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Eagles - Take It Easy

There were only four kinds of country music. One is your gospel songs, your religious songs. The others were your jigs and reels... Your third were your heart songs, sentimental songs that came from the heart, and the fourth, which has passed out to a degree today and was terrific in those days, were the event songs. Now would you like to ask me what I mean by an event song? An event song is something that had happened, not today, maybe years ago, but hadn’t permeated through the South because of a lack of newspapers and no radio and no television in those days, but they had heard of it. For instance, some of the biggest sellers we were ever able to bring out was things like The Sinking of The Titanic. Bring out a record years after it happened and tell a story with a moral. The Sinking of The Titanic was a big seller, but there was a little bit of a moral that people shouldn’t believe that they could build a ship that couldn’t be sunk. That’s the way they talked about it; of thinking God took it upon Himself to show them that they couldn’t build anything greater than He could. Everything had a moral in the events songs.

Well, for instance, things that have been made into a motion picture since... That shows the interest of the people in hearing somebody else recount an event, because re­member there were thousands of buyers of phonograph records that had no other means of communication. You had sad ones, the stories of Jesse James and all kinds of bandits and convicts and every­ thing you could think of. Yes, and a murder here and there. Naomi Wise is a story of a little girl who lived. Marion Parker was married unfortunately, in Atlanta. But there was always a moral so what was done wrong should not be done by the person who was listening. It did a tremendous amount of good. I can’t emphasize that too much.
Source: Anthology of American Folk Music Edited by Josh Dunson and Ethel Raim


Eagles - Take It Easy
  • Release date: 1 June 1972
  • Written by: Glenn Frey, and Jackson Browne
  • Produced by:Glyn Johns


"Their Greatest Hits (1971-1975), in February 1976. proved to be surprisingly meteoric. It topped the charts and became a phenomenal success, eventually selling upwards of 25,000,000 copies and dueling with Michael Jackson's Thriller for the title of the best selling album of all time in the U.S."

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