Gram Parsons left the Byrds after making Sweetheart Of The Rodeo in hopes of achieving a synthesis of country, soul and rock ‘n’ roll he dubbed “Cosmic American Music.” He realized that vision twice — first, with the Flying Burrito Brothers, on The Gilded Palace Of Sin, and then, with Elvis Presley’s band and Emmylou Harris, on Grievous Angel. No record has accomplished as much since, although Jim Ford’s similarly expansive debut, Harlan County, came close.
Originally released nearly three decades ago on the Hollywood-based Sundown label, Ford’s only record to date is as freewheeling an expression of the late-’60s zeitgeist as any of us is likely to hear. Witness “Dr. Handy”, a “Sugar, Sugar”-meets-“Brown Eyed Girl” stick of juicy fruit about a bayou huckster who keeps the kids in candy. Or “I’m Gonna Make Her Love Me”, a freaky slab of fatback the likes of which Funkadelic didn’t perfect until the early-’70s. Add to that the Muscle Shoals groove of the title track and the hip-shake boogie of “Workin’ My Way To L.A.” — rhythms courtesy of Native American rockers Redbone — and the honky-fonk of Harlan County starts to sound as epochal as Parson’s cosmic vision. Hell, two string-laden ballads a la “Wichita Lineman” even make sense in this context.
Ford dropped out of sight shortly after releasing this album. Rumor has it he went to England to record a follow-up, only to scrap the project after both Brinsley Schwarz and Joe Cocker’s Grease Band proved they couldn’t hack his idiosyncratic arrangements. Apocrypha like this only adds to Ford’s mystique, especially when one tries to reconcile his musical catholicity with his hillbilly origins — a world in which he was “diggin’ hard coal at twelve years old,” and where a young child’s dream was “a new pair of shoes to keep its little feet warm in winter.”
Wherever Ford is today, it’s no wonder he got out of Kentucky. You can almost hear the screen door slam when, on the title track, he sings, “I put a shirt on my back and a brown paper sack, a big piece of my mama’s cold cornbread. I hit the road jack, forgot to look back, I walked all the way down to somewhere. I been all over this whole wide world, I slept on a northwest bounty. The coldest place, Lord, I ever did see is the hills back in Harlan County.” Something tells me Springsteen never ran as far or as fast.
