At that mysterious rock-and-roll expiration date of 26 years old, singer-songwriter Gram Parsons jumped from this mortal coil after overdosing in a motel near Joshua Tree National Park in California. Within days, the body would be stolen at LAX by Parsons’ friend Phil Kaufman and returned to Joshua Tree to be burned, which Kaufman insisted were Parsons’ final wishes.

For an artist of little merit, a story like this would alone be enough to cement one’s legendary status. Even with landmark records like the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo, Flying Burrito Brothers’ Gilded Palace of Sin and his pair of solo albums, GP and Grievous Angel, Parsons’ hard-to-believe life and death often outshine his music, the country-rock hybrid he once dubbed Cosmic American music.

For all the mythmaking, details like the Viking funeral in the desert and the iconic Nudie suit adorned with pills, pot leaves and naked women ultimately only amplify Parsons’ mystique and rich musical legacy.

Parsons, who’d grown up in Florida and Georgia, had potent star quality—an achingly beautiful honeyed tenor, keen musicianship, songwriting skill and big-screen good looks. As his friend and regular musical foil Keith Richards points out, Parsons “knew and deeply understood country music.” Parsons, Richards says, “was the real South.” Parsons thought to bring country music (at a time when it was deemed severely unhip) to a counterculture audience at a time when riots were burning and rock and roll was the de facto soundtrack.

In his lifetime Parsons’ star was ever ascendant, but he never reached a wide audience. It’s hard, however, to imagine what the musical landscape would look like without him. He influenced everyone from the Eagles to REM, Elvis Costello to Norah Jones, Sheryl Crow to Wilco, and just about any act that has been described as alt.country.

Now on DVD is Gandulf Hennig’s documentary Fallen Angel (Rhino), originally produced in 2004 for BBC television, which pieces together interviews with friends, family and admirers alongside the scant existing footage of and recorded interviews with Parsons to tell a tale of a privileged upbringing in the South and a life-changing meeting with Elvis at age 10; Parson bounces from Harvard to New York City and then Los Angeles, joins the Byrds and Burritos, sets up an encampment with the Stones and meets Emmylou Harris, with decadent excess and groundbreaking, transcendent music throughout.

Included are interviews with Richards, Kaufman, Harris, Byrd/Burrito Chris Hillman, REM’s Peter Buck, Steve Earle and Dwight Yoakam. While the talking-head-style interviews are largely forced to carry the film, a mass of never-before-seen family photos and some wonderful lost film footage, particularly of the Burritos, enrich the overall picture.

One of the fatal flaws that Fallen Angel can’t escape is that to tell the Gram Parsons story the seamy particulars must end up taking center stage. His music is explored thoroughly in the film, but Hennig dwells too much upon the drugs and the blazing body in Joshua Tree.

That said, interviews with Parsons’ surviving family members shed a new light on Kaufman’s oft romanticized corpse hijacking and emphasize the deep pain still felt over the incident. It’s powerful when his sister Becky goes to tears over it and “Gram the legend” becomes “Gram my big brother.” The insight that unravels from Gram’s family, focusing on the death of his mother and a twisted relationship with his stepfather, proves to be the most dramatic and arguably one of the keys in making Parsons who and what he was.

Fallen Angel provides a potent and worthwhile look at Parsons’ story, but ultimately what matters is the music. Fittingly, Rhino has simultaneously issued The Complete Reprise Sessions, a three-disc set that collects Parson’s solo albums GP and Grievous Angel (both the final albums he would record and probably his finest) along with lost alternate takes and rough mixes. Recorded between 1972 and 1973, the albums followed Parsons dismissal from Flying Burrito Brothers, a band he’d started and fronted, and found the singer down but ready to prove something. He was in the process of putting a new band together with help from Family/Blind Faith man Rick Grech. Upon discovering an unknown, angelic-voiced singer in Wahsington, D.C., Parsons knew he’d found the missing piece of his puzzle. With Emmylou Harris’ heavenly soprano with which to duet, Parsons finally could make the music he’d been longing for.

There’s little to compare with the emotionally wrought, wounded beauty of the Parsons-penned “A Song for You” from GP, with weary-voiced sentiments of loss and lack of fulfillment. It’s a tour de force and maybe the greatest thing Parsons ever recorded. Then there’s road worn beauty of “Return of the Grievous Angel” from Grievous Angel, which captures the essence of coming back to a place where one might no longer belong, with Parsons and Harris pining over the elegant cry of Al Perkins’ steel guitar.

Both GP and Grievous Angel are remastered and included as separate discs in makeshift recreations of the original album sleeves. The third disc offers a wealth of unreleased material, including a stellar alternate take of the Parsons standard “Hickory Wind” and a version of Rick Grech’s “Kiss the Children” dueting with Barry Tashian (of Barry and the Remains fame.)

Even before he made his grand exit, Parsons was heralded as a mystical, mythical, country-rock prophet. In the final press bio that Gram Parsons would be forced to help draft for his record label in 1973, he said, “I think the mystique built up around me is the creation of the press and fans.” With Fallen Angel the mythmaking continues, but the years have shown that the music is really what sticks, and that’s why Gram Parsons is a legend.