Critical Mass

Groundbreaker: Singer known for country rock, his work with The Byrds eschewed labels

Parsons is the father of country rock, even if he isn’t very famous. And yes, he died young, at 26.

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Sweetheart of the rodeo illustration.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Sweetheart of the rodeo illustration.

The human impulse is to categorize, to sort and to label collections of things we imagine have something in common. When we encounter something new we tend to think it is like this or not like that. Maybe it is simply a mental convention, a dog-trotted path worn smooth on our collective cerebral cortex. Power comes from naming things.

So individuals -- especially artists -- have every right to resist this socio-cultural tagging. Artists aren't interested in the ready-made genre bins prepared by marketers. The very act of naming art can be perceived as hostile, a way of keeping that artist under control.

Gram Parsons never wanted to be considered one of the founding fathers of country rock. He called what he played Cosmic American Music, a label that has the advantage of being as vague as it is evocative, calling up all kinds of ghosts, from Dorsey Dixon's mill worker ballads, Robert Johnson's ice-pick blues, Woody Guthrie's lefty plaints, and the high lonesome whine of Hank Williams to the boogie jazz of the Allman Brothers.

But before we get to that and his role in The Byrds' groundbreaking 1968 album Sweetheart of the Rodeo, we should probably understand Gram Parsons was not always Gram Parsons.

. . .

Parsons started life as Ingram Cecil Connor III, the son of Ingram Cecil Connor Jr. His father somehow got named Coon Dog during World War II. (Maybe because he favored a particular hound, but other explanations are plausible. The man liked to drink and run around. He played guitar and sang a bit as well.)

The son of a military man, Coon Dog dropped out of college to enlist in the U.S. Army Air Corps in May 1940, before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor but not before world war seemed inevitable. He was stationed on Oahu when the Japanese attacked, but wasn't on base at the time. He was living at the Diamond Head estate of a family friend, Barbara Hutton, granddaughter of Frank Woolworth, founder of Woolworth's dime-store chain. Her dad was Franklyn Laws Hutton, co-founder of the E.F. Hutton brokerage firm. Her aunt was Marjory Post Hutton, daughter of C.W. Post, founder of what would become General Foods.

Such were Coon Dog's running circles; of modest means, he had a knack for being around the rich.

As officers do in wartime, Connor rapidly advanced from second lieutenant to major. He flew more than 50 sorties in his P-40 Warhawk; engaged and shot down a number of Japanese Zeros. Probably not five (although he is anecdotally described as an ace, he's not listed as such in any of the unofficial compendiums) but he was awarded the Air Force Cross for bravery. Malaria and shell shock grounded him in 1943, and in 1944 he returned to the States to train pilots in Jacksonville, Fla.

There he befriended a man named John Snively, scion of the family who owned most of the citrus groves in Orange County, worth a reported $200 million in 1945. John had a sister, Avis, who liked to drink as much as Coon Dog did. They married on the Snively estate in Winter Haven, Fla., on March 22, 1945. After the war, he joined the family business, taking over the Snivelys' box-making factory 270 miles away in Waycross, Ga.

Their son, named Ingram etc. and called Gram, was born Nov. 5, 1946. In 1951, his sister, "Little" Avis, was born. They were raised by nannies and disciplined by their mother; their dad was reportedly an easygoing presence who showed up to take his son fishing and camping. The Connor children got music lessons. Gram mastered the trumpet and piano and by 1956 was completely enthralled by new sensation Elvis Presley.

In a 1972 interview, Parsons claimed he'd seen Presley in Nashville, Tenn., at the Grand Ole Opry when he was 7 years old. But Presley played the Opry only once -- on Oct. 2, 1954, when Parsons would have been about a month shy of his 9th birthday. Presley bombed that day -- allegedly one of the Opry officials told him to go back to driving trucks. So Presley decided to never return, and signed on to Shreveport's Louisiana Hayride two weeks later.

