The Byrds' biographer, Johnny Rogan, has said that the album "stood alone as a work almost completely divorced from the prevailing rock culture. Its themes, mood and instrumentation looked back to another era at a time when the rest of America was still recovering from the recent assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy." Ultimately, the Byrds' experimentation with the country genre on "Sweetheart of the Rodeo" was slightly ahead of its time, to the detriment of the band's commercial fortunes, as the international success of country rock-flavored bands like the Eagles, America and Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show during the 1970s demonstrated.