POLK’S MUSICAL SIXTIES

GRAM PARSONS GRAM PARSONS

Polk’s “Uncommonly Musical” Sixties, Gram Parsons, and a Cosmic Collaboration to Save the Derry Down

The sixties in Polk County, Florida, claimed a transcendental sum total of talent. Some kind of musical magic was in the water, or maybe the stars. It was the birthplace of the Father of Cosmic American Music, Gram Parsons, along with a broad list of other epochal musicians and entertainers who emerged from these sleepy southern towns. Garage band kids from Winter Haven, Auburndale, and Eloise would go on to become acclaimed songwriters, comedians, and performers. Something celestial must have laid at the junction of time and place – in this slice of Florida throughout the sixties – a place Bob Kealing called “uncommonly musical.”

The effects of Elvis Presley and the Beatles can’t be discounted, said Kealing, the author of Calling Me Home: Gram Parsons and the Roots of Country Rock. They were ubiquitous on the radio, the paramount of celebrity, and spent significant time in the Sunshine State, Presley in 1956 and the Beatles in 1964. Elvis even performed a show at the Polk Theatre in Lakeland on August 6, 1956. “That was huge for people because it was the dawning of youth culture – it was the dawning of music that was made for teens,” Kealing said. “Rock and roll spoke to a lot of teen yearning and feelings of angst and anxiety.”

Musician, comedy writer, and childhood friend to Gram Parsons, Jim Carlton suspects the showbiz spirit of Florida’s first theme park had something to do with it. Before moving from Chicago, Carlton’s parents took him to see a film shot at Cypress Gardens, Easy to Love (1953), starring Esther Williams and Van Johnson, to give their son a glimpse of his new home. “Cypress Gardens was this little hub of show business, a little oasis in the middle of Florida,” he said.

The collaborative culture of band hopping, jam sessions, and playing gigs in youth centers across Central Florida certainly played a role. “My dad always said the best thing you can do is play music with other people,” Carlton said. And he was right. Local garage bands like the Legends, the Dynamics, and the Steppin’ Stones produced prolific musicians, like Jim Stafford, Jon Corneal, and Les Dudek.

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Lakeland-born, Auburndale-raised Bobby Braddock was a product of Polk County’s musical pinnacle. A pianist for the Dynamics, Braddock has had a series of No. 1 hit songs spanning five decades. He and Curly Putman co-wrote “D-I-V-O-R-C-E,” recorded by Tammy Wynette, and George Jones’s chart-topping classic “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” Braddock paid homage to his hometown in his autobiography Down in Orburndale: A Songwriter’s Youth in Old Florida.

The late Carl Chambers, who passed away in 2020, was another Auburndale musician and songwriter to make a hit, composing Alabama’s “Close Enough to Perfect.”

Kent LaVoie, who performs as Lobo, grew up in Winter Haven. The singer-songwriter has had major chart success with songs like “Me and You and a Dog Named Boo” and “I’d Love You to Want Me.”

And, of course, there’s Gram Parsons – a country rock cult figure and genre pioneer. He may not have cut his teeth on twang, but Gram certainly became a country music tastemaker and luminary. Parsons’s backstory is imbued with equal measure talent and tragedy. The winsome Winter Haven-born musician carried an earnestness in his voice that endears listeners almost fifty years after his death. Whether he’s bluesy belting “Cry One More Time for You” or giving a subtle Elvis lip snarl and afflicted gaze while singing “Hot Burrito #1,” those who discover Gram don’t soon forget him.

Parsons’s renown is most often attributed to his later work with the International Submarine Band, the Byrds, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Gram and the Fallen Angels, his solo work, and collaborations with Emmylou Harris. One jewel on the crown of his legacy was co-writing “Hickory Wind” with Bob Buchanan, released on the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo album in 1968. The first few guitar twangs of the song are a promise only Parsons can make good on, as he delivers the first line, “In South Carolina…” with his lofty southern sweetness.

Two famous friends and collaborators cardinal to his career and personal life were Rolling Stones guitarist and frontman Keith Richards and a young Emmylou Harris, whom author Bob Kealing referred to as Parsons’s “vocal soul mate.” During Harris’s induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame decades after Parsons’s death, his enduring memory and mark are present. While introducing Emmylou, Country Music Hall of Fame CEO Kyle Young called Gram the one “who would help [Harris] understand the true power, poetry, purity, and perhaps the political righteousness of country music as the voice of, by, and for the people.” The enigmatic chemistry between Emmylou and Gram is the stuff of legend, living on in perpetuity. Swedish folk duo, First Aid Kit, called their songs “quite the musical revelation.” Inspired by Gram and Emmylou’s relationship and “the joy and magic of singing with someone you love,” the pair released the song “Emmylou” in 2012. Harris gently wiped tears from her cheek during the 2015 Polar Music Prize ceremony as the pair sang “Emmylou.” During the chorus, the sisters lilt:

I’ll be your Emmylou and I’ll be your June If you’ll be my Gram and my Johnny too No, I’m not asking much of you Just sing little darling, sing with me

In a 2010 Rolling Stone article listing Gram Parsons as #87 in the list of the “100 Greatest Artists” of all time, friend Keith Richards called Gram “everything you wanted in a singer and a songwriter,” and said, “we can’t know what his full impact could have been. If Buddy Holly hadn’t gotten on that plane, or Eddie Cochran hadn’t turned the wrong corner, think of what stuff we could have looked forward to, and be hearing now. It would be phenomenal.”

Parsons’s former bandmate and “Spiders and Snakes” songwriter, Jim Stafford, shared the sentiment. “He was headed in the right direction if he had lived long enough. The sad part is none of us will ever get to know what he could have accomplished because he really was a gifted young man. He really was.”

But, before he would carve out a cosmic career, cement his name in country rock history, and leave the world too soon, Gram Parsons was just another kid from Winter Haven, Florida who loved Elvis.

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The first few guitar twangs of the song are a promise only Parsons can make good on...