THE GRAM SCHEME OF THINGS Gram Parsons was born Ingram Cecil Connor III in Winter Haven, Florida. The Conners moved to Waycross, Georgia where his father, Cecil “Coon Dog” Conner II, worked in a family box plant. In Waycross, Gram saw an up-and-coming Elvis Presley at the city auditorium in February 1956. Gram Parsons biographer Bob Kealing noted that the effect this had on Gram was “immediate and long-lasting.” The pursuit of music and celebrity would be a fixture in Parsons life from this moment forward.
Legends started in 1961 with Gram playing guitar and piano, Jim Stafford from Eloise on lead guitar, Lamar Braxton on drums, and his friend Jim Carlton on upright bass.
Gram’s maternal grandparents were the exceedingly wealthy Winter Haven citrus family, the Snivelys. Patriarch John Snively was a fertilizer salesman turned real estate investor and citrus millionaire. The Snively mansion can still be seen in LEGOLAND Florida Resort today as John was the one who’d sold the land on which Cypress Gardens was built. This charmed citrus-money lineage guaranteed Gram a rather healthy trust fund.
Jim’s father, Chicago musician Ben Carlton, moved his family to Winter Haven in 1954 to work in-studio for the radio show Florida Calling. Contracted by the Florida Citrus Commission, the show was broadcast five days a week from the Florida Citrus Building.
Jim Carlton met Gram Connor in 1959 when he transferred to St. Joseph Catholic School. “I am not Catholic, and neither was he, but my folks were told I’d get a better education there and I probably did. It was a heck of a lot more fun than public school,” Carlton said.
Within ten minutes of meeting, Jim and Gram became friends, united by a sharp sense of humor. Carlton described Gram as a bright kid, and said, “Even then he was very magnetic.” In a time where boys called one another by their last names, Carlton took notice that for the young Connor boy – everyone just called him Gram.
That trust fund didn’t mean he would be spared tribulation though. Parsons lost his father to suicide on December 23, 1958, and his mother to alcoholism on the day of his high school graduation from the Bolles School. Gram’s own death at 26, in Joshua Tree, California, on September 19, 1973 and the circumstances that followed have unfortunately – at least partially – cast a shadow over his musical contributions.
At school, the nuns would task Gram with watching over younger classes if a teacher had to step out. He was known to tell stories to keep the children entertained. “He was confabulous,” Carlton laughed. “If you believed everything Gram ever said, you were a fool. He spread a lot of his own legend if you will. […] But he was so damn good at it.” In fact, Gram would go on to ‘spread his own legend’ while at Harvard. In a comical turn of events, he convinced the school paper that he and his college band, the Like, had signed with RCA Records, a falsehood picked up by The Boston Globe with even more fabulous claims tacked on – carried further down the line, the following week by The Tampa Tribune.
Kealing felt compelled to tell Gram’s story for this reason. “It really felt like Gram had an unfinished life,” he said. The overemphasis on the morbid circumstances surrounding Parsons’s death in the California desert inspired Kealing to write a book that forwent the macabre for what mattered. During a 2013 book signing at the Winter Haven Public Library, the author said, “I was looking for some sort of redemption in Gram Parsons’s story. Less about the hype and sensationalism, more about the rich fabric of the definative places that he called home. The people with whom he played and those who carry on his legacy. That’s why I wanted my book to be a song of the south — Gram’s story rooted in places like Winter Haven and Waycross — not LA, not Joshua Tree, California.”
Storytelling aside, there was a maturity about Gram, gilded with boyish charm. Carlton described Parsons as a nonjudgmental character who rejected the prejudices that were a hallmark of the 1960s deep south. Adults like Carlton’s father remarked on Gram’s intellect.
In the same spirit, this article will focus on stories from Parsons’s formative years and career – on his contemporaries and friends – those who shaped the music scene within and beyond the orange groves, pine scrub, and murky lakes of Polk County, Florida.
A stylish dresser and ever ‘his own man’ as Carlton described him, Parsons made other boys envious when girls would ogle over him. “He would take that in stride,” his friend said. Gram had even been hit a few times by jealous boyfriends – but he could take a punch. Parsons’s good looks and style would be a point of recognition for the rest of his life. His rhinestone-studded Nudie suit embroidered with naked ladies, pot leaves, pills, and poppies with a bold red cross radiating rainbow rays on the back remains an epic piece music fashion history. During a talk at a Brunswick, Georgia library in 1992 journalist Stanley Booth, who traveled with the Rolling Stones and wrote the book The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones, described the first time he saw Gram entering a room with Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. Booth, who also grew up in Waycross, Georgia,
Following the death of his father in 1958, Gram moved with his mother, “Big Avis” Connor and younger sister, “Little Avis” back to Winter Haven. It was here that Gram would step into the limelight, and never really leave. The first band Parsons played with was called the Pacers. In 1960, he sang to a crowd of some 50 kids at the Dundee train depot. Gram would eventually move on to start his own band called the Legends. There are several iterations of the band throughout the years seeing members come and go. The
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