VA - Truckers, Kickers, Cowboy Angels: The Blissed-Out Birth of Country Rock, Vol. 6: 1973 (2015)

2-CD Digipak (6-plated) with comprehensive booklet, 43 tracks. Sales have been strong and critical response has been overwhelming to Volumes 1 through 5. Now the story concludes! The mix is as before: big hits and neglected classics that tell the story of a musical genre. Double CDs with generously full booklets with complete song-by-song notes, rare photos, and first-person accounts. Volume 6 – 1973: The leading edge of the country rock scene was shifting from Los Angeles to Austin. In March 1973, 'Crawdaddy' magazine highlighted the Austin for the first time. Pretty soon, everyone was catching on. In September, 'Billboard' devoted a full page to Austin, calling out Willie Nelson, Doug Sahm, Jerry Jeff Walker, and Billy Joe Shaver. The original standard-bearers of Country Rock, the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers, had lost their way, but their guru, Gram Parsons, made two of the finest LPs of any era. Parsons' work is the cornerstone of our last two volumes. But we detour to Austin to catch Doug Sahm, Jerry Jeff Walker, the Lost Gonzo Band, and Willie Nelson. We gather the best of the era's country rock from Nashville, New York, San Francisco, and all points in-between. Here are the era's greatest recordings and the stories behind them. We close with Gram Parsons' death and Emmylou Harris picking up pieces, carrying the music forward from Nashville. Country and Rock shouldn't have coexisted in the mid-to-late 1960s when the United States was so polarized and ROCK epitomized one cultural extreme just as COUNTRY epitomized the other. But the trippy, counter-culture edge that Gram Parsons, the Byrds, the Burritos, Commander Cody, Michael Nesmith, and the others brought to country music, made the unimaginable real. That's the story we've told. We followed Country Rock on a ten-year journey from 1966 to 1975. Since then, it has branched in many directions: Soft Rock, Outlaw country, Southern Rock, Alt-Country, Americana, and much else. But if you follow the tributaries back, you usually arrive at the music anthologized in this series.