Calling Me Home: Gram Parsons and the Roots of Country Rock by Bob Kealing (review)

Bob Kealing has written a paean to Gram Parsons in a literary style that could only be called Southern gothic. On the first page he sets the tone: “Pain and tragedy run like perilous fault lines through three families that make up Gram Parsons’s family tree” (1). And from there Kealing sets his course on explaining why, perhaps, Parsons was so self destructive while at the same time gifted and one of the leaders in the Cosmic Americana musical movement of the late sixties and early seventies. Using a variety of interviews with people who knew Parsons at various points in his life, as well as with surviving family members, Kealing tries to paint a compassionate picture of Parsons and works hard to impress the reader with just how talented Parsons was and how important his contributions are to rock and country music history.

Parsons was born Gram Connor in Waycross, Georgia, to a war hero father and a mother from a prominent and wealthy central Florida family. Both were heavy drinkers. Coon Dog, as his father was known, committed suicide while Gram was still young, and his mother, Avis, remarried Bob Parsons who later adopted Gram and his younger sister. Avis would later die from complications linked to her alcoholism. The family had already relocated to Florida by this time, and Parsons migrated between boarding school and central Florida, playing in a variety of bands at youth centers throughout the region. Jim Stafford, of “I Don’t Like Spiders and Snakes” fame, was one of his early band mates, and he remembers fondly Parsons’s love of music, his ability to harmonize, but especially the opulence of his home life. Young Parsons wanted for nothing and his family did everything they could to enable his success. When he decided to give folk music a try, à la Florida icon Fred Neil, after a trip his band made to New York City, his father opened a coffeehouse in Orlando where young Gram could play regularly. Later, the Parsons family used their influence to get him into Harvard (he lasted one semester) and then funded a variety of recordings. All in all, Gram was a trust-fund kid who enjoyed music and musicians and the life-style. Kealing notes this, saying that some “critics minimize Parsons as a selfish, trust-fund dilettante” who became famous because he died (9). Calling Me Home does little to refute this, although Kealing works hard to convince the reader otherwise and show that Parsons was truly a man ahead of his time.

But Kealing too often settles for hyperbole when assessing Parsons’s talent or contribution, and at times takes as truth recollections certainly altered by time and nostalgia. Take, for instance, the conversation Kealing relates between a nine-year-old Parsons and his childhood friend Dickey Smith concerning Elvis playing in Waycross in 1956. Gram wanted to go to the show and begged Smith to join him, but Smith said, “never heard of him,” to which Parsons is reported to have replied, “This guy’s gonna be real famous” (17). And this type of oral history runs through the entire book. Kealing does not try to interpret what is said, and there is little or no critical analysis of what he is told in the interviews. In all fairness, this is not an academic monograph but more a fan history.

Keeling runs through Parsons’s flirtation with the Byrds, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and then, briefly, with Emmylou Harris, but what one comes away with is a picture of a young man living large, hanging out, and doing drugs with rock stars. It is almost a story of someone star-struck: the text is riddled with celebrity rock star connections. Certainly Parsons had talent and vision, but often his own self-destructive behavior and a near complete lack of understanding of the feelings of others superseded this...