A more likely story has Connor taking his son to see Presley at the Waycross Auditorium in 1956. The 9-year-old Parsons may have met Presley backstage after the show and shook hands with him. It's said this was the moment young Gram decided to pursue music as a career.

Two days before Christmas 1959, after putting the rest of the family on a train to the Snively estate in Winter Haven, Gram's father put a bullet in his head. Avis told the children it was an accident. A year later she married Robert Ellis Parsons, a rich -- and by some accounts shady -- New Orleans businessman, who adopted Gram and young Avis. They took his name.

Gram attended the prestigious Bolles School in Jacksonville, where the boys called each other by their last name. (Except for Gram, which led some of them to believe he was named "Gram Graham.") He was in a group there that included Jim Stafford, who'd go on to have several novelty hits, including "Spiders & Snakes," and Kent Lavoie, who as Lobo scored the Billboard Top 10 hits "Me and You and a Dog Named Boo," "I'd Love You to Want Me,"and "Don't Expect Me to Be Your Friend" in the early 1970s.

On his graduation day, Gram learned his mother had died of cirrhosis of the liver. He went off to study theology and LSD at Harvard Divinity School but wasn't there long. He used to say he was there for "about four hours and 15 minutes," time enough for his faculty adviser the Rev. James Ellison "Jet" Thomas to turn him on to old-time gospel and Hank Williams.

He bought a house in New York (that trust fund was deep) as a base for the International Submarine Band, a straight-ahead country outfit he founded with erstwhile Harvard classmate Ian Dunlop. At the urging of his friend Brandon De Wilde -- the child actor who starred in Shane and who was trying to establish himself as a folk singer -- he moved the ISB to Los Angeles, where the vibe might be more conducive. The band had a cameo in Peter Fonda's movie The Trip.

Then Parsons met Chris Hillman in a bank. Hillman played bass for a band called The Byrds. He liked this pretty 21-year-old kid. And his band had an opening.

The Byrds, especially frontman Roger McGuinn, had grown tired of David Crosby; he was loudly political where the rest of the band was not, he favored his own compositions over other people's songs, and he wanted to run off and play with the boys from Buffalo Springfield whenever he felt like it. So The Byrds cut him a fat severance check and auditioned Parsons, who first impressed McGuinn as a jazzy piano player.

On the eve of the International Submarine Band's album's release, Parsons ditched his old band for The Byrds. He was supposed to be a sideman, filling in on piano or rhythm guitar. But he soon wrestled the moment away from McGuinn, who wanted to make the band's next album -- its sixth -- a tour of American musical styles ending with a futuristic, psychedelic track. But Gram started singing gospel songs with Hillman and convinced him that a country record could and would work. Parsons persuaded the group to make its next album in Nashville, and to make it country.

. . .

You can, if you've the slightest bit of digital wherewithal, dial Sweetheart of the Rodeo up on a streaming service and listen for yourself. But first listen to the Byrds' album that immediately preceded it, The Notorious Byrd Brothers, which might give you a hint as to where McGuinn wanted to take the record and how far off into the woods Parsons took the band.

Notorious is a good if not great record, probably the best work that the classic Byrds lineup -- McGuinn, Crosby, Hillman and drummer Michael Clarke -- ever did together. There are a lot of hired guns on the album, including guitarists James Burton and Clarence White, session drummers Jim Gordon and Hal Blaine, several horn players and, on one track, a string quartet. It's what most people think of when they think of the Byrds sound -- chiming 12-string guitar with accents provided by pedal steels and burbling Moog synthesizers.

Parsons' vocal work is limited to three leads on the official Sweetheart release: Luke Daniels' "You're Still on My Mind," Merle Haggard's "Life in Prison" and his own gorgeous "Hickory Wind," but it's his sensibility that controls the album. A threatened lawsuit by Lee Hazlewood -- who owned the label that had signed the Submarine Band -- caused McGuinn to replace three of Parsons' lead vocals with his own. Parsons' composition "One Hundred Years From Now," sung by McGuinn and Hillman, is another highlight.

