The one artist Don Henley said made country music cool
Don Henley didn’t need to do much to get people on board with the country-rock angle when the Eagles began.
Rock and roll had already begun moving in that direction ever since the folk tradition took over, and when the heavy hitters started arriving in California, it was out of the question for artists to add a little bit more twang to their voice in between their heavy riffs. But it was going to take a long time for Henley to think that their take on country was the hippest thing in the world.
Because, despite their fantastic songs, there was a period where the Eagles were being treated like the worst thing to ever happen to music. ‘The Dude’s words hold a fair amount of power behind them, and even if the California legends had the melodies that millions of people love to sing along to, most rock fans want more of a challenge out of music than wanting to sing along with music that sounds like sitting on a beach with a margarita in your hand.
But it’s not like Eagles’ music was a one-to-one comparison with what Henley grew up listening to. He had been used to listening to people like George Jones and Hank Williams back in the day, and even if those influences turned up more than a few times in their music, it was always important for him to look at the songwriting of people like The Beatles for what beautiful melodies should sound like.
If there’s one band to truly thank for the country-rock movement, though, it’s The Byrds. Roger McGuinn had already given the world some of the most beautiful chiming guitar parts anyone had ever heard, but once they started reaching the end of the 1960s, a change was in order. They had been working on new music that had a country flair to it, but even if McGuinn wasn’t the most hardened country player in the world, Gram Parsons knew the genre like the back of his hand.
Aside from making Sweetheart of the Rodeo one of the classics from the era, Parsons was always a walking encyclopedia when it came to classic country songs. With his long hair and cowboy boots, he seemed like the next generation’s answer to the country greats that came before him, but even if Eagles ended up becoming much bigger following Parsons’s death, Henley never forgot what Parsons did for the genre.
Country music was still considered uncool for a while, and Henley felt that Parsons helped turn everything around, saying, “In the Sixties, rock & roll became a cultural force, and country music was looked down on as square. Then Gram Parsons made it OK again. He invented the genre of long-haired country music when George Jones still had a flat-top haircut. That said to me, ‘It’s alright to blend these genres now. It reflects the old and new.’”
Eagles were already bound to sound a lot like Parsons’s back catalogue since they were working with one of his ex-guitarists, Bernie Leadon, but they were far from the only one enchanted by his music. The entire Los Angeles scene would follow Parsons’s lead when people like Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris started singing, and thanks to his friendship with Keith Richards, The Stones’ later records had its fair share of twang behind it as well.
But beyond being one of the biggest genre switchups that California had seen up until that point, it’s not like Parsons or Henley were ever forcing country onto their peers. This was the natural extension of all great American music, and even if there were new genres popping up left and right, the true singer-songwriters never forgot where they came from.
