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Fri 17 October 2025 16:30, UK

The history of American music has been an essential part of Don Henley ever since he began.

While he never envisioned being the next Woody Guthrie by any stretch, his acute knowledge of how the average blue-collar worker looked at the world is still felt every single time one of those classic Eagles tracks comes on. But while a lot of people got started in that folk tradition, Henley was never afraid to let his country roots show.

But whenever people end up talking about the idea of the American music icons, who are they typically thinking of? For rock, it’s usually people like Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, maybe, but that’s only one genre. For the golden age of pop, I suppose you could say people like Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby were fixtures of the genre, Billie Holiday for jazz, or even Ray Charles and Sam Cooke for soul music, but Henley knew that country was a much bigger part of what made the sound of America.

He had been exposed to all kinds of music as a kid, and in between listening to The Beatles and Presley, there would be people like George Jones on the radio or the best of Hank Williams’s discography playing. Each of them had a different piece of the musical puzzle, and when Henley first put it together on the Eagles’ first record, he knew that he had a long way to go before he was at the same status as one of his heroes.

That kind of music might have been out of reach, but Desperado was certainly getting there. They had always talked about doing a concept record that was all about rebellious figures, and tracks like ‘Doolin Dalton’ and ‘Tequila Sunrise’ practically sound like they were ripped straight out of an imaginary Western. But compared to everything on the record, the title track stands alone in their discography.

Like some of the best Beatles songs and Zeppelin songs, ‘Desperado’ has felt like it’s always existed. Every one of the chords is absolutely perfect for the song, and while it might not be the most complicated tune in the world, the fact that it pulls on every single heartstring comes down to the perfect marriage between Henley’s voice and the right lyrics about a man needing to stop spending his life running.

There are shades of everyone from Gram Parsons to Hank Williams in the tune, but if there was anyone that defined their iconic track, Henley felt Stephen Foster laid the groundwork for this kind of American masterpiece, saying, “Its style was largely based on the old songs of Stephen Foster, sometimes known as the Father of American Music, who wrote over 200 songs and was the subject of much controversy. His compositions are sometimes referred to as ‘childhood songs’ because in the last century, they were often used in childhood education. I was introduced to these sentimental songs as a little boy by my grandmother, who lived with us.”

Despite the juvenile edge that’s in many of Foster’s songs, it’s not like Henley couldn’t take inspiration from there. In fact, ‘Desperado’ is practically a grown-up version of a nursery rhyme, and while most kids wouldn’t want to be singing songs about a lonesome gun-toting drifter needing to be saved from himself, they all at least know the importance of love the same way Henley does on the track.

Sure, Henley might not be necessarily proud of the vocal on the song and has spent years talking about Eagles being a hybrid of different styles, but there’s no way that you can listen to ‘Desperado’ without that country flair. The band could try to outrun it for as long as they could, but the sensibilities of people like Foster are bound to be passed down for generations to come.

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