On This Day in 1977, Waylon Jennings Released the Massively Successful Hit That He Hated

On this day (April 11) in 1977, Waylon Jennings released “Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love)” as the lead single from his album Ol’ Waylon. The song went to the top of the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart and scored favorably on the Hot 100 and Adult Contemporary surveys. It also became one of Jennings’ signature songs. However, he was never a fan of the self-referential single.

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Penned by Bobby Emmons and Chips Moman, “Luckenbach, Texas” was a massive hit for Jennings. The track topped the Hot Country Songs chart for six consecutive weeks between May and June 1977. It peaked at No. 25 on the Hot 100 and No. 16 on the Adult Contemporary chart. In short, the song was everywhere during the spring of ’77. This helped boost the popularity of both Jennings and Ol’ Waylon.

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Ol’ Waylon remains one of Jennings’ most successful releases. It topped the country albums chart for 13 weeks and became the first album by a solo country artist to reach Platinum status. Much of the album’s success can be traced back to the success of its lead single. Despite the song’s importance to his career, Jennings did not like it.

Waylon Jennings Never Liked “Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love)”

Waylon Jennings famously wrote in his biography that he knew the song was a hit but didn’t like it when he recorded it and still didn’t some 20 years later.

Jennings was not shy about his distaste for the hit. In a Rolling Stone feature, his longtime drummer Ritchie Albright recalled Jennigns talking about the song during a recording session. “He said, ‘Just remind me when I’m picking singles from now on that I got to sing that motherf**ker every night.”

His dislike for the song may have gone deeper than just having to sing his name in the lyrics. “Waylon was b*tching about doing one of those Willie concerts and somebody took the money, nobody got paid, and all that. It was another one of those fiascos,” Albright recalled. “That’s how Chips and Bobby got the idea for the song,” he added.

Also, Jennings, like Moman and Emmons, had never been to Luckenbach when he recorded the song. In fact, he didn’t visit or perform there until he played Nelson’s Fourth of July Picnic in 1997, 20 years after releasing the song.

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