in south carolina there are many tall pines, i remember the oak tree that we used to climb

83.

sweetheart of the rodeo
the byrds [columbia, 1968]

country music is the antithesis of "hip:" rural and reactionary; inherently suspicious of all things new, urban, and youthful; unapologetically banal, from the trite, mawkish lyrics to the cornball cowboy hat showmanship borrowed from vaudeville. thus, when the Byrds traded in their chiming Rickenbackers for the rickety lilt of a dobro, the pulsating folk-rock throb for a languid clippity-clop, ponderous drug-induced existential dread for cloying, unaffected schmaltz, it marked an audacious and potentially divisive aesthetic shift. thank Gram Parsons, the yearning wunderkind with a death-drive gleam in his eye and megalomaniacal ambition that sensed something magnificent and quintessentially American in a style of music that most in the rock community emphatically dismissed. Sweetheart of the Rodeo is a joyous, spirited record, punch-drunk off the simple pleasures of the simple songs. bookended by two Dylan covers, the raucous, celebratory tribute to mail-order brides "you ain't goin' nowhere" and the bread-line ballad "nothing was delivered," the album runs through a gamut of country styles, from the po' boy Woody Guthrie shuffle of "pretty boy floyd" to the white-boy gospel of the Louvin Brothers' "the Christian life." the record's highlight is the tear-in-the-beer Gram Parsons original, "hickory wind," a wistful, sad-sack ode to lost youth and corrupted innocence. Sweetheart of the Rodeo is unprecedented in its un-ironic embrace of a style of music most of the Byrds' contemporaries avoided like a drunk leper - especially in the midst of a hostile culture war - and still unsurpassed in its rambunctious jocularity and unexpected profundity; it may be a lighthearted record, but it reveals more about the American experience than most of the horribly dated, pretentious hippie drivel released the same year.

dance the chicken reel moment: the Byrds appeared on the Grand Ole' Opry in Nashville to promote this record. those in charge were suspicious of allowing "long-hairs" to perform on the vaunted stage, and when Parsons ripped into "hickory wind" instead of the announced Merle Haggard cover, it firmly "pissed off the Nashville establishment." so much for winning favor with the yokels!