The most beautiful country song Don Henley ever heard: “It’s just a pure, quintessential record”
There is no getting around the influence that country music has on everything that Don Henley has ever written.
Although Eagles were meant to be a melting pot of every kind of American music that they listened to, it doesn’t take a musical scholar to listen to the kinds of songs they were making in the early stages of their career and see that they had more than a little bit of twang under their belt. But even if putting them in that one genre box doesn’t do them justice, Henley wasn’t going to shy away from wearing his country influences on his sleeve from time to time whenever he could.
But when he was growing up, some of the greatest music that he heard was a lot more diverse than you would have expected. Sure, there were people like Elvis Presley and The Beatles that everyone flocked to whenever they started writing their own tunes, but if you look at Eagles’ music specifically, you’re going to hear everything from Gram Parsons to George Jones to even hints of Motown thanks to Glenn Frey’s history of growing up and listening to the songs coming out of Detroit.
They didn’t like putting parameters around themselves, but there’s a purity in old country music that you can hear in everything that Henley plays. Whereas a lot of country music these days may be centred around trying to apparel to the younger generation, Henley was growing up at a time when people like Merle Haggard and even Ray Charles were making some of the finest country music that anyone had ever heard, and that’s before getting into the genius that is Dolly Parton.
Parton might be known more for her presence as a country icon more for her songs these days, but her track record for classic tunes is still one of the most impressive runs in country music history. She’s the first to say that she has a few tunes that didn’t quite work out, but whenever she was singing her heart out, that voice could bring virtually anyone to tears whenever she was singing a heartbreaking ballad.
And even years after the fact, Henley duetting with Parton on Cass County was the first time that he felt like he harnessed the same energy that he heard in Parton’s music. Her voice is almost a piece of American history, and since Henley’s album was about bringing a sense of Americana back to music, hearing a song ‘Just Someone I Used to Know’ with Porter Wagoner was one of the reasons why he ended up settling into this style of music years after being a rock and roll star.’
Compared to everything else Eagles did, Henley felt that nothing ever sounded prettier than hearing Wagoner and Parton singing this song, saying, “Once you get past the horn introduction, I think that’s one of the most beautiful authentic country songs on record, and that’s soulful. It’s just a pure, quintessential country record, and it’s a great song. That’s another thing: [It’s] the songwriting that I think has suffered a bit as of late.”
Like any good country song, though, this isn’t the kind of tune that’s meant to be just another ode to simple living. At its best, this was the genre that could make grown men weep, and when you hear two of these giants performing together, you can hear the history of the relationship in their performance as they talk about becoming two halves of the same whole to suddenly becoming strangers after things don’t work out.
The music might be a bit tough for some people to swallow, but this kind of record is what country music was all about. Sometimes it can be corny, and there are more than a few times where it can be a little bit repulsive for people that roll their eyes the first time they hear a fiddle, but when the genre is at its best, there’s no other music that can be that emotional and heartbreaking.
