(Credits: Far Out / Fotoburo De Boer / Noord-Hollands Archief)
Wed 24 December 2025 4:00, UK
Where would music be without the daring innovation of a select few creatives? We often overlook how much of an impact The Byrds had on rock, folk, and country.
When we think of musical innovators in the 1960s, we often think of The Beatles, given they took over the States in ‘64 and wound up becoming one of the most popular bands in the world to pick up instruments, which is fair enough, but someone had to knock the Fab Four off the top of the charts, and that came in the form of the folk rock movement.
E Street guitarist Steve Van Zandt has previously spoken about the impact that folk rock had in the ‘60s. “It transformed America […] On February 8th, there were no bands in America; on February 9th, we had Ed Sullivan, and on February 10th, everybody had a band in their garage. It was literally overnight,” said Van Zandt when discussing The Beatles’ original impact, before confirming which band knocked them off the top spot.
Adding, “The floodgates opened until the summer of ‘65, when the Americans took the charts back with the folk rock of The Byrds and Bob Dylan.”
While Bob Dylan adopted folk rock, which was a controversial move for many, it was The Byrds who originally gave the style form. When they covered ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, Roger McGuinn took the track and added their own spin on it. It was a bold move, and one that the band didn’t know would work at first. Bassist Chris Hillman said in an interview that he doesn’t think they would have played the Dylan cover were it not for McGuinn’s insistence.
“Kudos to Roger McGuinn for taking on ‘Tambourine Man,’ which didn’t knock us out when we first heard it,” said Hillman. “Bob Dylan had written it in a very countrified groove, a straight 2/4 time signature, and Roger takes the song home and works with it, puts it in 4/4 time, so you could dance to it. Bob heard us do it and said, ‘Man, you could dance to this!’ It really knocked him over and he loved it.”
McGuinn had a great mindset when it came to music. He was innovative and trusted his gut, which is what steered him towards also embracing a country music style. You could hear this evidently on their record Sweetheart of the Rodeo, which they released in 1968, something which McGuinn admitted was a “labour of love”.
“We were so in love with this music, we listened to it day and night on the radio,” said McGuinn, discussing the band’s decision to head to Nashville and start recording country music. “I went to Nudies, and I got some cowboy boots, and I got a black Cadillac El Dorado. I didn’t put the bullhorns on it like Nudie had but I was into this whole country thing.”
McGuinn admitted that he acknowledged The Byrds certainly had an impact on country rock music, but also said that while he enjoyed the sound they achieved, he also felt that some fans were disappointed. Country music had a stain on it because of the political leanings of many artists, which led to listeners turning off as they felt The Byrds had turned their back on their political values.
“I’m sure we did influence a lot of people in that direction, but we also disappointed a lot of rock fans,” McGuinn concluded. “They said, ‘What is this?’ You know, because there was a sort of, country music was tainted with a political right-wing spin, and they thought, ‘Wow, you’ve gone over to the enemy side, man, like you’re letting us down here.’ But it wasn’t anything political, it was a love of the music. To me, country music was just another form of folk music.”
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