genre american

Country Rock

late 1960s–1970s · Los Angeles, California

Gram Parsons' cosmic American music made commercial: the Byrds' pedal steel, Eagles' harmonies and the Long Beach Ballroom — the bridge that let country and rock share an audience.

Country rock emerged from the Byrds’ 1968 album Sweetheart of the Rodeo — recorded in Nashville with Gram Parsons as a temporary member, featuring fiddles and steel guitar on country standards — and from Bob Dylan’s turn toward country on John Wesley Harding (1967) and Nashville Skyline (1969). Parsons’ vision of “cosmic American music” — country and rock and gospel and soul mixed without concern for genre boundaries — was the genre’s founding philosophy, even if commercial success eluded him personally.

The Flying Burrito Brothers (Parsons and Chris Hillman, post-Byrds) distilled the idea. Poco, Pure Prairie League and Linda Ronstadt developed it commercially. The genre reached its commercial peak with the Eagles: Jackson Browne, Don Henley, Glenn Frey and associates who took Parsons’ cosmic American music, gave it a studio sheen, and made Hotel California (1977) the best-selling country-adjacent rock album of the decade.

Country rock opened a door between two audiences that had been entirely separate. It also provided the infrastructure for alternative country in the 1980s and 1990s: Uncle Tupelo, the Jayhawks, Wilco and Son Volt — who cited Gram Parsons as the patron saint of what they were doing.

Connections

Roots, siblings & influences

fuses

Country

1920s→ · genre

White Southern vernacular music — British ballads on an African banjo — recorded from 1922 and sold as 'hillbilly', the blues' estranged sibling.

Country rock took country music's vocal harmonies, pedal steel guitar and lyrical subject matter and placed them in rock's electric band context.

Country Music, U.S.A. · Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: Pop from the Beginning

fuses

Folk Rock

mid-1960s–early 1970s · genre

Bob Dylan's electric turn and the Byrds' ringing twelve-strings: the marriage of folk music's lyrical seriousness with rock's rhythm and amplification.

Country rock grew from the same folk-rock impulse toward acoustic instruments and lyrical seriousness, taking that impulse in a more explicitly country direction.

Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: Pop from the Beginning

What grew from it

gave rise to

Americana

mid-1990s→ · genre

The roots music umbrella: folk, country, blues, gospel and bluegrass recombined without commercial pressure — Emmylou Harris, Uncle Tupelo, Gillian Welch and a tradition that doesn't know it should be obsolete.

Americana grew from country rock's roots impulse — the desire to make music connected to American folk and country traditions — without the commercial compromises.

Country Music, U.S.A.

Key artists

Bob Dylan
1941– · artist
The poet who rewrote what a song could say: from the folk revival to electric rock to country and back, Dylan's restless movement made him the most influential songwriter in American music.

Sources

Country Music, U.S.A. — Bill C. Malone and Jocelyn R. Neal (2010). University of Texas Press (3rd rev. ed.; first published 1968) · Book
Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: Pop from the Beginning — Nik Cohn (1969). Weidenfeld & Nicolson · Book