Country Rock

Country rock takes country's instrumentation — acoustic guitar, pedal steel, fiddle — and grafts it onto a rock band's drum kit (backbeat on 2 and 4) and electric Telecaster. Tempos sit 100-140 BPM. Vocals usually stack in 2- or 3-part harmony, with a soft, conversational lead in the Jackson Browne mold. Lyrics lean less toward country's pickup-truck-and-heartache axis and more toward the highway, the canyon, and West Coast restlessness. Production aims for a dry, present acoustic-guitar sound alongside clean (not overdriven) electric tones.

The Byrds' 'Sweetheart of the Rodeo' (1968) — a Los Angeles rock band recording at Columbia's Nashville studio with steel guitar — is the inflection point. Gram Parsons, briefly a Byrd and then a Flying Burrito Brother, called the project 'cosmic American music' and gave the form its theory. By the early 1970s the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, and Little Feat were selling records to a national audience, and the Laurel Canyon neighborhood of Los Angeles was the scene's geographic center.

Vocal harmony is the form's signature: count the voices. The Eagles work in three parts, CSN&Y in three or four, and each member's tonal placement is distinct. The pedal steel — a horizontal lap instrument played with a metal bar sliding across the strings — provides the 'crying' bends between vocal lines. The contrast between that wet, vibrato-rich steel and the dry, clipped Telecaster picking is the genre's sonic fingerprint.

The Eagles' 'Take It Easy' (1972) is the one-song summary. For an album, Jackson Browne's 'Late for the Sky' (1974) shows the songwriter side; the Eagles' 'Hotel California' (1976) shows the arena side.

Gram Parsons died of a drug overdose in 1973 at 26. His friend Phil Kaufman stole the body from Los Angeles International Airport and attempted to cremate it in Joshua Tree National Monument, per Parsons' verbal request; the partial cremation left charges of misdemeanor theft (the body was not legally property), and the incident inspired the 2003 film 'Grand Theft Parsons.'