A song I heard many many years ago. This is about as genuine as you can get.
What a beautiful song. Country or whatever you want to call it…it’s a great one. Gram Parsons and poet Tom Brown wrote this song. This song was on his last solo album Grievous Angel. Gram was not a country wanna-be…he was country. Keith Richards has said that Gram taught him everything he knows about country music. After hearing Gram Parsons…Merle Haggard wanted to produce him.
After leaving the Byrds, Parsons made a series of albums… Grievous Angel completes the cycle. Beginning with the Flying Burrito Brothers’ The Gilded Palace of Sin, the work progressed through Burrito Deluxe and Parsons’ earlier solo effort, GP.
I have not mentioned his singing partner yet. The wonderful and beautiful Emmylou Harris. Emmylou Harris was an unknown singer in her early twenties when Gram Parsons saw her perform at a folk club in Washington, D.C. in 1971. He recruited her the following year to sing on 1973’s classic album GP and the subsequent tour. She ended up on the GP album and this one…Grievous Angel.
Grievous Angel peaked at #195 on the Billboard Album Charts. If Parsons had survived it’s no telling what he and Emmylou would have done together. His voice wasn’t strong like Johnny Cash or Merle Haggard but it was so emotional that you were in the story with him.
This song describes the vision of home and love that haunts a wanderer through his travels across America.
Emmylou Harris: “I would say until I had met Gram and started working with him I didn’t really understand or have a real love or feel for country music. Like most of my generation, you know, country music was politically incorrect for us at that point. It was associated with Republicans and Right Wing and that sort of thing. He taught me the beauty and the poetry, the simplicity, the honesty in the music. And the love of harmony came from really singing with him.”
Emmylou Harris: Well, we got fired after our first gig. We had two weeks of rehearsal. And I was just in the band. I never worked with a band. I didn’t know how you did things. So I just recorded things as we went down. But Gram didn’t focus on the material from the record; he just wanted to play songs. So we sat around and played all these songs, but we never worked up a beginning, middle, and end. It was such a train wreck that first night. But actually, before we got fired, the club got closed down because Weather Report had played there a few days earlier, and they were so loud that an injunction was put against the club. So, technically, we really didn’t get fired.
Emmylou Harris: “I discovered my own voice singing in harmony with Gram, there is something about the uniqueness of two voices creating a sound that does not come when they are singing solo, and I have always been fascinated by that. That song, and our harmony, is kind of a pinnacle of our duet-singing together.”
Return of the Grievous Angel
Won’t you scratch my itch, sweet Annie Rich
And welcome me back to town?
Come out on your porch or step into your parlor
And I’ll tell you how it all went down
Out with the truckers and the kickers and the cowboy angels
And a good saloon in every single town
Oh, and I remembered something you once told me
And I’ll be damned if it did not come true
Twenty thousand roads I went down, down, down
And they all lead me straight back home to you
‘Cause I headed west to grow up with the country
Across those prairies with the waves of grain
And I saw my devil
And I saw my deep blue sea
And I thought about a calico bonnet
From Cheyenne to Tennessee
We flew straight across that river bridge
Last night a half past two
The switchman waved his lantern goodbye and good day
As we went rolling through
Billboards and truckstops pass by the grievous angel
And now I know just what I have to do
Take it for me, James
And the man on the radio won’t leave me alone
He wants to take my money
For something that I’ve never been shown
And I saw my devil
And I saw my deep blue sea
And I thought about a calico bonnet
From Cheyenne to Tennessee
The news I could bring, I met up with the king
On his head an amphetamine crown
He talked about unbuckling that old bible belt
And lighted out for some desert town
Out with the truckers and the kickers and the cowboy angels
And a good saloon in every single town
Oh, but I remembered something you once told me
And I’ll be damned if it did not come true
Twenty thousand roads I went down, down, down
And they all lead me straight back home to you
Twenty thousand roads I went down, down, down
And they all lead me straight back home to you
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