It would be too easy and rather lazy to describe country rock as merely rock bands playing country music – as the internet’s All Music Guide does. Anyone who has been seduced by the high-plains feel of the often wonderfully intricate sound, or the rebellious nature of the outlaw image that so often rides hand-in-hand with country rock will tell you that it’s the beginning of a life-long love affair with the music.
Although country rock in the 70s is festooned with some of the biggest names of the genre, its roots can be traced back to the beginnings of country. Country music, or bluegrass in its purest form, is essentially white America’s traditional folk music.
The Carter Family’s early explorations of bluegrass in the 40s and 50s are as good a place to start as any, but it was to country’s very own hillbilly Shakespeare, Hank Williams, and Bakersfield Boogie Boys Merle Haggard and Buck Owens in the 50s and 60s that we must turn to see the inspiration behind the men who first melded country music’s unique blend of melancholy and good time muse.
Gram Parsons is widely regarded as the man who instigated the move between the two seemingly disparate genres, first with the International Submarine Band, and later with The Byrds, notably on 1968’s excellent Sweetheart Of The Rodeo, before blowing the genre wide apart with the first country rock supergroup, The Flying Burrito Brothers.
Others followed; Neil Young and Steven Stills from Buffalo Springfield both made major splashes in the water throughout the 70s, while a host of more polished acts and beautifully crafted songwriters like The Eagles, Poco and Jackson Browne came to the fore, with some gaining immense success.
Elder statesmen of the genre such as Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings shunned the Nashville schmaltz that has so often put off people in the UK (not least hard rock fans who still seem split on the whole country rock issue), and established the Outlaw sub-genre, which in turn allowed the excellent songwriting of Kris Kristofferson to shine through.
Elsewhere, the likes of Little Feat dragged country rock back to the rock fold, while new young pups like Joe Ely would help develop a harsher direction from which, eventually, would develop the alternative country movement of the 90s.
