“I Didn’t Like It and Still Don’t”: Why Waylon Jennings Hated One of His Most Beloved Hits

What resonates with an audience won’t always resonate with the artist, something Waylon Jennings learned the hard way after he grew to hate one of his most beloved hits. The laid-back groove about the simpler things in life (namely, guitars that tune good and firm feelin’ women) is one of the country star’s best-known hits and responsible for much of his overall career success.

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Still, that doesn’t change the fact that even years after he first released it in April 1977, Jennings couldn’t stand to perform the song live. As someone who also feels awkward speaking in third person, this writer has to agree with Jennings.

Why Waylon Jennings Hated One Of His Biggest Hits

Waylon Jennings’ 1977 track “Luckenback, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love)” effectively solidified the country star’s place as a crossover artist. The song expectedly rose to the top of the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart, but its more impressive feats included a No. 16 spot on the Adult Contemporary chart and No. 25 on the Billboard Hot 100. Outlaw country was at its peak. “Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love)” seemed to encapsulate this free-wheeling, rebellious attitude in a way that was obviously palatable to the masses. The song was a massive hit for Jennings. The only problem? He hated singing it.

“Chips Moman had co-written the song, and when he showed it to me, he used the right approach,” Jennings recalled in his memoir. “‘I got a song here, and you can’t do it because your name’s in it.’ I knew it was a hit song, even though I didn’t like it and still don’t. It reminded me too much of “Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues,” and it had a laid-back rhythm I kept wanting to rush. I’ve never been to Luckenbach. Neither had Chips or his co-writer, Bobby Emmons.”

The name-dropping that Jennings referenced is in the song’s chorus. Let’s go to Luckenbach, Texas, with Waylon and Willie and the boys. This successful life we’re livin’ got us feuding like the Hatfields and McCoys. Between Hank Williams’ pain songs and Newbury’s train songs and “Blue Eyes Cryin’ in the Rain,” out in Luckenbach, Texas, ain’t nobody feelin’ no pain.

“He didn’t like the fact that he was going to sing his own name in a song,” Jennings’ son, Shooter Jennings, told Rolling Stone. “It is what it is. But I dig it.”

Others Didn’t Mind The Third-Person Name-Drop As Much As Waylon

Even if Waylon Jennings hated having to sing his own name in the third person on one of his most beloved hits, he wasn’t unaware of why it was so successful. Speaking of “Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love)” in his memoir, Jennings wrote that the song was “a simple symbol of goin’ home. Every state has a Luckenbach. A place to get away from things. That’s why it succeeded. The song was New Country. It was making our own myth, only in a way that touched people who were themselves caught keeping up with the Joneses, whether drug-induced or materially possessed.”

Jennings’ son, Shooter Jennings, shared a memory his father told him to Rolling Stone. “He told me that one time when I was a baby, there was wrestling on the TV in the hotel room we were in. Hulk Hogan was giving one of his monologues, and he says, ‘The only two things in life that make it worth living are guitars that tune good and firm-feeling women.’ He looked around the room like, ‘Am I the only one who heard that?’ I think that was definitely the moment when he knew that what he had done had saturated American culture.”

After all, the third-person name-drop is a lot less awkward when you’re not the one singing it. Nevertheless, Jennings’ drummer, Richie Albright, recalled the country star telling him in the studio, “Just remind me when I’m picking singles from now on that I got to sing that motherf***** every night.”

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