JD Souther, the singer-songwriter who penned hits for Laurel Canyon elite including Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, and James Taylor, has died. He was 78.
Souther’s death was confirmed on his website, which noted that he “passed away peacefully in his New Mexico home.” No cause of death was given, but the passing appears sudden considering he was due to start a tour with Karla Bonoff on September 24th in Phoenix.
Through a solo career spanning seven decades, Souther released nine albums with the most recent one, Tenderness, arriving in 2015. Though he snagged a Top 10 hit with his 1979 single “You’re Only Lonely”, Souther is best known for the songs he fed other artists. An early architect of the burgeoning country-rock movement emanating from southern California in the early 1970s, Souther had a hand in Eagles’ “Heartache Tonight”, Ronstadt’s “Faithless Love”, and James Taylor’s “Her Town Too”.
John David Souther was born on November 2nd, 1945 in Detroit, MI and raised in Amarillo, TX. Souther’s music career began in the Texas Panhandle city with a band called The Cinders who released one single for Warner Bros. as John David and the Cinders. After moving to Los Angeles in the late 1960s, he met future Eagle Glenn Frey and the two became roommates and collaborators, briefly performing as the folk duo Longbranch Pennywhistle. The band’s sole eponymous album arrived in 1970 on rockabilly singer Jimmy Bowen‘s Amos Records.
In 1972, Souther cut his self-titled debut. Though at the time it didn’t do much for Souther’s nascent career—peaking at #206 on the album charts—recognition came decades later when Eagles included his song “How Long” on their 2007 album Long Road Out of Eden. The song fetched a Grammy for “Best Country Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal”, Eagles’ first Grammy win since 1979. John David Souther also spawned “Run Like a Thief”, which Bonnie Raitt would cover on her 1975 album Home Plate.
As Eagles rose to fame in the 1970s and Laurel Canyon’s influence spread across the country, Souther became a frequent collaborator. He was partially responsible for three of the band’s five Number 1 hits: “Heartache Tonight”, “Best of My Love”, and “New Kid in Town”. Souther told The L.A. Times in 2008 that David Geffen, whose label Asylum released Eagles’ 1972 debut, “sort of” asked him to join the group that would become rock n’ roll icons.
“I considered it, and we rehearsed a set and played it for David [and Eagles managers] Elliot Roberts and Ron Stone at the Troubadour one afternoon,” Souther said. “Truthfully, it took all of a minute afterward to say, no, the band was exceptional as it was, and I was quite happy to stay home and write. I think they were relieved, as well.”
Souther’s solo career continued with the formation of the Souther-Hillman-Furay Band featuring Chris Hillman (The Byrds) and Richie Furay (Buffalo Springfield). The band issued a pair of well-regarded country-rock records in the mid-’70s, dissolving ahead of Souther’s biggest solo success on “You’re Only Lonely” from his 1979 album of the same name.
By the 1980s, Souther was a well-regarded songwriter and many of his friends and collaborators had gone on to lucrative careers of their own. He recorded and wrote for James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt (whom he briefly dated), Eagles’ Don Henley, Irish band Clannad, and more. That same decade saw Souther try his hand at acting, first appearing in the TV drama Thirtysomething. He would go on to act in films Postcards from the Edge, Purgatory, My Girl 2, and Deadline and had a recurring role in the country music drama series Nashville from 2012 to 2017.
In 2013, Souther was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame where he was declared “a principal architect of the southern California sound and a major influence on a generation of songwriters.” In recent years, he performed with Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir as a special guest, including a show in Menlo Park, CA where the two songwriters composed a new song from the hip live onstage. In January, he played with Eagles at Kia Forum where Henley introduced him as part of the “tightknit community of songwriters and singers” that he and Frey would turn to in the ’70s “when we would get stuck on a song or we’d try to start some new material.”
“Language is my meat,” Souther told The L.A. Times in 2008. “I agree with [novelist] Jim Harrison: Forget sending me someone with an interesting experience; send me someone drunk on words. It would be a better book.”
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