Horns and Halos: Gram Parsons Delivered Transcendent Music with The Byrds, Flying Burrito Brothers and Fallen Angels
Few of the guitars that belonged to country-rock pioneer Gram Parsons are around today. Much like the man himself—who died of morphine-and-tequila overdose in 1973 at the age of 26—his instruments tended to have disastrously short but eventful lives, creating exquisite, game-changing music before making an untimely exit. Many were lost in a fire at Parsons' home in L.A.'s Laurel Canyon not long before his death.
But two that survive are very much the alpha and omega of Parsons' guitar history. There's his small-body 1963 Martin 00-21 flattop acoustic guitar, currently in the collection at Nashville's Country Music Hall of Fame, which dates from Parsons' earliest days as a young up-and-coming participant in the mid-Sixties folk boom. Then there's the custom acoustic made by luthier David Russell Young in 1973, an instrument that dates from Parsons' final days and was prominently played on the legendary Gram Parsons and the Fallen Angels tour of that same year. The guitar recently hit the auction block, consigned by Parson's widow, Gretchen Parsons-Carpenter.
In the decade that separates these two guitars, Parsons played a key role in bringing country music out of the honky tonks and into the forefront of rock music through his landmark work with the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers, and as a solo artist. In the process, he opened up a rich vein of songcraft rooted in the heartbreak tropes of country balladry, yet fused with post-Sixties existential angst.
It's safe to say there would be no Eagles without Gram Parsons. Eagles guitarist Bernie Leadon even played alongside him for a while in the Flying Burrito Brothers. In terms of more contemporary music, Parsons is one of the patriarchs of what we now call alt-country and Americana. His own preferred phrase was "American Cosmic Music." Call it what you will, the whole twangy crew from Wilco to Neko Case to Jim Lauderdale to Lucius are, in one way or another, the children of Gram Parsons.
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