Gram Parsons is one way into Waycross. His childhood here, the music he left behind, and the Gram Parsons Guitar Pull connect the town to a much larger musical story. Motherlode follows those connections into the work of the musicians and writers gathered below.
Stanley Booth offers another connection between Waycross, Parsons, and the Rolling Stones. Abby Owens, Hayshaker, Marlin Brackett, and The Newfanglers open further paths through the music. Jock Bartley leads beyond the town into the wider Parsons story.
The Route 1 visit brought another layer: Billy Ray Herrin’s tour through Parsons’s childhood, an evening of shared songs at Uncle Dave Griffin’s home, and photographs from the 2017 Guitar Pull. The personal account and dated diary have their own field report.
Gram spent his life trying to escape Waycross, only to make Waycross impossible to escape from his story.
She came into country music the same way she came into the world—in a trailer, in an orange grove, without waiting for Nashville’s permission.
Elvis Presley wouldn’t lend Gram James Burton, so fate handed him Jock Bartley—a Fallen Angel who would carry the fire into Firefall.
It took the Rolling Stones to introduce Stanley to Gram—two boys from Waycross who had to cross a continent to discover they came from the same swamp.
Hayshaker took Waycross’s cosmic-country inheritance, hot-wired it with AC/DC and X, and drove it straight into the swamp.
A general contractor by trade, he came late to songwriting but already understood that a song, like a house, will only stand if every line bears weight.
The Newfanglers didn’t write Blood in the Pines so much as exhume it, then let Don Helms’s steel guitar testify for the dead.
