Gram Parsons

Early in 1968, he joined the Byrds, “Mr. Tambourine Man”, “Sweetheart of the Rodeo”, and it was Gram who had turned them around from a pop band into a country music band and expanded their whole being. He was on his way to South Africa, and Gram asked me, “What’s the drift I’m getting since I got to England? When I say I’m going to South Africa, I get this cold stare.” He was not aware of apartheid or anything. So, when I explained it to him, he said, “Oh, just like Mississippi?” And immediately, “Well, fuck that.” He quit – he was supposed to leave the next day for South Africa. So, we just sat around all night, played music without stopping. Sat around the piano or with guitars and just went through the country songbook. Gram taught me country music – how it worked, the difference between the Bakersfield style and the Nashville style. He played it all on piano, Merle Haggard, George Jones, Hank Williams. Some of the seeds he planted in the country area are still with me, which is why I can record a duet with George Jones with no compunction at all…Gram and John were really pure musicians. He was a bold man, never had a hit record, yet his influence is stronger now than ever. Basically, you wouldn’t have had Waylon Jennings and all of that outlaw movement without Gram Parsons. Country music isn’t just this narrow thing that appeals to rednecks.
It’s hard to describe how deeply Gram loved music. We’d sing Everly Brothers songs. He’d be like me, wake up with George Jones, roll over and wake up again to Mozart. I absorbed that Bakersfield way of turning melodies and also lyrics, different from the sweetness from Nashville – the tradition of Merle Haggard and Buck Owens, the blue-collar lyrics from immigrant world of the farms and oil wells of California, at least that’s where it had its origins in the ’50s and ’60s.
“I’ve been writing about a guy that builds cars.” THE NEW SOFT SHOE
--Keith Richards