But the most illuminating track is Parsons' version of "The Christian Life," an old Louvin Brothers tune. (McGuinn's version is on the 1968 album, but Parson's original vocal was included on the 1997 and 2003 Legacy CD re-issues.) Parsons, backed by crack session players like White and pedal steel player Jaydee Maness, pushes his always tenuous voice to the shaky brink in a sincere, utterly unironic reading of the lyrics:

My buddies shun me, since I turned to Jesus

Others find pleasure in things I despise

I like the Christian life.

Compared to Parsons' version, McGuinn's take on the song sounds corny, a joke undermined by his attempted Southern accent. In McGuinn's hands the song sounds like a one-off novelty, a rock 'n' roll gesture.

Parsons, on the other hand, isn't kidding at all. All his buddies who want him to drink and carouse with them are going to hell and he's not, and he's glad of that:

I won't lose a friend by heeding God's call,

For what good's a friend who wants you to fall

While his version of "The Christian Life," which suffers by comparison to Parsons' version, McGuinn does excellent work on William Bell's "You Don't Miss Your Water," a soul song transposed into a major country key, Woody Guthrie's "Pretty Boy Floyd" and the Dylan numbers that open and close the album, "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere" and "Nothing Was Delivered." It's utterly earnest.

And it marks the beginning -- and end -- of an era. Parsons' brief sojourn in The Byrds is emblematic of his flashy, fast life. He was opportunistic, undisciplined and full of himself -- voracity was more his style than virtuosity. He was out of The Byrds a few months later, ostensibly because he objected to a tour of South Africa the band was to embark on, but more likely because he really liked hanging out with drug buddy Keith Richards.

He hung out with the Rolling Stones while they were recording Exile on Main Street and became Richards' favorite sounding board. The Stones wrote "Wild Horses" for Parsons. He arranged "Honky Tonk Women" as "Country Honk" for them.

In 1969, he formed the Flying Burrito Brothers with ex-Byrd Hillman and Chris Ethridge, "Sneeky" Pete Kleinow and later Michael Clarke. They recorded the classic Gilded Palace of Sin. In 1970, they released a second album, Burrito Deluxe. Parsons left the band after a motorcycle wreck in 1970. That same year he married model Gretchen Burrell. They honeymooned at Disneyland. He was a bad husband, a drunk and a drug addict.

In 1972, Parsons met the woman who was to become his protege -- and the savior of country music -- Emmylou Harris. He asked her out to California to do harmonies on his first solo album, GP, for Warner Bros. Then the posthumous Grievous Angel, released four months after he died.

Parsons is famous now in a way he never was when he was alive. He never had a hit record. But he deflected the trajectory of American popular music, shifted the spectrum in a way only a few other artists have. Some sounds stick around through history, lingering at the scene like the sulfur stink of gunpowder after a massacre.

Parsons may have just been a trust-fund hippie in a Nudie suit who was lucky to die young (of a drug overdose on Sept. 19, 1973, the day before Jim Croce's plane went down near Natchitoches, La.), but he had at least one good idea, and he left behind a batch of songs that demonstrate he had more to do with Hank Snow than the Eagles. He might not acknowledge it, but call him the father of country rock because that's at least what he was: whether accident or a monster or both, it has his DNA.

Email:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

blooddirtangels.com

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Courtesy of Legacy Recordings/Sony Music/DON HUNSTEIN

The Byrds fused country and rock in their groundbreaking 1968 album Sweetheart of the Rodeo . Band members on those sessions were Chris Hillman (from left), Kevin Kelley, Gram Parsons and Roger McGuinn.

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Democrat-Gazette file photo

Gram Parsons is one of the trailblazers for today’s Americana movement. He was a member of The Byrds during the recording of 1968’s Sweetheart of the Rodeo.

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The Byrds Sweetheart of the Rodeo

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Gram Parsons GP

Style on 07/15/2018

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