The $7,500 Misspelled Letter John Lennon Hand-Wrote Waylon Jennings

John Lennon and Waylon Jennings seem like an unlikely pair, and we wouldn’t exactly call them best friends. However, back in the day, Lennon did try to connect with Jennings; and the way Jennings spoke about the incident is pretty hilarious.

The famous letter is an item of curiosity for music historians and fans of both of the music superstars. Photos of the letter first surfaced in Jennings’ famed 1996 autobiography. There, no context was given. It simply featured the caption “A Beatle writes…” with a photocopy of the letter itself.

So, what’s the story behind the time John Lennon wrote Waylon Jennings a very strange letter?

John Lennon’s Letter To Waylon Jennings

The pair first met in March of 1975 at the Uris Theater in New York City, likely during the Grammys. They had their own preconceived notions about one another. Jennings told Lennon that he thought he was “some kind of mad guy or something like that.” To which Lennon responded, “Listen, people in England think you shoot folks.” Clearly, John Lennon and Waylon Jennings shared a similar sense of humor. 

The letter begins with Lennon apparently pitching a song to Waylon that he wrote but didn’t release. He misspelled “Waylon” and corrected it with a pen. Lennon was the kind of guy to write the way that he spoke, so much of his Liverpool accent came out in the letter as well.

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Jennings once spoke about the letter with an equal mix of humor and confusion, though he did note that he found the letter to be “nice”.

“He wrote me this really nice letter I’ve still got at home that was just all over the place,” said Jennings of the letter Lennon sent him. “Part of it was hand-written, part of it was typed. I got to meet him a couple of times after that. I was amazed at how much fun he was to be around.”

The letter is indeed partially typed and riddled with spelling mistakes, which Lennon comically corrected by hand like a school teacher grading an assignment. He also apologized for the mispellings in the letter as well.

So, where’s the letter now? Back in 2014, it was sold for $7,500 during an auction of thousands of items that Waylon Jennings owned from his estate in Arizona.

Photo by David Redfern

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