byrdsongs, xxxi

Dr. Byrds and Mr. Hyde features one of the greatest record sleeves in the history of popular music. The front cover has a great picture of the band, but it's the back that's the real treat. Aliens or cosmonauts or some such come down from on high. They strip off their space gear and it's the Byrds in full outlaw regalia. And then the band rides off on horseback into the brilliant golden sunset. Awesome. I've spent hours and hours at a time gazing at this sequence of images over the years, so grateful that there's actually somebody out there who gets it, who gets me, who gets all of us who live for stuff like this... Nashville West is a nice doe-si-doe-and-away-we-go-type number that the Byrds would play at the open or close of their shows. The title is also the name of the nifty little band that Clarence White and Gene Parsons were in before they joined the Byrds. But most importantly, Nashville West is the nickname given to Bakersfield, which became the second capital of country music for those situated west of the Rio Grande.  The roots of Bakersfield as Nashville West stretch back to the dustbowl and the great western migration. Having been displaced from their farms and way of life by drought, debt peonage, and all those ravages of the Great Depression you may have read about in The Grapes of Wrath, many of the 'okie' migrants - generically so called even though they weren't exclusively from Oklahoma - settled in the Central Valley and picked fruit for the ascendant agricultural corporations. They brought their hillbilly music with them, not just country and western but, more fundamentally, folk music. Reflecting on this today got me to thinking about the roots of folk rock, of which the Byrds were considered the pioneers.  While the harmonies were part of a larger response in music to the sublime natural wonders that abound in the lived experience of California, the folk part of the equation comes not only from Bob Dylan but also from California's history as a magnet for those seeking (and often failing to find) a better way of life. So maybe the okie is Dr. Byrds, and the Space Cowboy is Mr. Hyde...