Rockpedia
Rock branch Full entry · 1968

Country rock

Emerged 1968 Origin California, USA Subgenres 1 Vocals Sung
Heaviness
2
Speed
4
Melody
10

Sung. Melodic singing throughout.

In short

Pedal steel and three-part harmony over a rock rhythm section. The sound of Laurel Canyon.

How it sounds

  • Pedal steel and acoustic guitar over a rock rhythm section.
  • Vocal harmony in thirds and sixths, sung loosely.
  • Moderate tempos and warm, airy production.

Hear what that means

Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. 2 of 3 are cued to a second read from the upload's own tracklist.

The specifics

Tempo
80-120 bpm
Song length
3-5 min
Tuning
Standard and open G, with pedal steel guitar as a lead voice — an instrument with a foot-operated pitch-bending mechanism that no other rock genre uses.
Production
Warm, close and vocal-forward, recorded in Los Angeles by people who could afford good rooms. The harmony stacking is the production's main job.
Written about
Loss, The American west, Domesticity, Exile

What each part is doing

  • Pedal steel The genre's signature: a lap instrument whose pedals and knee levers bend individual strings mid-chord, producing the sliding harmonic movement no fretted instrument can make.
  • Guitar Clean and picked rather than strummed, using open tunings and country phrasing — bends into a note rather than onto it.
  • Bass Simple, root-and-fifth, staying out of the way of a very busy harmonic arrangement.
  • Drums Brushed or lightly played, frequently with a two-beat country feel rather than a rock backbeat.
  • Vocals Close harmony in thirds, stacked two and three deep. The Eagles' records are essentially vocal arrangements with a band underneath.

What it isn't

That it softened rock. It is more accurate to say it made country commercially enormous by routing it through rock's audience — the records that resulted sold in numbers neither genre had seen, which is why the whole thing is remembered as a dilution by people who preferred the harder end of both. Gram Parsons' actual project was the opposite: taking rock's audience to country music.

Told apart from

  • Folk rock Country rock is folk rock's child pointed at American country rather than at British and American folk ballads — the repertoire changes and the pedal steel arrives.
  • Southern rock Southern rock is a blues-rock band with country in it; country rock is a country band with rock in it. The centre of gravity is the difference.
  • Alt-country / Americana Alt-country arrives twenty years later from the punk side, and is deliberately rougher and less commercial.
  • Jangle pop Both descend from the Byrds. Jangle took the twelve-string and the melancholy; country rock took the harmony and the pedal steel.

The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.

History

Gram Parsons persuaded The Byrds to record a country album in Nashville in 1968, to the horror of both camps. The idea caught on in California, where the Eagles turned it into the decade's best-selling sound. Neil Young took the rougher, more honest route through the same fusion.

Descended from

Branches into

Siblings on this branch

Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree

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Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim.