Sweetheart of the Rodeo is the sixth studio album by the American rock band the Byrds, released in August 1968 by Columbia Records. Recorded with the addition of country rock pioneer Gram Parsons, it became the first album widely recognized as country rock as well as a seminal progressive country album, and represented a stylistic move away from the psychedelic rock of the band's previous LP, The Notorious Byrd Brothers. The Byrds had occasionally experimented with country music on their four previous albums, but Sweetheart of the Rodeo represented their fullest immersion into the genre up to that point in time. The album was responsible for bringing Parsons, who had joined the Byrds in February 1968 prior to the start of recording, to the attention of a mainstream rock audience for the first time. Thus, the album is an important chapter in Parsons' crusade to make country music fashionable for a young audience.
The album was conceived as a history of 20th-century American popular music, encompassing examples of country music, jazz and rhythm and blues, among other genres. However, steered by the passion of the little-known Parsons, this concept was abandoned early on and the album instead became purely a country record. The recording of the album was divided between sessions in Nashville and Los Angeles, with contributions from session musicians including Lloyd Green, John Hartford, JayDee Maness, and Clarence White. Tension developed between Parsons and the rest of the band, guitarist Roger McGuinn especially, and some of Parsons' vocals were re-recorded, partly due to legal issues. By the time the album was released, Parsons had left the band. The Byrds' move away from rock and pop towards country music elicited a great deal of resistance and hostility from the ultra-conservative Nashville country music establishment, who viewed the Byrds as a group of hippies attempting to subvert country music.
Upon its release, the album reached number 77 on the Billboard Top LPs chart, but failed to reach the charts in the United Kingdom. Two attendant singles were released during 1968, "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere", which achieved modest success, and "I Am a Pilgrim", which failed to chart. The album received mostly positive reviews in the music press, but the band's shift away from psychedelic music alienated much of its pop audience. Despite being the least commercially successful Byrds' album to date upon release, Sweetheart of the Rodeo is today considered to be a seminal and highly influential country rock album.
Background (January–March 1968)
The initial concept by Roger McGuinn for the album that would become Sweetheart of the Rodeo was to expand upon the genre-spanning approach of the Byrds' previous LP, The Notorious Byrd Brothers, by recording a double album overview of the history of American popular music. The planned album would begin with bluegrass and Appalachian music, then move through country and western, jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock, before culminating with futuristic proto-electronica featuring the Moog modular synthesizer.
With a college tour to promote The Notorious Byrd Brothers looming, a more immediate concern was the recruitment of new band members. David Crosby and Michael Clarke had been dismissed from the band in late 1967, leaving Roger McGuinn as de facto leader of the Byrds, along with Chris Hillman, the only other remaining member of the band. To address this problem, McGuinn hired Hillman's cousin, Kevin Kelley (formerly a member of the Rising Sons), as the band's new drummer, and it was this three-piece line-up, with McGuinn on guitar and Hillman on bass, that embarked on the early 1968 college tour. It soon became apparent, however, that the Byrds were having difficulty performing their studio material live as a trio, and so it was decided that a fourth member was required. McGuinn, with an eye still on his envisaged American music concept album, felt that a pianist with a jazz background would be ideal for the group.
A candidate was found by Larry Spector, the band's business manager, in the shape of 21-year-old Gram Parsons. Parsons, a marginal figure in the L.A. music scene, had been acquainted with Hillman since 1967 and he auditioned for the band as a piano player in February 1968. His faux-jazz piano playing and genial personality at audition was enough to impress both McGuinn and Hillman; so Parsons was recruited as the fourth member of the band, although he quickly switched to playing guitar instead of piano. Although Parsons and Kelley were full members of the Byrds, they received a salary from McGuinn and Hillman and did not sign with Columbia Records when the Byrds' recording contract was renewed on February 29, 1968.
Unbeknownst to McGuinn or Hillman, Parsons had his own musical agenda in which he planned to marry his love of traditional country music (which he saw as the purest form of American music) with youth culture's passion for rock. He had already successfully attempted this fusion as a member of the little-known International Submarine Band, on the album Safe at Home, but Parsons' new status as a Byrd offered him an international stage from which to launch his bid to reclaim country music for his generation.
Following his recruitment, Parsons began to lure Hillman away from McGuinn's concept album idea and towards a blend of what Parsons would later term "Cosmic American Music". In essence, this was a hybrid of various roots music forms, primarily oriented towards honky tonk country music but also encompassing folk, soul, rhythm and blues, rock and roll and contemporary rock. Hillman, who had come from a musical background firmly rooted in bluegrass, had successfully persuaded the Byrds to incorporate country influences into their music in the past, beginning with the song "Satisfied Mind" on their 1965 album, Turn! Turn! Turn! Many of Hillman's songs on the Younger Than Yesterday and The Notorious Byrd Brothers albums also had a pronounced country feel, with several featuring Clarence White (a renowned bluegrass guitar player and session musician) on lead guitar, rather than McGuinn. During time spent singing old country songs with Parsons, Hillman became convinced that Parsons' concept of a country-oriented version of the Byrds could work.
