Sweetheart of The Rodeo - Release and Reception

Release and Reception

Sweetheart of the Rodeo was released on August 30, 1968, in the United States (catalogue item CS 6970) and September 27, 1968, in the UK (catalogue item 63353). Columbia Records launched an accompanying print advertising campaign proclaiming "This Country's for the Byrds" and featuring the tag line "Their message is all country...their sound is all Byrds." The album is notable for being the first Byrds LP to be issued exclusively in stereo in the United States, although the album was released in mono and stereo variations in the United Kingdom. The album reached #77 on the Billboard Top LPs chart, during a chart stay of ten weeks, but failed to chart in the United Kingdom. The lead single from the album was a cover of Bob Dylan's "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere", which was released on April 2, 1968, climbing to #75 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #45 in the UK charts. A second single from the album, "I Am a Pilgrim", was released on September 2, 1968, but failed to chart.

Despite receiving generally favourable reviews from the critics, the country-rock style of Sweetheart of the Rodeo was such a radical departure from the band's previous sound that large sections of the group's counter-culture following were alienated by its contents, resulting in the lowest sales of any Byrds album up to that point. Barry Gifford, in the August 1968 edition of Rolling Stone magazine, said of the album: "The new Byrds do not sound like Buck Owens & his Buckaroos. They aren't that good. The material they've chosen to record, or rather, the way they perform the material, is simple, relaxed and folky. It's not pretentious, it's pretty. The musician-ship is excellent." Gifford added that "The Byrds have made an interesting album. It's really very uninvolved and not a difficult record to listen to. It ought to make the "Easy-Listening" charts. "Bringing it all back home" has never been an easy thing to do."

Rolling Stone also praised the album in its September 1968 issue, with Jon Landau writing "The Byrds, in doing country as country, show just how powerful and relevant unadorned country music is to the music of today." Landau added "they leave just enough rock in the drums to let you know that they can still play rock & roll." Noted rock critic, Robert Christgau, described Sweetheart of the Rodeo in a 1969 article for The New York Times as "a bittersweet tribute to country music." However, contemporary reviews of the album were not universally positive, with an anonymous Melody Maker review from late 1968 deriding the album as "Not typical Byrds music, which is rather a pity." Similarly, Robert Shelton, writing in The New York Times in November 1968, commented that "The latest Byrds album adheres to most of the 'rules of the game' about country sound, and yet, sad to say, to this old fan of The Byrds, the album is a distinguished bore."

In more recent years, Allmusic critic Mark Deming noted in his review of the album that "no major band had gone so deep into the sound and feeling of classic country (without parody or condescension) as the Byrds did on Sweetheart; at a time when most rock fans viewed country as a musical "L'il Abner" routine, the Byrds dared to declare that C&W could be hip, cool, and heartfelt." Alexander Lloyd Linhardt, reviewing the album for Pitchfork Media, described it as "a blindingly rusty gait through parched weariness and dusted reverie. It's not the natural sound of Death Valley or Utah, but rather, a false portrait by people who wished it was, which makes it even more melancholy and charismatic." Journalist Matthew Weiner commented in his review for Stylus that "Thirty-five years after it startled Byrds fans everywhere with its Podunk proclivities, Sweetheart remains a particularly fascinating example of two musical ships passing in the night, documenting both Parsons’ transformation into a visionary country-rock auteur and a pop band’s remarkable sense of artistic risk."

The Byrds' biographer, Johnny Rogan, noted that the album "stood alone as a work almost completely divorced from the prevailing rock culture. Its themes, mood and instrumentation looked back to another era at a time when the rest of America was still recovering from the recent assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy." Ultimately, The Byrds' experimentation with the country genre on Sweetheart of the Rodeo was slightly ahead of its time, to the detriment of the band's commercial fortunes, as the international success of country-rock flavoured bands like The Eagles, America and Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show during the 1970s demonstrated.