TELEVISION REVIEW : Harris Still Exploring at the Ryman : Her concert at former home of the Grand Ole Opry provides a basement-to-attic walk through country music history and styles.

Country singer Emmylou Harris has long blazed a career path from equal parts talent, inspiration and integrity. So it’s no great surprise that her first TV special, “Emmylou at the Ryman” (Wednesday at 5 and 8 p.m. on the Nashville Network), operates so effectively and effortlessly on a variety of musical and historical levels.

At its most fundamental, the show finds Harris singing her heart out in Nashville’s historic Ryman Auditorium, home from 1943 to ’74 of the Grand Ole Opry and now largely a tourist attraction used for live music only on special occasions.

But just as her “Last Date” live album in 1982 opted for new material over the usual “greatest hits live” approach, “Emmylou at the Ryman” (also the title of a new album recorded during these sessions) finds Harris exploring new corners of the musical universe.

For one thing, the concert provides an introduction to her dazzling new acoustic band, the Nash Ramblers, formed in 1990 after a bronchial infection prompted her to rely on fewer decibels--but no less musical energy--than she had been used to with her justly legendary Hot Band.

With flawless interpretations of songs by writers from Stephen Foster and Bill Monroe to John Fogerty and Steve Earle, Harris and the band conduct a virtual basement-to-attic walk through country music history and styles, from rollicking bluegrass and heart-piercing blues to ebullient gospel and sublime balladry.

In several songs, Harris--whose rootsy music set the tone for so many of today’s “new traditionalists”--also quietly displays a social conscience that’s largely missing from the current class of country hit-makers.

An artist without Harris’ unimpeachable credentials--she’s also president of the nonprofit Country Music Foundation--might raise eyebrows over the in-house nature of the show: The same company that owns Opryland U.S.A.--the theme park that has been home to the Grand Ole Opry since it moved out of the Ryman--also owns the Nashville Network as well as the Ryman itself.

But there’s not a self-serving note struck here. When the members of the Nash Ramblers speak briefly on camera about the role the Opry played in their musical pasts, it’s not to glorify the institution or themselves but to elucidate how the Opry inspired each of them to devote their lives to country music.

Harris herself offers insights about how she chooses material that could serve as a primer for so many rut-bound singers who rely so heavily on Nashville’s songwriting factories. She speaks as intelligently, and enthusiastically, about unknown writers and singers as she does about country legends who have influenced her music in one way or another.

There are no guest celebrities (save a quick exhibit of lively footwork from the 80-year-old Monroe), no flashy costume changes, and not a strobe light nor a wisp of stage fog in sight--just an hour of honest, unpretentious music played the same way. But then, with a marriage between country institutions as venerable as Harris and the Ryman, who would have expected anything less?

* “Emmylou at the Ryman” airs Wednesday at 5 and 8 p.m. on the Nashville Network.