"The Christian Life" is one of the highlights of The Byrds' 1968 album Sweetheart of the Rodeo. But it was probably inevitable that it would be misunderstood. No, Gram Parsons wasn't trying to convert his listeners to Christianity. He had much eager sinning left to do in his short lifetime. On the other hand the song has nothing to do with peak-2020 "everything is about race" cultural politics. I don't know where you'd even get something like that.
No, the simple truth is that Parsons heard the Louvin Brothers' original and was moved by it. Therefore he covered it with the Byrds, and opted to treat the sentiment behind it respectfully, whether he shared it or not.
2 comments:
Gram Parsons knew a good song when he heard one and The Christian Life is a very good song. Sweetheart of the Rodeo was one of my favorite albums. He was writing songs by then but so were others like Bob Dylan, for instance, who wrote several Byrds songs among themYou Ain't Goin' Nowhere and Merle Haggard's I Am a Pilgrim (yes, I looked them up as my two favorite songs on a great album). I imagine making SHotR must have been a group decision among the Byrds, especially McGuinn. It was weird to read the record bombed since everybody I knew at the time owned a copy. Oh it was a very creative era with room for all and a lot of mixing and matching going on..
It seems to me Emma Roller is another one of those educated white women on a mission to find racism (and woke shibboleths in general) in whatever topic catches her momentary attention.There's such a thing as reading far too much into simple things.
When you hear that something bombed it often means that the financial backers and others gave up on it too soon. Of course in this case Parsons leaving the band so soon afterwards probably did put a crimp in plans to tour and otherwise promote the album. Yet still, within a few years it made its impact felt. I'm glad you reminded me of "I Am a Pilgrim" because it inspired me to go back and listen to it again. Very much a country song, if the folk side of country. Roger McGuinn's voice suits it well.
The point of education is to expose growing minds to new ideas and let them think and debate, not to turn ideas into orthodoxies and set about converting everyone. Some seem to have forgotten that.
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