Top Ten Angelic Songs: Return of the Grievous Angel (#4)

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It's time for another song from list of favorite tunes with the word "angel" in the title. These top four, especially, were very difficult to put into an order. Any one of these four get "stuck" in my iPod for a while when they pop up. Here's the next song on the list. #4: Return of the Grievous Angel - Gram Parsons Oh, man, what a song. Listening to this you may understand why so many mourn the loss of Gram Parsons at such an early age (guess how old he was....no, 26, he didn't make it to the "27 club" when he died of an overdose in Joshua Tree National Monument [now National Park]...and if you want a real interesting read, check into the story of how some friends stole Parson's body from LA International Airport, took it back to Joshua Tree, and burned it). No wonder people think of what he could have done after a song like this. (For you trivia buffs, the Eagles' song "My Man" from On the Border is a tribute to Parsons. Bernie Leadon was in the Flying Burrito Brothers with Parsons.) A man who left Tennessee (I'm guessing Memphis because of the reference to "the river bridge," implying the Mississippi, and the reference to Elvis ["I met up with a king, on his head an amphetamine crown, he talked about unbuckling that old Bible Belt and lighted out for some desert town"]) to roam the west ("I headed west to grow up with the country") comes back home to his girl ("won't you scratch my itch, sweet Annie Rich and welcome me back to town") after getting lonely in Wyoming ("I thought about a calico bonnet from Cheyenne to Tennessee"). Gram Parsons, sadly, didn't live to see his influence on music. There's a lot of Americana, alt-country, and country-rockers out there making grade A quality music because they heard songs like this and went, "Wow." Wow, indeed. Return of the Grievous Angel Written by Gram Parsons and Tom Brown Recorded by Gram Parsons From Grievous Angel, 1974 Out there with the truckers and the kickers and the cowboy angels: