When the Rolling Stones started hanging out with Gram Parsons, it was a pivotal moment for them all. This was in 1968 (of course) and Laurel Canyon (of course), where the Stones were working out “Sympathy for the Devil,” “Street Fighting Man,” and other songs that they’d later record in London for Beggars Banquet. Parsons had just joined the Byrds and utterly changed their direction, swerving from psych to country rock; Sweetheart of the Rodeo, released that August, contained covers of Merle Haggard, Woody Guthrie, soul singer William Bell, and country gospel duo the Louvin Brothers, encased in an album decorated with illustrations of a flower-bedecked cowgirl and spurs that looked practically embroidered on its cover—a strong intimation of the singer’s musical and aesthetic leanings.

Parsons had the kind of presence that held the Stones and their entourage in starstruck thrall, even before they saw him sing or play, though he was far from reaching the peak of his fame—this was before his famous duets with Emmylou Harris on Grievous Angel and before the milestone The Gilded Palace of Sin by his band the Flying Burrito Brothers. Here was this strange, beguiling Southern boy, a Harvard dropout with a big inheritance, a dark melancholy, a deep backwoods knowledge of country and blues borne out of his swampland upbringing, and an uncommonly stylish way about him that seemed to both speak to every mismatched piece of his background and totally transcend it. “Out here with the truckers and the kickers and the cowboy angels,” he’d sing one day; his lyrics spoke to gamblers and “high fashion queens,” as they still do now. Today, on what would have been Parsons’s 69th birthday, look around: ’70s-esque embroidery and adornment rampant on Gucci’s Fall runway; the custom-embroidered suits at indie labels like Austin’s Fort Lonesome; the all-out, all-American fervor for vintage, raw, and embellished denim.

gram parsons

 Photo: Courtesy of Rhino

“He had cooler clothes than they did,” drily recounts Stanley Booth, a writer who traveled with the Stones in those days and eventually wrote a book about the band. Booth happened to also be from Waycross, Georgia, where Parsons grew up, but they didn’t meet until outside those Mick Jagger–Keith Richards sessions in L.A., “leaning against his iridescent blue Harley-Davidson, the hills dark behind him as he talked seemingly against his will about the Okefenokee country.” The motorcycle was essential. “There’s a photograph of Gram on his Harley motorcycle, me on the back wearing Biggles glasses,” Richards writes in his memoir, Life; later he becomes downright besotted himself: “Even hardened waitresses in the Palomino bar who’d heard it all. He could bring tears to their eyes and bring that melancholy yearning.” “He glowed,” echoes Booth. “He was radiant. He was covered with star frost like Elvis Presley in his white suit on Jackie Gleason's show.” Soon Parsons and Presley would share a suitmaker, the legendary Nashville tailor Nudie Cohn, crafter of the singer’s gold “50,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong” outfit and custom rhinestone cowboy suits for John Wayne, Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, George Jones, and ZZ Top. Hank Williams died with his Nudie suit in his Cadillac.

For The Gilded Palace of Sin, Parsons ordered up a suite of Nudies for the band, his own covered in giant poppies, prescription pills, marijuana leaves, a cross, and, naturally, a lowercase-n nudie on the inside of one lapel. Yes, you can buy reproductions of Parsons’s suit today, but to merely ape his look—those suits, his bandana ties, his Burrito Brothers T-shirts, you name it—would be to totally miss the point of Gram Parsons, like wearing a cheap repro of a tour shirt of a band you’ve never heard, or the ignorant and insulting faux pas of non–Native Americans wearing an “Indian” headdress. Real style, not costume wearing, is not about imitation or appropriation but an intrinsic, personal involvement, the kind of relationship Parsons had to song. Rather than borrow his actual wardrobe, take him as a lesson in how to approach personal style.

Today, Gram Parsons’s Nudie suit hangs in the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville, but back then, “the country music world would have nothing to do with him,” Harris has said. Already he’d found a place and broadcast a sense of self that lay far beyond the narrow definitions of Nashville or L.A. Those who saw him perform colossal heartbreakers like “Do You Know How It Feels to Be Lonesome” recognized it instantly, as did those who met him that summer of ’68: He belonged nowhere and everywhere.

gram parsons

 Photo: Courtesy of Rhino