Who was the first true country-rock band?
Rock and roll has always been an amalgamation of every genre that has come before it. As much as people like to think that the genre began the minute that songs like ‘Rock Around the Clock’ and ‘Johnny B Goode’ were unleashed upon the world, everyone from Chuck Berry to Little Richard was following in a long line of blues musicians and simply added more attitude behind their tunes. There was plenty of room to grow, though, and many artists from California figured out how to add some twang into their delivery.
Then again, rock and roll was never that far away from country music in the very beginning. Bill Haley and the Comets had started out as a rockabilly band, and when listening to some of the music The Beatles and The Rolling Stones were making in their prime, it’s clear that they were taking some influence from the handful of Buck Owens and Hank Williams records in their record collections.
There are even a handful of country artists who have always seemed to get a free pass when it comes to rock and roll. Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson, for instance, never claimed to be anything other than country throughout their career, but their mindset of not playing by the rules and doing whatever the hell they wanted wasn’t all that different from the way that punks saw their music back in the day.
Although it would make sense for all country music to come out of the heartland, it started to slowly make its way to the West Coast once the 1970s began and people worked their way out of the Summer of Love. And while Eagles have been considered one of the all-time kings of country rock, the true beginning of everything begins with the genre’s distant cousin: folk rock.
So, who officially started country rock?
Before people had started to get acclimatised to country music, bands like The Byrds had already started going back to pure folk music. Bob Dylan had already caused a stir on the other side of the US, but Roger McGuinn arrived on the scene as a recovering folkie who learned how to create rock and roll. ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ had that signature jangle to it, but the country influence wouldn’t fully come in until Gram Parsons became a part of the lineup later in their career.
Parsons was practically an encyclopedia of old country music, and his influence was apparent the minute he stepped up on Sweetheart of the Rodeo. That album has a good case for being the first official country-rock album, but by the band’s standards, The Byrds were never going to be purely country, which meant Parsons needed to move on to find his own sound.
After checking out of The Byrds, The Flyin’ Burrito Brothers was the first time people got to hear the prototype for what country-rock sounded like. Though the band was short-lived with Parsons in the lineup, the seeds of the genre were already being planted, from the storytelling angle on every tune to Parsons’s distinctive rasp to future Eagles guitarist Bernie Leadon turning in time with them.
And looking at how far Parsons’s influence spread, it’s not like the world wasn’t paying attention. After all, rock and roll needed some sense of direction after the Woodstock era fell to ruin, and while many people were satisfied following in the footsteps of Led Zeppelin, it’s easy to see the Burrito Brothers’ sound rubbing off on everyone from The Rolling Stones to Eagles to Tom Petty’s work.
