The life Gram Parsons lived has always overshadowed the music he made. How could it not? Consider this biographical sketch:
Ingram Cecil Connor III was born in the fall of 1946, the grandson of a millionaire citrus baron in Florida. He grew up in Georgia. When he was 12 his father—a World War II fighter pilot—shot himself in the head with a .38-caliber pistol. The day he graduated high school his mother died of alcoholism. He went to Harvard to study theology. Music led him to Los Angeles, where he joined a group called The Byrds and performed at the Grand Ole Opry. Then he started a group called The Flying Burrito Brothers that blended country music with rock music in a way another California group called The Eagles would soon expand upon. After that he stayed a while with Keith Richards. Then he recorded a solo album with musicians from Elvis Presley’s band and a young singer from Birmingham named Emmylou Harris. A few months later Parsons died of a drug overdose (alcohol, morphine) in a cinderblock California hotel room. He was 26. Before his family could have his body flown south for burial two friends stole the corpse from an airport, drove it into Joshua Tree National Park, doused it with gasoline and set it afire in the night. Nothing much remained in the morning—the people who discovered the remains thought they had come upon a smoldering log.
With a biography like that Parsons could have written “Happy Birthday To You,” the most recognizable song in the English-speaking world, and stories of his life would still eclipse his achievements of craft. As it was, he was a singer-songwriter who wrote and performed country music that never really sold well, so of course his life is more well-known than his work. This is a shame.
To 21st century ears—mine included—Parsons’s songs might sound at first like empty old country. While the structure of many of his songs were certainly based on classic country standards, he adorned them with strains of hot rhythm & blues, Buddy Holly spirit and Sunday morning gospel. Spend time with his best compositions and eventually a careful artistry reveals itself. He chased a country-rock vision three decades before its time.
The song that comes the closest to capturing this vision is “Return of the Grievous Angel,” recorded not long before his death. Musically, it is Parsons at his best—paved backroad country with some amplified blue-eyed soul. The lyrics, though, are what seal the deal. They tell of a man coming home after traveling out west, where through joys and pains he discovered the best version of himself. The tale is an encapsulation of what Parsons was up to in his career: journeying through the history of American music and being inspired to create something new. Parsons sings the words with understated conviction. It is fair to view the song as his artistic high-water mark.
Here’s the thing: Parsons did not write the lyrics. In fact, he never knew who did. The words to his crowning achievement as a songwriter arrived in his hands under some of the strangest circumstances in the history of popular music.
Six months before his death, Parsons and his band were in an East Coast bar, preparing to perform, when a man came in off the street carrying a poem. He wanted to give it to Parsons but couldn’t get to him, so he gave it to someone with the band then left—vanished really. Ten months later Reprise Records released Parsons’s final, posthumous album. The first song—“Return of the Grievous Angel”—took nearly every lyric from the poem that man had left in that bar.
While this story has been recounted in several biographies of Parsons, nothing much about the man who wrote the words has ever been known, like: Who was he? Where did he come from? Where is he now? What actually transpired in that bar that night? And what else has he written?
I wanted to know these things. So last year I tracked him down.
His name is Thomas Stanley Brown.
He told me that in the spring of 1973 he was a member of the American Poets’ Workshop in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That same spring Gram Parsons and his touring band, The Fallen Angels, played a week-long stand at Oliver’s, a bar in nearby Boston, near Fenway Park. When Brown learned Parsons was going to be at Oliver’s he decided to take him a poem he had written, one inspired by his romance with his wife, as well as an image of Parsons. It took about 20 minutes to write.
Parsons and his band played at the bar from March 20 to March 25. Brown is not sure which night he went. Whichever night it was when he arrived Parsons was arguing with his wife, so he chatted up Emmylou Harris, who was in the band. At some point Brown handed the poem to Michael Martin, an Australian roadie. Martin gave it to Phil Kaufman, the tour manager. I never did find Martin. I did find Kaufman, though, in Nashville. He told me he held the lyrics for Parsons until after the show and added that Martin is “MIA in Australia” today. (For the record, Martin and Kaufman were the friends who stole Parsons’s corpse and burned it in Joshua Tree.)
After those Boston shows Parsons and his wife went home to California. In July, their house burned down. Around August, Parsons recorded some songs for an album in Los Angeles. In September, he overdosed. The following January his last solo album, consisting of those August songs, was released. No one could have been more surprised to hear the album’s first song than Thomas Stanley Brown.
Brown said Parsons made two changes to the poem. One, he changed the word “roughnecks” to “kickers.” Two, he added this couplet to serve as the song’s bridge: “And the man on the radio won’t me leave alone/He wants to take my money for something that I’ve never been shown.” Other than those changes Parsons sang the words Brown wrote.
But Brown received no songwriting credit on the album.
“I wrote letters, protesting my lack of credit,” he told me, “but they went unanswered.”
Eight years later, in the fall of 1982, Emmylou Harris released an album called “Last Date,” on which she covered, “Return of the Grievous Angel.” Once again, Brown wrote a letter, this time to Harris. He reminded her of their conversation years before in Oliver’s. He reminded her what she had been wearing that night. And he reminded her of the poem he gave Michael Martin. After receiving Brown’s letter Harris confirmed that he indeed had authored the lyrics to the song.
“I got a sizeable royalty check very soon after,” Brown said, “and my name was added to the credits.”
Why was Brown not given credit in the first place? Kaufman told me that when Parsons’s home burned down the flames claimed Brown’s contact information, so there was no way to reach him. Brown, though, said the late Eddie Tickner, Parson’s manager, told him the fire story was bullshit, that Parsons was simply not going to give Brown credit. Who knows? At any rate to this day when a musician or band records a version of “Return of the Grievous Angel”—like Lucinda Williams and David Crosby and The Counting Crows and others have done—it is credited like this: “by Gram Parsons and Thomas Stanley Brown.”
And rightfully so.
In our correspondence Brown was always courteous in answering questions about the circumstances surrounding the poem he wrote 46 years ago. But when I emailed asking about him, specifically about his life, he responded: “All the essentials regarding Return of the Grievous Angel have already been made public. Glad you like the song.”
There is a reason, it seems, that nothing much has ever been known about Thomas Stanley Brown—he is a private person. All we know is he wrote the words to a classic country song. We know nothing about him. All we have is his work.
If Gram Parsons could have been so lucky.
Further reading
David N. Meyer wrote a good biography of Gram Parsons titled, “The Ballad of Gram Parsons and His Cosmic American Music.” Ben Fong-Torres wrote a good biography of Gram Parsons titled, “Hickory Wind.” Most of the details above come from those two books.
About the photograph
This is a poster advertising Gram Parsons’s shows at Oliver’s in the spring of 1973. Thomas Stanley Brown sent the picture to me.