Chris Hillman

He was born in Los Angeles on 4 December 1944 and grew up on his family’s ranch in Rancho Santa Fe, in northern San Diego County. An older sister brought home folk records, among them the New Lost City Ramblers’, and from them he found his way to bluegrass and the mandolin. At fifteen he saw the Kentucky Colonels at the Ash Grove in Los Angeles, and he later traveled to Berkeley for mandolin lessons from Scott Hambly. By eighteen he was playing mandolin in two bands. The first, the Scottsville Squirrel Barkers, made one album, Blue Grass Favorites (1963), and its alumni included Bernie Leadon, later of the Eagles, and Kenny Wertz of Country Gazette. In late 1963 he joined the Golden State Boys, with the singer Vern Gosdin, his brother Rex and the banjo player Don Parmley; the band became the Blue Diamond Boys and then the Hillmen. Their album, recorded at World Pacific Studios in Hollywood with Hillman on mandolin behind the Gosdins’ and Parmley’s trio singing, was not issued until 1969, as The Hillmen on the Together label. Del McCoury played briefly with the Golden State Boys in 1964, when Hillman was a member.

The Hillmen broke up when Hillman went to the Byrds in 1964, recruited to play bass guitar, an instrument he had never played; he borrowed one to try out. With Roger McGuinn, David Crosby, Gene Clark and Michael Clarke he played on Mr. Tambourine Man (1965) and the records that followed, and he grew into a singer and writer in the band, co-writing “So You Want to Be a Rock ’n’ Roll Star” with McGuinn for Younger Than Yesterday (1967). On Sweetheart of the Rodeo (Columbia, 1968), the country album the Byrds made with Gram Parsons, Hillman played bass and mandolin alongside Nashville and Los Angeles players such as Lloyd Green, John Hartford, Roy Huskey Jr., Jay Dee Maness and Clarence White.

After leaving the Byrds he formed the Flying Burrito Brothers with Parsons. The Gilded Palace of Sin (1969) included “Sin City,” which the two wrote together and which J. D. Crowe’s New South later recorded. He stayed with the Burritos after Parsons left, playing bass and mandolin on the live Last of the Red Hot Burritos (A&M, 1971) with Byron Berline on fiddle, Kenny Wertz on guitar and banjo, Roger Bush on bass and Al Perkins on steel. He also played mandolin as a guest on Dillard & Clark’s Through the Morning, Through the Night (1969). In the 1970s he was a member of Stephen Stills’s Manassas, whose double album came out in 1972, of the Souther-Hillman-Furay Band with J. D. Souther and Richie Furay, and of McGuinn, Clark & Hillman, and he made two solo albums for Asylum, Slippin’ Away (1976) and Clear Sailin’ (1977).

He came back to the mandolin and to acoustic music on two albums for Sugar Hill. Morning Sky (1982), recorded at Criterion Music in Hollywood, had Herb Pedersen singing tenor to his lead, Byron Berline on fiddle, Al Perkins on steel and Kenny Wertz and Emory Gordy in the band; Desert Rose (1984) moved toward country, with Pedersen on rhythm guitar and Jay Dee Maness on steel. In 1985, after he and Pedersen had toured with Dan Fogelberg behind Fogelberg’s bluegrass album High Country Snows, Hillman formed the Desert Rose Band with Pedersen and the guitarist John Jorgenson, adding Maness, the bass player Bill Bryson and the drummer Steve Duncan. Its MCA/Curb debut, The Desert Rose Band (1987), carried his “Love Reunited” and “One Step Forward,” written with Steve Hill and Bill Wildes, and in 1988 “He’s Back and I’m Blue” and “I Still Believe in You” reached No. 1 on the country chart. The Academy of Country Music named the Desert Rose Band its touring band of the year in 1988, 1989 and 1990. In 1989 his duet with McGuinn on “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Vol. 2, was nominated for a Grammy. The band broke up in 1994.

From then on most of his records were made with Pedersen. As a duo they recorded Bakersfield Bound (Sugar Hill, 1996), on which Hillman sang lead and played mandolin, Way Out West (Back Porch, 2002) and At Edwards Barn (Rounder, 2010), and with Tony and Larry Rice they made three Rounder albums as Rice, Rice, Hillman & Pedersen between 1996 and 2001, for which he wrote many of the songs; he also released the solo albums Like a Hurricane (1998) and The Other Side (2005). Bidin’ My Time (2017), his first solo album in twelve years, was produced by Tom Petty, one of the last projects Petty completed, with Pedersen as executive producer. In 2018 Hillman and McGuinn toured with Marty Stuart and His Fabulous Superlatives for the fiftieth anniversary of Sweetheart of the Rodeo, and a live album from the tour came out in 2024. His memoir, Time Between: My Life as a Byrd, Burrito Brother, and Beyond, was published by BMG Books in 2020. In October 2022 the surviving members of the Desert Rose Band reunited for a final concert at the Country Music Hall of Fame, launching its exhibit on Los Angeles country-rock, Western Edge, and that December Hillman announced his retirement from touring, though not from making music. Since 2022 he has hosted a weekly SiriusXM show, Chris Hillman’s Burrito Stand.

• 1991: Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, with the Byrds
• 1988, 1989, 1990: Academy of Country Music touring band of the year, with the Desert Rose Band
• 2004: Americana Music Association Lifetime Achievement Award
• 2004: San Diego Music Awards Lifetime Achievement Award, with the Scottsville Squirrel Barkers