J.D. Crowe and the New South
Devil in Disguise
“Devil in Disguise” in the bluegrass canon is the same song originally titled “Christine’s Tune,” written by Chris Hillman and Gram Parsons and recorded by the Flying Burrito Brothers on their 1969 debut The Gilded Palace of Sin. The piece’s renaming — to avoid offending a real-life Christine the song was rumoured to target — is part of the lore around the early Burritos era, though sources differ on exactly when and why the change took hold.
The song crossed into bluegrass via the Bluegrass Album Band, who cut it on The Bluegrass Album, Vol. 3: California Connection in 1983. That supergroup — Tony Rice, J.D. Crowe, Doyle Lawson, Bobby Hicks, and Todd Phillips, with Jerry Douglas appearing across the series — made a project of pulling country and country-rock material into a tight bluegrass-traditional reading, and “Devil in Disguise” sits comfortably alongside the Vol. 3 reading of “California Cottonfields.”
The lyric is a sharply written character piece — the woman of the title is set up as everything sweet and given away, line by line, as a calculated heartbreaker. Tony Rice’s vocal phrasing is the element most quoted in cover versions, though the harmonic shape (steady country-bluegrass changes in G) makes it accessible at any jam. The Burritos’ Hillman/Parsons original is the best historical reference; the Bluegrass Album Band reading is the one bluegrass pickers learn from.
