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Fri 23 January 2026 21:46, UK

Country music was never that far away from rock and roll, as far as Don Henley was concerned. 

As much as people liked to put Eagles down as a standard country-rock outfit, Henley was proud to wear that piece of his musical upbringing on his sleeve, whether that was pulling from Stephen Foster or even throwing in the occasional bluegrass into the mix to give their albums some variety. The band definitely had a lot more to offer, but the storytelling in a lot of their songs always comes back to those that could make you cry with only a few lines of lyrics.

Because when looking at some of their finest work, a lot of the songs aren’t the typical song about relationships or anything. ‘Hotel California’ is already one of the most twisted tunes of the 1970s, and on more epic tracks like ‘The Last Resort’, Henley wanted to make a statement about how we’re treating the planet rather than play up the glitzy lifestyle that they talked about on ‘Life in the Fast Lane’.

That might have been what everyone might have wanted, but Henley’s heroes were good at giving people songs they didn’t realise they needed. No one told people like Johnny Cash or Willie Nelson how to write their songs, and when listening to them back in the day, you could hear the raw conviction in their voice the same way that Henley used it when making his more poignant solo material on records like The End of the Innocence or Inside Job.

But getting the right singer to help round things out wasn’t lost on him. He had become lifelong friends with Linda Ronstadt thanks to her interpreting people’s material, and on some of his best records, he uses people’s voices like another musical colour to work with, whether that’s Stevie Wonder guesting with him on a record or going back to those old Americana roots when harmonising with Dolly Parton later in his career.

Then again, there wasn’t anyone who could manage to make him feel the same way that Patsy Cline did whenever she performed. Not all of her songs had to have the most thoughtful lyrics of all time, but whereas Willie Nelson wrote a song like ‘Crazy’, there’s no way that he could have ever managed to bring that dramatic flair that she did when she first took the microphone. This was magical, and it wasn’t something that Henley took for granted when he was first getting into the genre.

There were still plenty of country singers who showed him the ropes, but nothing could replace the sense of taste Cline had when she sang, with Henley recalling, “Patsy Cline in many circles is regarded as one of the finest Country singers ever to come down the pike, and I would agree with that. She unfortunately passed away in a plane crash much too soon in her life and who knows what she would have gone on to accomplish. But she did leave a wonderful legacy.”

The world may have lost a titan of the genre the day that Cline passed away, but her legacy lives on far beyond the songs that she wrote. Because if you listen to the way that Eagles structured their harmonies back in the day, there are a lot of vocal leaps that feel like they are taken directly from what Cline had been doing, especially on their earlier records when they tried to channel their inner cowboys like Desperado.

That kind of style certainly wasn’t going to be for everybody, but Henley wasn’t going to roll over and music for the charts every single time he made a record. His role was to quote his heart and to celebrate the music that made him fall in love with the genre, and whenever you hear those pedal steel guitars and his showstopping voice, he has the same sense of gravitas that Cline had on each of her records.

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