NEW YORK, NY.- JD Souther, who crafted many of the biggest hits to come out of the Southern California country-rock scene of the 1970s, including for the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor, and who later played a wizened music industry veteran — in other words, a version of himself — on the hit television show “Nashville,” died Tuesday at his home in Sandia Park, New Mexico, in the hills east of Albuquerque. He was 78.
His death was announced on his website. A cause was not provided.
Beginning in the late 1960s, Souther was part of a coterie of musicians around Los Angeles who found themselves circling the same sort of peaceful, easy, country-inflected rock sound. They played at the same venues — among them the Troubadour, the famous West Hollywood nightclub — and lived and partied in the same canyons in the Hollywood Hills.
Souther played with or wrote for most of them. Though he was brought up on jazz and classical music, he easily mastered the country-rock vernacular on songs like “Faithless Love” and “White Rhythm and Blues,” for Ronstadt; “The Heart of the Matter,” which he wrote with Don Henley and Mike Campbell; and “Her Town Too,” a collaboration with Taylor and Waddy Wachtel that Souther and Taylor sang as a duet.
He also played a central role in the formation of the Eagles, encouraging Ronstadt, his girlfriend at the time, to hire his friend Glenn Frey as part of her backup band. After Henley joined, he and Frey decided to form their own group, along with two other members of Ronstadt’s ensemble, Bernie Leadon and Randy Meisner.
Souther was almost the fifth Eagle: He joined the quartet for an afternoon tryout at the Troubadour, but he decided that the band was already perfect, and that he’d rather write for them.
A string of songs followed, many of them hits and most of them written with Henley and Frey, including “The Best of My Love,” “Victim of Love,” “Heartache Tonight” and “New Kid in Town.”
“There was definitely a period of time where people would occasionally say to me, ‘Doesn’t it piss you off that the Eagles have these big hits off your songs?’” he told the website The Creative Independent in 2019. “I would usually start saying, ‘Would you like to see the checks?’”
Early on, Souther played in a band with Frey called Longbranch Pennywhistle, and later in the Souther-Hillman-Furay Band, with Chris Hillman of the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers and Richie Furay of Buffalo Springfield and Poco. All along he maintained a solo career, and he finally had a hit of his own with “You’re Only Lonely,” the title track of his 1979 album, which reached No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
It was a banner year for him: The Eagles’ final No. 1 hit, “Heartache Tonight,” which he wrote with Henley, Frey and Bob Seger, peaked that fall.
Afterward, Souther largely retired from music. The Los Angeles scene was moving away from his style of music, as was the industry in general.
“I had done what I wanted to do musically,” he told Rolling Stone in 2012. “And I just thought to myself, ‘All the men in my family worked until they died, and I’m going to take a few years off and build a great house and have a life.’”
By the late 1980s, he had taken up acting: He had a small role as a piano player in Steven Spielberg’s 1989 film, “Always,” and he played an environmental activist in several episodes of the TV show “Thirtysomething.”
He also returned to recording and performing, this time with a jazzy style that brought him back to his roots. He had recorded four studio albums and a live record since the late 1990s; his most recent album, “Tenderness,” was released in 2015. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2013.
Souther had been scheduled to perform later this month with singer-songwriter Karla Bonoff in Folsom, California, and Napa, California, and he had a series of solo concert dates booked into 2025.
In recent years he was better known, at least to younger fans, for his screen presence. He joined the cast of “Nashville” in 2012, playing a veteran music producer, Watty White — a character that drew heavily on his own experiences in the industry. He appeared during the first season, and his character was popular enough that the showrunners brought him back for the fifth season.
John David Souther was born Nov. 2, 1945, in Detroit, though when he was very young his family moved first to Dallas, and then to Amarillo, Texas, where he grew up.
His father, John Souther, sang for a big band under the stage name Johnny Warren, a job that kept him on the road. His mother, Loty (Finley) Souther, eventually protested, and after the family moved to her home state, Texas, Souther ran a music store.
The store became a cradle for JD’s musical career, the place where he was exposed to a wide variety of styles and performers in between helping his father sweep the floors and stock the record bins. He took up the violin when he was 8 and then the clarinet, tenor saxophone and drums.
He briefly attended Amarillo College but left to pursue music with his first band, the Cinders. He moved to New York, then Florida, and finally Los Angeles, where he met Ronstadt and Frey.
He married Alexandra Sliwin in 1969; they divorced in 1972. In addition to Ronstadt, he later dated Stevie Nicks and singer-songwriter Judee Sill, who is said to have written her song “Jesus Was a Cross Maker” about him.
Another marriage, to Sarah Nicholson, also ended in divorce. Survivors include two sisters, Susan Burt and Shari Smeaton.
Souther moved to Nashville, Tennessee, in 2001 and later to rural New Mexico. He insisted he was happy that his songs were more famous than he was.
“I like the fact that I don’t get made up before I go out of the house or check to be sure my hair looks great,” he told The Creative Independent. “I don’t really want to be stopped when I’m in the grocery store and have somebody pay a bunch of attention to me. It’ll be nice if that happens, but it’s not what I want.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
