Wishing you could go back and redo some aspect or experience of your life is natural, and it was certainly a feeling Waylon Jennings was familiar with while looking back on his decades-long career as one of the pioneering members of the outlaw country music movement. It was the shifting trend that set the stage for Jennings to become one of country music’s most lovable rebels, but his feelings about it were complicated.
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In 2018, the archival YouTube channel @EmerysMemories released never-before-seen footage of Jennings speaking to Tom and Ted LeGarde as part of the twin musicians’ scrapped television program, Down Home Down Under. During the interview, Jennings revealed what he might have done differently if he had the chance to revisit the birth of outlaw country music.
If Waylon Jennings Could See Outlaw Country Music Rise Again
Outlaw country music referred to a subgenre that existed somewhere outside the more traditional and conservative proper country channels. There was less gospel and more ganja, less love songs to women and more love songs to whiskey, and a general sense of rebellion and edginess that the more straight-laced country crowd just didn’t have (and frankly, didn’t want). Outlaw country music also described country music that didn’t quite fit the standard harmonic structure of classic country, folk, or bluegrass. It’s more of a feeling than a concrete definition, something Jennings was quick to pick up on.
Speaking to the LeGarde twins, Jennings said he always struggled to fit inside an easily definable category in his early years. He learned to accept his space in the middle of multiple genres and believed that a good indicator of success is when people start describing someone’s music as that artist’s specific “sound.” The Waylon Jennings sound, the Willie Nelson sound, and so on. “That’s what I always strive for, you know?” Jennings said. “Not for a particular type of music. And then, when I thought I had it all made, they come along with this outlaw Mickey Mouse.”
“I thought that was about the dumbest thing I’d ever heard,” Jennings continued. “Outlaw music. What’s outlaw music?”
Jennings laughed off his feelings about outlaw country music before admitting that if he had to do it all over again, “I’d probably argue till I got that close [holds up his fingers a short distance apart] to changing their minds, and then I’d stop. Because you know what? It worked pretty good.”
The Proof Was in the Pudding (As In, Record-Breaking Album Sales)
Waylon Jennings might not have taken to outlaw country music the first time he heard of the idea. But he could spot a good professional move when he saw it, and the record sales of his first “official” outlaw country release spoke for themselves. Wanted! The Outlaws ushered in a new wave of country with Jennings, Willie Nelson, Jessi Colter, and Tompall Glaser in 1976. The album was a massive success, becoming the first country album to receive a platinum certification, thanks to hits like “Suspicious Minds” and “Good Hearted Woman”.
Jennings wrote in his autobiography, “We weren’t just playing bad guys. We took our stand outside country music’s rules, its set ways, locking the door on its own jail cell. We looked like tramps. Willie in overalls, me with my hair slicked back and Levis, fringe sprouting on our cheeks and chins.”
“We were all undergoing transformations. If we took on the guise of cowboys, it was because we couldn’t escape the pioneer spirit, the restlessness that forces you to keep pushing at the horizon, seeing what’s over the next ridge. When I put the black hat on and walked to the stage, carrying my Telecaster, I was staking my own piece of land where the buffalo roam. Don’t f*** with me was what we were saying.”
Photo by Paul Natkin/Getty Images
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