Gram Parsons has been hailed as the godfather of country rock. He died young, aged just 26, back in 1973 – but his influence was huge and his connections extended from The Byrds and The Rolling Stones to Emmylou Harris, the Eagles and even Elvis Presley.
Parsons is inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame on 14 November. The list of 2026 inductees also includes Phil Collins, Oasis and Iron Maiden. Compared to such world-famous stars, Gram Parsons is the quintessential cult hero.
As his friend and loose collaborator Keith Richards once stated: “Quite amazingly, Gram Parsons – who never actually had a hit record of his own, ever – has got one of the most solid and faithful followings of any artist that I can think of.”
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Parsons was born into money but didn’t have it easy. His birth name was Cecil Ingram Connor, but in his teens, after his wealthy father committed suicide and his mother remarried, he took his stepfather’s surname of Parsons.
The young Gram was inspired to start singing after he saw an Elvis Presley concert in 1956. Many years later, when creating his two solo albums, GP (1973) and Grievous Angel (1974), Parsons hired members of Elvis’s TCB Band (named after Presley’s motto: Taking Care of Business). Among those players were guitarist James Burton and drummer Ron Tutt.
Parsons’ first significant recording was as leader of The International Submarine Band. Their sole album, Safe At Home, was released in 1968 and featured a handful of Parsons’ original songs alongside country standards. Safe At Home has been described as “the first important country rock album”.
The International Submarine Band had already broken up by the time that album was released, but Parsons quickly moved on to join The Byrds. His passion for country music informed the group’s 1968 album Sweetheart Of The Rodeo, which included Hickory Wind, written by Parsons with International Submarine Band guitarist Bob Buchanan. For Parsons connoisseurs, Hickory Wind is his signature song.
A restless spirit, Parsons didn’t stick around anywhere for long. By the end of 1968 he left The Byrds to form a new band, The Flying Burrito Brothers, with another Byrds exile Chris Hillman.
Released in 1969, the Burritos’ debut album The Gilded Palace Of Sin was not a hit, peaking at No 164 on the Billboard 200, but its blend of country and rock was seminal, cited by the Eagles as a major inspiration.
This group made just one more album, 1970’s Burrito Deluxe, which featured future Eagles guitarist Bernie Leadon alongside pedal steel player Sneaky Pete Kleinow. But the album is best remembered for including the first version of The Rolling Stones’ ballad Wild Horses to be released (the Stones’ own version was delayed until 1971 by legal issues).
Parsons had been gifted the song by Keith Richards after the two had developed a close friendship rooted not only in music but also in drug-taking.
Parsons has often been portrayed as the key figure who turned on Keith Richards and Mick Jagger to country music, but as Richards said: “I was listening to country music and blues before I could even play guitar. I was already pretty well versed in the music before I even started to play it.”
Richards added: “I think we were just leaning in the same direction. Gram was a natural soul brother, you know? So he cut Wild Horses as well. It was almost as if there was a magnetic sort of attraction to each other.”
Parsons was a guest of Richards in the south of France during the recording of the Stones’ 1972 classic Exile On Main St., but a clash with Richards’ partner Anita Pallenberg had Parsons removed from the Stones’ inner circle.
Around the same time, he discovered a new kindred spirit in a singer who became arguably his most significant collaborator. Emmylou Harris sang beautifully on Parsons’ two solo albums, and was co-writer of the closing track on Grievous Angel, the ballad In My Hour Of Darkness, on which Linda Ronstadt also contributed vocal harmonies.
Al Perkins played pedal steel on these albums, and in 1990 he summed up Parsons’ style with perfect economy. “It was sort of funky country,” Perkins said. “Not quite rock, but beyond traditional country.”
Sadly, Gram Parsons did not even live long enough to see the Grievous Angel album released. In the desert town of Joshua Tree, California, he died on 19 September 1973 from an overdose of morphine and alcohol.
Many years later, Keith Richards reflected: “If only he’d taken a little more care of himself. It can happen all in one night. It was such a sudden and unnecessary accident in a way. He never got to where he was obviously going to go.”
Parsons was memorialised in the song My Man from the Eagles’ 1975 album On The Border. The song was written and sung by his old bandmate Bernie Leadon.
Most poignant of all was the elegy from Emmylou Harris in the song Boulder To Birmingham, from her debut solo album Pieces Of The Sky.
As Harris would recall: “It was 1973 at the time of the Topanga Canyon fire, and you could stand in the middle of the streets in Los Angeles and the entire landscape looked like it was burning. It was really an amazing image.
“When you are very raw and in the throes of deep grief, there’s an unreality of being in the world when someone that used to be with you is suddenly no longer there. I think the combination of those things is what got the song started.”