Parsons' passion for his country rock vision was so contagious that he convinced McGuinn to abandon plans for the Byrds' next album and follow Parsons' lead in recording a country rock album. Parsons also persuaded McGuinn and Hillman to record the album in the country music capital of Nashville, Tennessee, as Bob Dylan had done for his Blonde On Blonde and John Wesley Harding albums. Although McGuinn had reservations about the band's new direction, he decided that such a move could expand the already declining audience of the group. After long-time Byrds' producer Gary Usher, who had little interest in producing McGuinn's concept album, indicated a preference for the country concept, McGuinn acquiesced. On March 9, 1968, the band decamped to Columbia's recording facility in Nashville to begin recording sessions for Sweetheart of the Rodeo.
Recording (March–May 1968) Between March 9 and March 15, 1968, the band, accompanied by several prominent session musicians, recorded multiple takes of eight songs at Columbia's Studio A in the Music Row area of Nashville. Recording sessions for the album continued from April 4 through May 27, 1968, at Columbia Studios in Hollywood, with a further seven songs recorded during these sessions and finishing touches applied to many of the tracks recorded in Nashville.
The songs that the Byrds recorded for the album included "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere" and "Nothing Was Delivered", two country-influenced Dylan covers from his then-unreleased Basement Tapes sessions. Despite the change in musical style that the Sweetheart of the Rodeo album represented, the inclusion of two Dylan covers provided a link with their previous folk-rock incarnation, when Dylan's material had been a mainstay of their repertoire. The Byrds also recorded a trio of classic country songs for the album: the traditional "I Am a Pilgrim", which Merle Travis popularized in the late-1940s; the Cindy Walker-penned "Blue Canadian Rockies", which had been sung by Gene Autry in the 1952 film of the same name; and "The Christian Life", written by the Louvin Brothers, which was the antithesis of a traditional rock song with its gentle lyrics extolling the simple pleasures of Christianity as a lifestyle.
The band supplemented these older country standards and Dylan covers with two contemporary country songs: Merle Haggard's maudlin convict's lament, "Life in Prison"; and Luke McDaniel's "You're Still On My Mind", a sorrowful tale of a heartbroken drunkard failing to find solace at the bottom of a bottle. Additionally, the Byrds gave William Bell's Stax hit, "You Don't Miss Your Water", a country flavored make-over, highlighted by the band's trademark crystal clear harmonies and contributions from JayDee Maness and Earl P. Ball, on pedal steel guitar and honky-tonk piano respectively. With its fusion of country and soul, "You Don't Miss Your Water" was a perfect example of what Parsons would later define, with his self-coined phrase, as "Cosmic American Music".
Lacking any country songs of his own, McGuinn delved into his pre-Byrds folk song repertoire instead, contributing Woody Guthrie's "Pretty Boy Floyd", a romanticized portrayal of the real-life folk hero and outlaw. The March 12, 1968 recording session that produced "Pretty Boy Floyd" saw McGuinn attempting to play the song's banjo accompaniment, but feeling dissatisfied with his efforts, he ceded the part to session player John Hartford. The Byrds also recorded a Kelley original, "All I Have Are Memories", Tim Hardin's "You Got a Reputation", and the traditional song, "Pretty Polly", but none of these songs were selected for the final Sweetheart of the Rodeo album.
Parsons brought three of his songs to the recording sessions: "Lazy Days", "One Hundred Years from Now" and "Hickory Wind", the latter of which had been written by Parsons and former International Submarine Band member, Bob Buchanan, during an early 1968 train ride from Florida to Los Angeles. "One Hundred Years from Now" has a quicker tempo than most of the material on Sweetheart of the Rodeo and functions as a speculation on current human vanities and how they might be viewed by successive generations. The Chuck Berry-influenced "Lazy Days" was not included in the final album, but was re-recorded by Parsons and Hillman's later band, the Flying Burrito Brothers, for their 1970 album, Burrito Deluxe.
Nashville reaction and touring
Upon completion of the Music Row recording sessions, the band ended their stay in Nashville with an appearance at the Grand Ole Opry at Ryman Auditorium (introduced by future "outlaw" country star Tompall Glaser), on March 15, 1968. The band was greeted with derision by the conservative audience because they were the first group of hippie "longhairs" to play at the venerable country music establishment. In fact, the Byrds had all had their hair cut shorter than they normally wore it, specifically for their appearance at the Grand Ole Opry, but this did nothing to appease their detractors in the audience. The Byrds opened with a rendition of Merle Haggard's "Sing Me Back Home", which was met with derisive heckling, booing, and mocking calls of "tweet, tweet" from the hostile Opry audience. Any hope of salvaging the performance was immediately destroyed when Parsons, rather than singing a song announced by Glaser, launched into a rendition of "Hickory Wind" dedicated to his grandmother. This deviation from protocol stunned Opry regulars such as Roy Acuff, and embarrassed Glaser, ensuring that the Byrds would never be invited back to play on the show.