by Jessi Colter
Management was always a problem. For years, W. E. “Lucky” Moeller had been Waylon’s manager and booker. Combining both roles ultimately proved problematic. Waylon saw Lucky as a father figure. When Waylon’s father died, he grew even more dependent on Lucky. At the same time, Waylon understood how Lucky was working both sides of the street, often to the artist’s disadvantage.
Lucky was an old-school promoter who’d booked everyone, beginning in the forties with Bob Wills. In addition to promoting, he also ran nightclubs and dance halls where he’d feature his artists like Webb Pierce and Kitty Wells, whom he called his White Horses. Lucky was in the two-sided position of both paying for and selling talent. Sometimes that worked against Waylon. When, for example, Kitty would turn down a lowball offer from a club owner, he’d send in Waylon as a replacement at half Waylon’s normal rate. One way or the other, though, Lucky kept Waylon working. But at the end of a long tour the numbers didn’t add up.
“I love Lucky,” said Waylon, “but after ten months on the road, I’d have to ask him, ‘Hoss, how is it that I come to owe you thirty thousand dollars?’”
“What’s his answer?” I asked Waylon.
“He just laughs and says, ‘Look, son, I’ve always kept you working, and always will.’”
I understood the bond between Waylon and Lucky. But I also saw that, in addition to being a bond, it was a form of bondage. Because he didn’t want to focus on the minutiae of managing his own money, Waylon turned over the task to someone who had a daddy-like dominance over him. I was alarmed by the implications of their relationship. But I was also aware of my own limitations. No matter how dysfunctional it might be, I knew better than to get into the middle of that long-term friendship. Thus the leak in Waylon’s financial ship went unattended. It would take several more years before that leak got plugged.
Financial disorder is always disturbing. That disturbance was allayed, though, by all the excitement of the creative whirlwind in which we found ourselves. Waylon was in the studio making incredible albums like Singer of Sad Songs with killer versions of George Jones’s “Ragged but Right” and the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women.”
I was in the studio as well. In 1970, Chet Atkins finally decided that I was more than a songwriter. He now saw me as a solo artist and signed me to RCA. He and Waylon coproduced the album and were confident enough to call it A Country Star Is Born, a title that both excited and embarrassed me.
When the record was complete, Chet called me to his office. He said he had something important to discuss.
“Are you happy with the professional names you’ve used previously?”
“No,” I said. “Mirriam Eddy is over, and Mirriam Johnson is too long. Besides, neither one sounds entertaining.”
“Well, can you think of something else?”
I thought back to a story I once heard my father tell about Jesse James’s chief counterfeiter. I remembered the man was called Jesse Colter. When I mentioned the name to Chet, he broke out into a smile.
“That’s it!” he said.
“It is?”
“It’s catchy, it’s edgy, it’s quirky. I do believe it’s you.”
I wrote it down on a piece of paper, changing Jesse to Jessi. I stared at it for a few seconds.
“Not bad,” I said. “Not bad at all.”
Chapter 13
THE BIRTH OF JESSI COLTER
WAYLON, WHO ALWAYS HAD A HARD TIME CALLING ME Mirriam, took to Jessi immediately. He agreed with Chet.
“You’re a pistol,” he said. “The name fits.”
My mother didn’t mind, but Daddy initially had problems.
“Jessi Colter doesn’t represent the proudest moment in American history,” he said, shaking his head. “Besides, it’s a man’s name.”
I didn’t reply. Daddy wasn’t the type you talked back to. Eventually, though, he withdrew his complaint. Soon everyone, save my family—to whom I’ll always be Mirriam—was calling me Jessi. I didn’t mind. I didn’t treat the changeover all that seriously. If Chet and RCA thought it would help sales, why not? If the name pleased my producer and my husband, I had no problem. Besides, it did have an adventuresome edge. I adopted it without further thought.
I did, however, devote enormous thought to the music I was making. This was, after all, my debut album. In the past I had recorded singles and saw this as a chance to stretch out and express the feelings that had been populating my heart. Those feelings came out in my songs. As a writer, I could never edit my emotions. So if you look at the underpinnings of the songs I wrote and performed on the record, you have some idea of what I was going through in my life.
My relationship with Waylon was still new. And even though he showered me with love and lavishly praised my music, he wasn’t always there. He could disappear for days at a time. I knew Waylon loved women and their attention. He instinctively knew how to tease, flirt, and cause the heart to flutter.
Because neither one of us was confrontational, we avoided discussions of what he did when I was not around. He had made it clear from the start that my choice was to accept him as he was or not accept him at all.
“Don’t try to remake me, Jessi,” he had said. “It just won’t work.”
I lived with both the calming certainty of his love and the distressing uncertainty of his fidelity.
For my part, I loved the man inordinately. I loved his heart, his soul, and his stupendous artistry. I knew that deep down he was good as gold. But I also knew that his imperfections—his get-high propensities, his wandering eye—were making me a little crazy. The only way to cope with my craziness was to channel it into song.
“Songs,” said Waylon, “are things you have to write. You can’t ever stop writing songs.”
