Hearts and Flowers

Hearts and Flowers were one of the most eclectic 1960s Californian folk-rock groups, as well as being one of the very first to point the way toward country-rock. Over the course of their two Capitol albums, they blended folk, country, and rock with inventive sprinkles of pop and psychedelia on both original material and covers of songs by Donovan, Arlo Guthrie, Hoyt Axton, Gerry Goffin-Carole King, Kaleidoscope, Tim Hardin, and others. As was the way with many such innovative bands of the time, they were lost in the shuffle in an era when rock was expanding furiously in all directions. If they're mentioned at all by historians, it's usually because one of them went on to join a superstar group in the 1970s that played a far slicker variation of the kind of folk-rock pioneered by bands like Hearts and Flowers the previous decade.