City Hall in 2013. Chipman, a Canadian, is from Calgary, but she spent most of her adult life in Toronto," according to Saliers. The couple already had a daughter, Cleo, born in February of that year.

Saliers assisted in funding a music room at Emory University's Schwartz Center for Performing Arts which was named for her parents Don and Jane Saliers.