One of the wonderful things about living with Waylon was my indoctrination into his wildly creative songwriting world. Harlan Howard said that Nashville in the sixties and seventies was like Paris in the twenties and thirties. Where the Lost Generation had Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, we had—just to name a few—Roger Miller, Tony Joe White, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, and a young man who came ramblin’ through named Kris Kristofferson.
While the actual writing was done in private, the pullin’ session was a community phenomenon. That’s when the tunesmiths would come together—sometimes at the Holiday Inn on Nineteenth Street or at parties hosted by characters like Harlan Howard and Bobby Bare—and play their songs for one another.
While I was never intimidated, I was always inspired. They were powerful poets and dedicated craftsmen. They loved kidding around and putting each other on, but when it came to sculpting songs, they were dead serious. And don’t think they weren’t competitive. At the same time, the competition, though intense, was more good-hearted than ruthless. As an artistic community, these guys had a macho way of supporting and even nourishing one another.
While they wrote their stories of drinking and gambling, losing and winning, I wrote my own stories. I wrote songs that, through melody and metaphors, expressed my emotional ups and downs. Ironically, I sang the song that most clearly expressed my ambivalence about Waylon as a duet with Waylon! I called it “I Ain’t the One.” Read between the lines and you can sense what I was feeling about the uncertainty of our romance:
I sang:
If you’re looking for someone who’s got it all to give
Looking for someone who won’t care how you live
Looking for someone who don’t need love from you
I ain’t the one, I ain’t the one
Waylon sang:
If you’re looking for someone to dry
your tears when you cry
Looking for someone to turn his back each time you lie
Looking for someone to walk on and then walk by
I ain’t the one, I ain’t the one
The story underscores a couple’s refusal to tolerate anything short of uncompromised fidelity. That certainly was an attitude I wanted us to adopt, and when
we sang the song—which turned into a fan favorite—we were convincing.
But how convinced was I? Uncertainty kept creeping into my mind. Scenarios kept me awake late at night. During one of those nights I wrote the song “If She’s Where You Like Livin’”:
If she’s where you like livin’
You won’t feel at home with me
She tells you lies lookin’ into your eyes
She laughs but you don’t see
She knows just how to make you bow
And you fall down on your knees
How could such a man be crushed in her hand
I don’t believe I see
The most emotionally raw moment came when, without the camouflage of a complex story line, I simply cried, “Don’t Let Him Go.”
Don’t let him go
Stop him if you can
Don’t let him go
If you call him your man
You didn’t like something he did
Could it be you’ve been wronged?
Don’t you know, woman, without your man
You won’t be a woman for long
Given the feminist tenor of the times—a feministic movement that resonated with me—you could view “Don’t Let Him Go,” the most mournful song I’d written up to that point, as anti-feminist. Wasn’t the song basically saying that a woman is nothing without her man? Wasn’t I saying that a woman’s job is to accept her man, even if he has wronged her?
I made no apology for the song then, and I make none now. I didn’t see the song in terms of what I was saying. I saw in terms of what I was feeling. My feelings didn’t amount to any broad statement on feminism. My feelings were my own. They were fleeting. They were true—painfully true—at the moment I wrote the song. I put myself in the place of a woman who was on the verge of letting her man go. That woman could have easily been me. Part of me cried out, “Let him go!”
When those feelings swept over me, I wrote songs like “It’s All Over Now,” “I Ain’t the One,” and “If She’s Where You Like Livin’.” But those feelings passed and were replaced by others. One of those other feelings was fear—fear of losing someone I loved with all my heart, fear of giving up too soon, too impetuously, too impatiently. That feeling said to me, “Don’t let him go. Hang in. Hang on. It’s bound to get better.”
As it turned out, I wrote only five of the eleven cuts on A Country Star Is Born. Chet wanted to supplement my output with tunes written by prominent country composers like Mickey Newbury, Harlan Howard, and Willie Nelson. In fact, if I had to choose my favorite song on the record, it might be Willie’s haunting “Healing Hands of Time.” Healing hands that “lead me safely through the night” seemed to be the perfect metaphor for the spirit I was seeking. Though I might not have admitted it at the time, my spirit required repair. I needed healing.
Part Three
THE RETURN
Chapter 14
OH WELL, THERE’S ALWAYS GOD
IF I HAD TO NAME A SONG THAT SPOKE MOST DIRECTLY TO MY soul during the turbulent early seventies, it wouldn’t be one of mine or even one of Waylon’s. It would be Harry Nilsson’s version of “Without You,” written by Badfinger’s Peter Ham and Tom Evans.
That song possessed me, obsessed me, and somehow got me through a storm of confusion. Every time I heard it, I was able to access a sense of hope. Even though it’s a sad song—or perhaps precisely because it’s a sad song—hearing it lifted my heart. I believe great songs are transformative.
By virtue of the power of their melody and message, great songs turn sorrow to joy. The sheer joy of their soaring beauty cannot be resisted. And, at least in the moment we give ourselves over to the song, we are released from our pain and made to feel something positive.
