Watch an Unrecognizable Waylon Jennings Perform a Deep Cut Cover That the Original Songwriter Later Refused to Play

Waylon Jennings looked like the kind of man who was born with a full head of shaggy, shoulder-length hair, clad in a leather vest and black, wide-brimmed hat. (Much in the same way that it’s easy to imagine Willie Nelson coming out of the womb with braided pigtails and Trigger in his hand.) But in the case of both outlaw country stars, there was a time when both were clean-cut, wore well-tailored suits, and kept their hair short and slicked back.

Looking back on these artists in their earliest days as recording artists is always a trippy experience because you can tell by listening to them that it’s the same person. But strictly physically speaking, the performer looks like a stranger. Such was the case for this unearthed footage we found of Waylon Jennings performing in a television studio in the late 1960s.

His signature warble and squinty-eyed stare are there. But his hair is in a high pompadour, and he’s wearing a sharp, slim-cut gray suit. Jennings’ guitar, at least, was the same: his custom mid-50s Fender Telecaster with a black-and-white leather cover, a gift from his band, The Waylors.

Gordon Lightfoot Stopped Playing the Song Waylon Jennings Was Covering

The song Waylon Jennings was performing as a nearly unrecognizable then-recent Nashville transplant was “(That’s What You Get) For Lovin’ Me”. It is the eighth track on his third studio album, Leavin’ Town, which peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard Country Albums chart following its October 1966 release. Gordon Lightfoot, the original songwriter, released his version of the track months earlier in January of that year on his debut, Lightfoot! The song appeared as “For Lovin’ Me”, the fourth song on the 14-track album.

In either instance, the song can only be described as being sung by a dog. It’s unapologetic, it’s tomcatty, and in those ways, it perfectly fit Waylon Jennings’ rough-and-tumble demeanor. “Don’t you shed a tear for me ‘cause I ain’t the love you thought I’d be / I’ve got a hundred more like you, so don’t be blue / I’ll have a thousand more before I’m through.”

Years after both versions came out, Lightfoot stopped performing the song altogether. In a 2013 interview with Broadview, Lightfoot reflected, “I learned a lot of things from the many women I met. One of the things was, don’t write songs that are chauvinistic. And boy, I wrote a couple at the start, like ‘That’s What You Get For Loving Me’. Oh my goodness. I’ll never write another song like that. That one taught me a lesson. It really did. Others still sing it. But I won’t anymore.”

Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images