God's Own Singer. A Life of Gram Parsons - Jason Walker

A new edition of the classic biography that takes us "as close to the heart and soul of Gram Parsons as any author could.” (Nigel Williamson, Uncut)

Gram Parsons sang like an angel and dressed like a country star. Sadly he was neither, at least not in his lifetime. But before his tragically early death he played a key role in bringing together the worlds of rock and country music. And he made groundbreaking records whose impact has only grown in the fifty-some years since he died at the age of 26.

Born into a wealthy but ill-fated Southern family, Parsons started out playing folk music with the Shilos, whose story is told here in depth for the first time. After founding the International Submarine Band during his brief time at Harvard, Gram headed to Los Angeles, where he turned the Byrds on to country music before quitting to form the Flying Burrito Brothers. Later he recorded two magnificent and haunting solo albums that helped launch bandmate Emmylou Harris towards her subsequent fame.

Yet none of Gram's musical ventures captured the imagination of the contemporary record-buying public, and his dreams of stardom were repeatedly frustrated. He nevertheless lived out the rock 'n' roll lifestyle to the full, and by the time his masterpiece, Grievous Angel, was released in September 1973, he had been dead for four months.

The rich musical legacy of what Parsons called his “cosmic American music” paved the way for both 70s country-rock acts such as the Eagles and the later alternative-country movement exemplified by Wilco. But regrettably, Parsons’s musical output and his pioneering role are often not what he is most known for. He has become an almost mythological figure, remembered less for his prodigious musical talents than for his prodigious drug intake, his friendship with the Rolling Stones, his premature death, and, perhaps most titillating of all, for the manner in which his corpse was cremated in the California desert by two drunken friends bent on honoring a promise.

An accomplished musician himself, Jason Walker places the focus squarely on Parsons’s music – how it developed and what makes it so special. He spent seven years interviewing Gram's friends, colleagues, and collaborators for this biography, first published in 2002 and reissued here in a thoroughly revised edition. And for this reissue he turned up an important source that no previous researcher had found – Michael Martin, Gram’s sometime “valet” and one of only two participants in the abduction and unofficial cremation of Gram Parsons’s body. He had quite a story to tell . . .