Songs are ambiguous. Despite the writer’s intention, they mean different things to different people. Often we don’t even understand what they mean to us until, with the passage of time, we can look back and in a moment of clarity finally understand the significance.
On the surface, “Without You” is the simple story of someone who regrets letting a lover leave. It became a number-one pop hit for many weeks. Every time I heard it, I found myself holding back tears. It tore me up. For a while I thought that it was because in some ways it mirrored my anguish over Waylon and his inability to completely reform and his tendency to disappear unaccountably for days at a time. But now I’ve come to understand that the power of the song operated on a deeper level. Though I wasn’t entirely conscious of it at the time, “Without You” spoke to that part of me that was without God.
My forays into non-Christian disciplines had gone nowhere. No philosophy had satisfied me. New Age formulations failed to work any magic in my mind. Objectivism fell by the wayside. Agnosticism left me longing. I was tired of reading convoluted tracts of theology. I was weary of exploring psychological principles of self-strength and self-dependence. When it came to considering theories of human behavior, I was spent.
Waylon saw this first. He knew I was looking for something I’d lost, but not possessing that “something” himself, he couldn’t help me. Mother, of course, had seen my dilemma. But long ago she had decided that she wasn’t the one who could bring me back. Only God could do that.
The four kids, Waylon, and I had moved to a home on Donelson Hills Drive in the Sunny Acres section of Nashville close to the Cumberland River. It was an ordinary afternoon. Waylon and I were planning to head out on the road in a few days, and I was making preparations. Waylon was working at the recording studio. The children were at school. I was walking down the stairs to our finished basement to search for something. I can’t remember what I was looking for, but I do remember that the ceiling over the staircase was low—so low that if Waylon didn’t bend down, he’d hit his head. I didn’t have that problem. I was halfway down the stairs when a thought entered my head. The thought was strong enough to cause me to stop. I sensed it was profound, yet its literal form—the actual words that popped into my head—seemed almost simplistic.
The words were, Oh well, there’s always God.
Compared to Saul falling from his horse on the road to Damascus and hearing the Lord bellow, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” the words I heard appear meager, even tentative.
Oh well, there’s always God.
Unlike in Saul’s situation, the words were not apparently spoken in the voice of God. I don’t know whose voice spoke them. Maybe it was my own voice that had been suppressed for so long. Maybe it was the voice of my subconscious. The words had a tantalizing tone. Because they weren’t harsh, judgmental, or absolute, they had powerful appeal. I heard them more as a whisper than a command. They sounded like the concluding line of a poem or the answer to a riddle. They contained an innocence, a sweetness, a softness of expression that made the phrase linger long in my thoughts.
These were easy words, reassuring words, words of optimism and hope. Words that welcomed me back to a language I had lost. Words that welcomed me home. Words that warmed a heart grown cold.
Oh well, there’s always God.
So strong were the words, so deep their impact on me, I had to sit down on the staircase and reflect for a while. What did the words exactly mean?
I had gone away but God hadn’t. God can’t go away. God simply is. His presence is eternal. He is the great I Am. I thought of the story of the prodigal son in which the father welcomes his child with open arms. It matters not that the son had gone astray. The father’s love never wanes. The father’s acceptance is absolute.
Similarly, I had been taught as a child that God’s love and acceptance are not conditional. We don’t win his favor with our loyal support or exemplary behavior. His grace is our gift. Grace is an operation of life as simple as the air we breathe. It can’t be seen, but with it comes life that words can’t describe. It isn’t a question of earning or deserving it. Like his presence, it simply is. Our choice is whether to turn from that grace or embrace it fully.
I had turned fro
m the full spectrum of God’s gracious ways. In that turning, I had been mired in a difficult marriage with Duane, one during which I had no faith to call upon. I had left that marriage for good reasons. My life had become static and I ceased to feel joy. Joy returned in the person of Waylon Jennings. I was crazy for this man in every respect. Our romance was real and our marriage, no matter how challenging, was something to which I felt permanently committed.
But that romance was not without great challenges. Waylon was like Texas. He was a country unto himself. Most of the time he was emotionally available to me, but not always. One of the things he liked to say to me, referring to the complexity of his mind-set, was “You should see how it looks from in here.” I respected that complexity. When it came to Waylon, I required more patience, more understanding, more compassion. If I were to remain in this marriage—as I deeply desired—I needed help.
Sitting on that staircase, I had to wonder: Could God be the very help I need? Could it be that simple? The questions themselves relaxed me. They came as a relief. I sighed. I smiled. I even chuckled.
My heart knew that going back to God required no readmission test. I would not have to stand before a committee and answer questions about my truancy. I would face no inquisition or examination. But what would I have to do?
“The truth,” I remember my mother saying over and over again, “is in his Word. His Word enlightens even as it heals.”
Enlightening and healing were what I sought. Oh well, there’s always God was a good thought. Now I needed a good word. It was clear that I needed to open the Good Book that I had shelved years earlier.
But on that day, alone in the basement of our house, I didn’t run upstairs and break out the Bible. I didn’t jump in the car and roar off to church. I didn’t call my mother and tell her that I was suddenly back in the fold. I just kept this quiet revelation to myself.