Gram Parsons

Ingram Cecil Connor III was born on November 5, 1946, in Winter Haven, Florida, and grew up in Waycross, Georgia. His mother’s father, John A. Snively, was a citrus magnate. Both his parents were alcoholics, and his father, a decorated Second World War flying ace, shot himself two days before Christmas 1958. His mother married Robert Parsons, whose surname he took, and she died of complications from alcoholism on the day he graduated from school, June 5, 1965.

By 1961 he was playing in rock and roll cover bands, and by 16 he had turned to folk. His first professional group, the Shilohs, played hootenannies and coffee houses and in the summer of 1964 played regularly at the Café Rafio on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. He went to Harvard to study theology and stayed one semester. There a guitarist called John Nuese turned him towards country music, and together they started the International Submarine Band.

The International Submarine Band moved to New York in 1966, and then to Los Angeles, into houses Parsons bought with his trust fund. They appeared on screen in the Peter Fonda film The Trip, but their song for it was turned down. When Parsons said he wanted to play only country music, the rhythm section left. Suzi Jane Hokom saw a rehearsal and talked her boyfriend, Lee Hazlewood, into signing Parsons and Nuese to his label, LHI, as the band.

With session players filling out the band, they recorded the album in the second half of 1967: four Parsons songs, including “Luxury Liner”, and covers of Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard and Elvis. It was finished by December, but Parsons left for the Byrds in February 1968, and by the time LHI put it out the band no longer existed. Hazlewood gave it no promotional budget, and it was buried.

In February 1968 the Byrds, down to Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman, hired Parsons, at first to play piano. McGuinn planned a double album running through the history of American music, from bluegrass to the Moog synthesizer. Parsons talked them out of it and into a country record, made in Nashville. Its songs came from Bob Dylan’s basement tapes, the Louvin Brothers, Merle Haggard and Parsons himself, whose “Hickory Wind” he had written with Bob Buchanan on a train from Florida to Los Angeles.

Lee Hazlewood said Parsons was still under contract to LHI, and McGuinn replaced three of his lead vocals with his own; Parsons was still angry about it in 1973. That July, in London, Parsons refused to go with the band on a tour of South Africa, in protest at apartheid. McGuinn and Hillman thought it was an excuse to stay in England with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. He stayed at Richards’s house, and reintroduced him to country music. The album came out without him, reached No. 77, and sold worse than any Byrds record before it. It is now seen as the first widely recognised country rock album.

Back in Los Angeles, Parsons found Chris Hillman, who had left the Byrds too, and they formed the Flying Burrito Brothers with the bassist Chris Ethridge and the pedal steel player Sneaky Pete Kleinow. Parsons and Hillman wrote most of the songs in a house in the San Fernando Valley they called Burrito Manor. The record married country to the soul of Otis Redding and Stax, with covers of “Dark End of the Street” and “Do Right Woman”, and Kleinow played his steel through a fuzzbox and a Leslie speaker.

It reached only No. 164. In Rolling Stone, Stanley Booth called it one of the best records of the year. Sid Griffin later wrote that it sold just 50,000 copies, but that, as with the first Velvet Underground album, every one of those buyers seemed to have formed a band.

Nudie Cohn, born Nuta Kotlyarenko in Kyiv, made rhinestone suits for country singers at Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors in North Hollywood. Parsons took the Burritos to him for the cover shoot. His own suit had naked women on the lapels, drawn like old sailors’ tattoos, red poppies on the shoulders, marijuana leaves down the front and Seconal and Tuinal pills scattered over it, with a flaming red cross on the back.

Parsons was afraid of flying, so the Burritos toured America by train. They lost most of their money in a running poker game, and the audiences were bewildered. Parsons spent more and more time with the Rolling Stones, who were finishing Let It Bleed, and that December the Burritos played the free concert at Altamont, in a short set that made it into Gimme Shelter.

Ethridge left in the autumn of 1969, Bernie Leadon came in on guitar and Hillman went back to bass. Nobody had many new songs. Parsons, Hillman and Leadon spent three or four months trying to write together on the A&M lot, and Leadon said it was like pulling teeth. The album was made on a much smaller budget than the first, and sold even less: it missed the Billboard 200.

It holds the first released version of “Wild Horses”. Keith Richards gave Parsons a demo of it on December 7, 1969, the day after Altamont, almost a year before the Stones put out their own on Sticky Fingers. Parsons was missing gigs, or turning up too drunk to play, and in June 1970 the band fired him.

