Hearts & Flowers

Hearts & Flowers was a Los Angeles folk rock club band, perhaps most significant as one of the groups that launched the career of Eagles' founding member and guitarist-songwriter, Bernie Leadon. The lineup included Larry Murray (vocals, guitar), Dave Dawson (vocals, guitar, autoharp), and Rick Cunha (vocals, guitar).

The individual members met at the ongoing Monday night jam sessions being held at The Troubador over which Murray presided. Cunha and Dawson, who played in a duo, were newcomers as recent transplants to the area from Hawaii. After a few informal picking sessions, the trio gelled and started performing.

"We had a unique sound, a very strange sound, particularly because we found what we did best was old, traditional, country hillbilly music, Murray told John Einarson. "That became the core of what we did, the three of us, and we took it from there."

The group's sound was described as "Merle Haggard-meets-Sgt. Pepper" as a result of the wide-ranging influences each member brought to Hearts & Flowers. This included the aforementioned Haggard, plus Buck Owens, The Louvin and Everly brothers, The Country Gentlemen, The Beatles, and Bob Dylan. With such unorthodox influences -- plus the fact that the band featured autoharp --, the group was torn about the direction it wanted to take. "Had it been up to us, we would have gone way country," said Cunha. "We wanted it to be commercial and fit into the pop market, but left to our own devices it would have been even more country. Production changed what we would have done."

Meanwhile, Hearts & Flowers was influencing local musicians who heard them in various folk clubs around the Los Angeles area. This included several people who would later be credited with developing the then-germinating Southern California country-rock sound. Jim Messina (Buffalo Springfield, Poco, Loggins and Messina) says, "Those three guys were probably the closest thing to what we were all flowing into. They were the cutting edge of where the rest of us were going. They were the black that didn't quite have the edge sharped on it yet. I got my first Telecaster from Rick Cunha."

...
Wikipedia