Gram Parsons

I discovered Emmylou Harris in the '70s and at some point became aware that she was influenced by Gram Parsons. I had—of course—known the groups he performed with and influenced, but not him. I learned a lot from this:

The joke goes that if you play a country song backward, the singer’s wife returns to him, his dog comes back to life, his employer rehires him, and he gets out of prison. Traditional country music was made by those who ached and suffered. For Parsons, they were kindred spirits. ....

Every musician has influences, but Parsons was deliberate about synthesizing his. He wanted to combine the country music he loved with the modern, poetic lyrics he wrote, and the rock-star persona he embodied. .... The goal was to create a geographically, racially, and generationally desegregated sound. ....

In 1968...his life changed in a Los Angeles bank. There, he ran into Chris Hillman, cofounder of the Byrds—a band that had pioneered its own hybrid genre, folk rock, with their hit “Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man.” As luck would have it, they needed someone to fill in on keyboard. Parsons wasn’t much of a pianist, but he floored the group with his original songs. ....

With Parsons in the mix, the Byrds brought the undercurrent of country music in their earlier work to the surface. The Sweetheart of the Rodeo album featured two Parsons originals, including “Hickory Wind,” in which the protagonist yearns for his Southern childhood. On lead vocals, Parsons sang sadness: “It’s hard to find a way out / the trouble is real / in a faraway city / with a faraway feel / But it makes me feel better / each time it begins / callin’ me home / hickory wind.” ....

A testament to Parsons’s talent, and perhaps his charm, Chris Hillman agreed to start a band with him just a few months after his dramatic Byrds exit. “Since Gram and I shared a common vision to bring real country music to a rock audience with a hip sensibility, we agreed it would make sense for us to join forces and carry on from where Sweetheart left off,” he remembered. Together, they formed the Flying Burrito Brothers, a band whose name was outdone in peculiarity only by its music. ....

As his drug addiction worsened, Hillman felt he had no choice but to fire Parsons from the Flying Burrito Brothers. Gram made his next album in 1973, featuring harmonies by the then-unknown singer Emmylou Harris. With Parsons as her guide, “My ears and my heart opened up to country music,” she told Dan Rather. “I really heard the genius of George Jones, the beauty of Louvin Brothers harmonies, the poetry of country music, the stuff that’s deep in the weeds, the washed-in-the-blood stuff.” ....

He was mercurial, conceited, and reckless, and sometimes he broke his friends’ hearts. He was also extremely bright, funny, a perceptive songwriter, and a devoted brother. Perhaps there’s only so much one can extrapolate about who Parsons really was. There’s only so much room for a redemptive arc when a person dies at 26. .... (more)

Nancy Kathryn Walecki, "Sound as Ever," Harvard Magazine, July-August 2023.