Pure Prairie League

Pure Prairie League came out of Waverly, Ohio, with singer and guitarist Craig Fuller, drummer Tom McGrail and steel guitarist John David Call in the original lineup, and they got their name from McGrail, who borrowed it from a fictional 19th-century temperance union in the 1939 Errol Flynn western Dodge City. That's about as country as a rock band name gets, and the music matched: pedal steel, high harmonies and easygoing tunes with a little barroom dust on their boots.

"Amie" is the one that stuck. It first turned up on their 1972 album Bustin' Out, then came back around to become the biggest hit they ever had, a sweet, strummed ballad that sounds like a summer evening on the porch. Their records came out on RCA and Casablanca, and the band put together five Top 40 albums in a row in the 1970s, with a sixth in the 1980s.

The lineup never stood still for long, and no one player lasted the whole ride. Vince Gill sang lead and played guitar for a spell, and Gary Burr and Curtis Wright passed through too. They broke up in 1988, got back together in 1998 and have kept on playing since.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.