A&M signed Parsons as a solo artist in 1970, and he moved in with the producer Terry Melcher. They shared a taste for cocaine and heroin, the sessions came to little, and the tapes were lost. In March 1971 he went with the Rolling Stones on their farewell tour of Britain, and that summer he and his girlfriend Gretchen Burrell spent two months at Nellcôte, the villa in the south of France where the Stones were making Exile on Main St. in the basement. Upstairs, he and Keith Richards spent hours passing a guitar back and forth, singing old country songs.

His drug use and his fights with Burrell wore everyone out, and Richards’s partner Anita Pallenberg asked him to leave. He married Burrell that year, came off heroin in England with the help of Ric Grech, and went home. Playing a one-off show with the Burritos, he heard about a folk singer in Washington, D.C., called Emmylou Harris.

Mo Ostin signed Parsons to Reprise in 1972. Merle Haggard, Parsons’s hero, agreed to produce the album and then cancelled on the afternoon of the first session. Parsons hired Haggard’s engineer, Hugh Davies, and the core of Elvis Presley’s band, James Burton, Glen D. Hardin and Ronnie Tutt, and recorded from September to October 1972. He was drinking heavily, and Harris, who had not done much recording, wondered if this was how records were made. He cut back, and finished it.

Harris sings two duets with him in the manner of George Jones and Tammy Wynette, “That’s All It Took” and “We’ll Sweep Out the Ashes in the Morning”. She said he taught her to love country music: “He taught me the beauty and the poetry, the simplicity, the honesty in the music.” The album, his only one released in his lifetime, never charted.

Parsons took GP on the road as Gram Parsons and the Fallen Angels, with Harris as his duet partner. He could not afford Elvis’s players, so the band included Jock Bartley on guitar, Neil Flanz on pedal steel, Kyle Tullis on bass and N. D. Smart on drums, with Phil Kaufman, who had done time with Charles Manson, as road manager, keeping him away from drugs at the shows. The rehearsals were a party and the first shows were poor. By all accounts it was Harris who pulled the band together.

They got better, and were cheered at Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin and Max’s Kansas City in New York. At Liberty Hall in Houston, Neil Young and Linda Ronstadt sat in. The tour still did not sell GP. That July his friend Clarence White was killed by a drunk driver, and at the funeral Parsons and Bernie Leadon sang “Farther Along”. That evening, it is said, Parsons told Kaufman he wanted to be cremated at Joshua Tree.

Parsons had been going to Joshua Tree National Monument, in the California desert, since the late 1960s. In September 1973, with Grievous Angel mixed and a tour due in October, he went there with his old Waycross girlfriend Margaret Fisher, his assistant Michael Martin and Martin’s girlfriend Dale McElroy, and stayed at the Joshua Tree Inn. On the night of September 18, after drinking heavily, he was injected with morphine and overdosed. He was declared dead at the hospital in Yucca Valley just after midnight on September 19. He was 26.

His stepfather arranged a private funeral in New Orleans. To keep the promise Parsons had asked of him, Kaufman and Martin, posing as undertakers, took the coffin from Los Angeles airport in a hearse, drove it to Joshua Tree and set it on fire. They were caught, fined and made to pay for the funeral. What was left of his body was buried in Metairie, Louisiana.

Parsons made his second album that summer with Harris, James Burton, Glen Hardin and guests including Bernie Leadon and Linda Ronstadt, some of the arrangements already worked out on the road. He arrived in poor shape but rallied: the bassist Emory Gordy called them “great, happy sessions.” He had only two new songs, “Return of the Grievous Angel”, with words by the Boston poet Thomas Brown, and “In My Hour of Darkness”, so he filled it with older songs of his own and country standards. He mixed it at Capitol Studios before he left for Joshua Tree.

It came out four months after his death. His widow, Gretchen, who had never liked his partnership with Harris, took Harris’s photograph off the front cover, moved her credit to the back, and dropped the title track, “Sleepless Nights”. The record reached No. 195, and drew warmer reviews than GP.

Parsons called his music Cosmic American Music: country, rhythm and blues, soul, folk and rock as one thing. It sold little while he lived. Emmylou Harris carried it on. “Once I started singing country music with Gram there was no turning back for me,” she said. Her second album, Pieces of the Sky (1975), had “Boulder to Birmingham”, about losing him, and she recorded his “Hickory Wind”, “Wheels”, “Sin City”, “Luxury Liner” and “Hot Burrito No. 2”.

The Eagles, the new traditionalists of 1980s Nashville and the alt-country bands of the 1990s, Uncle Tupelo and Wilco among them, all learned from his records. Rolling Stone ranked him No. 87 of the 100 greatest artists of all time, and in 2026 he went into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for his musical influence. The Country Music Hall of Fame has not yet taken him in.