How The Byrds reinvented country music on ‘Sweetheart of the Rodeo’
For any casual rock and roll fan, country music was typically considered music reserved for the grandparents of the world. Even though there might have been a few things in common between rock stars and the likes of Johnny Cash, the tales of easy living and life on a farm didn’t appeal to the same people who were having their lives changed by artists like Chuck Berry and Little Richard. There was a middle ground, though, and The Byrds bridged the gap between country and rock in the late 1960s.
Before The Byrds had even started, the British Invasion had already brought along a fixation with country music. Across the first handful of Beatles albums, the band’s attempts at covers and originals tended to borrow heavily from George Jones and Buck Owens, like John Lennon’s lament ‘I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party’.
The clearest country rocker at the time was Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones, being just as enamoured with the sounds of folk rock as he was with Chuck Berry or Robert Johnson. Across the first handful of Rolling Stones albums, songs like ‘Dear Doctor’ and ‘Dead Flowers’ were direct extensions of what Richards was listening to, taking the basic idea of country music and injecting a rock and roll spirit into it.
While The Beatles and The Stones approached country music from an outsider’s perspective, The Byrds didn’t have much trouble. Before plugging in his guitar, Roger McGuinn was already a member of a bluegrass band, having an encyclopedic knowledge of how to blend the twang of a slide guitar with the sounds of rock and roll.
Although the group’s first handful of albums saw them taking the basis of a few Bob Dylan songs and putting them to music, various lineup changes led to them drafting in Gram Parsons as their new guitarist. Having been a fixture of the LA rock scene, Parsons modelled himself as a cowboy who just happened to play rock music, making him the standout musician on the group’s 1968 album, Sweetheart of the Rodeo.
While the album may not have been the biggest-selling record of the time, it would become the foundation for what the sounds of LA would be in the next few years. Boasting the signature chime of The Byrds’s jangling guitars, most of the songs on the project revolved around love lost and one’s struggles with faith, even incorporating a bit of gospel flair into songs like ‘The Christian Life’.
While Parsons was never to get anything off the ground with The Byrds or his solo career, the rest of the LA scene considered the album a pivotal moment in rock music. Coming directly afterwards, acts like the Eagles were building from what The Byrds had created on this album, singing heavenly harmonies that could have been ripped out of McGuinn’s playbook.
Even the country crowd got their fair share of inspiration from this album. Though he had been a staple in Nashville, Willie Nelson’s turn to an outlaw aesthetic on albums like Red Headed Stranger could be considered a response to what The Byrds had done so effortlessly on this album. Not every member of The Byrds may have known what it was like to live on a farm in the middle of the American south, but the sounds of ‘Hickory Wind’ have been shaping the country world for decades now.
