"Heartaches Of A Fool" by Willie Nelson, the title of the episode became a #39 country hit in December of 1981. (A little over 3 years after this episode aired). It was from the album "Greatest Hits And Some That Will Be".
Singer Charlie Strayhorn is a parody of Jimmy Dean, the famous country singer who started his own meat company in 1969. He specialized in making and selling sausage. Like Strayhorn, Dean appeared in his own commercials and, even though he passed away in 2010, his voice and image continued to be used in commercials for Jimmy Dean Sausage in 2022.
Though many locations - in this, and any other series - are repeatedly used, the place where the hickory smoke house for Charle Strayhorn's sausages will definitely seem familar to fans of this series. in the first scene of Jim (James Garner) and Charlie (Taylor Lacher) after having flown to Cripple Creek, AR, the 2 are in a red 2-door coupé, driving towards the (supposed) smoke house. As the car turns onto a forked road (under a tree), the property was first used in The Rockford Files (1974)' first season episode, This Case Is Closed (1974), as the road onto Warner Jameson (Joseph Cotten)'s estate.
Shorty McCall, the old cowboy at the end who gives Rocky the saddle, is played by Don "Red" Barry. He started his career in 1933 and starred with Noah Beery, Sr. (Rocky's real father) in the 1940 western movie serial "The Adventures of Red Ryder".
Rocky listened to the Charlie Strayhorn album on an 8-track tape, which was a popular format for recorded music from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s. The tapes produced excellent sound quality but were big and bulky, and especially were inconvenient for use in cars. The changing of the tracks almost always occurred in the middle of a song, which was one of the reasons their popularity had been overtaken by compact cassette tapes, which had about the same sound quality at one-third the size.