Ī candidate was found by Larry Spector, the band's business manager, in the shape of 21-year-old Gram Parsons. McGuinn, with an eye still on his envisaged American music concept album, felt that a pianist with a jazz background would be ideal for the group. It soon became apparent, however, that the Byrds were having difficulty performing their studio material live as a trio, and so it was decided that a fourth member was required. To address this problem, McGuinn hired Hillman's cousin, Kevin Kelley (formerly a member of the Rising Sons), as the band's new drummer, and it was this three-piece line-up, with McGuinn on guitar and Hillman on bass, that embarked on the early 1968 college tour. David Crosby and Michael Clarke had been dismissed from the band in late 1967, leaving Roger McGuinn as de facto leader of the Byrds, along with Chris Hillman, the only other remaining member of the band. college tour to promote The Notorious Byrd Brothers looming, a more immediate concern was the recruitment of new band members. The planned album would begin with bluegrass and Appalachian music, then move through country and western, jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock music, before culminating with futuristic proto- electronica featuring the Moog modular synthesizer. The initial concept by Roger McGuinn for the album that would become Sweetheart of the Rodeo was to expand upon the genre-spanning approach of the Byrds' previous LP, The Notorious Byrd Brothers, by recording a double album overview of the history of American popular music. Despite being the least commercially successful Byrds' album to date upon its initial release, Sweetheart of the Rodeo is today considered to be a seminal and highly influential country rock album.
The album received mostly positive reviews in the music press, but the band's shift away from psychedelic music alienated much of its pop audience. Two attendant singles were released during 1968, " You Ain't Goin' Nowhere", which achieved modest success, and " I Am a Pilgrim", which failed to chart. Upon its release, the album reached number 77 on the Billboard Top LPs chart, but failed to reach the charts in the United Kingdom. The Byrds' move away from rock and pop towards country music elicited a great deal of resistance and hostility from the ultra-conservative Nashville country music establishment, who viewed the Byrds as a group of long-haired hippies attempting to subvert country music. Tension developed between Parsons and the rest of the band, guitarist Roger McGuinn especially, with some of Parsons' vocals being re-recorded, partly due to legal complications, and by the time the album was released in August, Parsons had left the band. The recording of the album was divided between sessions in Nashville and Los Angeles, with contributions from several notable session musicians, including Lloyd Green, John Hartford, JayDee Maness, and Clarence White. However, steered by the passion of the little-known Parsons, who had only recently joined the Byrds, this proposed concept was abandoned early on and the album instead became purely a country record. The album was initially conceived as a musical history of 20th century American popular music, encompassing examples of country music, jazz and rhythm and blues, among other genres. Thus, the album is an important chapter in Parsons' personal and musical crusade to make country music fashionable for a young audience. The album was also responsible for bringing Parsons, who had joined the Byrds in February 1968 prior to the recording of the LP, to the attention of a mainstream rock audience for the first time. The Byrds had occasionally experimented with country music on their four previous albums, but Sweetheart of the Rodeo represented their fullest immersion into the genre to that point in time. Recorded with the addition of country rock pioneer Gram Parsons, it became the first major album widely recognized as country rock and represented a stylistic move away from the psychedelic rock of the band's previous LP, The Notorious Byrd Brothers. Sweetheart of the Rodeo is the sixth album by American rock band the Byrds and was released in August 1968 on Columbia Records.
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