by Jessi Colter
Together with Richie, Waylon produced the album. As a supervisor, Waylon had a gentle and supportive touch. I marveled at his mastery in the studio. I saw him as a musical architect. Though he could neither read nor write music, he could construct sturdy compositions as well as complex arrangements. He was totally committed to his craft.
The final song, written by Donnie Fritts and Spooner Oldham, was “Oh, My Goodness.” I heard it as a prayer—and a fitting one at that. Its simple message underlines the need for gratitude for the goodness that exists in this mean ol’ world. I believe that the only path to joy is through gratitude. How else can joy be realized on a consistent basis? Without the conscious cultivation of gratitude, we fall into negativity and despair. Choosing gratitude is a decision that requires effort. The effort is worth it because the payoff is beautiful. The payoff is joy.
As the seventies wound down, some ten years into my marriage to Waylon, I recommitted myself to gratitude. I required gratitude. It would have been easy—far too easy—to fall into resentment.
Stubborn as a mule, Waylon continued to pop his pills and snort his coke. In the meantime, I thought of the old cliché “If you want to hold on, you have to let go.” I did want to hold on. I remained convinced that one day—and soon—the man I loved would face and defeat his demons. I was grateful for the knowledge that for him to do just that, I’d have to let go. I couldn’t be bugging him. I couldn’t be trying to control him. I knew better than to give him ultimatums. I’d have to grind it out through gratitude. Gratitude for the excitement Waylon had brought to my life. Gratitude for the power of our physical and spiritual love. Gratitude for the patience God was granting me day by day.
Thinking positively, I looked around and saw so much to be grateful for. I absolutely loved the extraordinary people I had met through Waylon—particularly June and Johnny Cash and Connie and Willie Nelson. Remarkable individuals all, these were friends of the heart. Some—like Johnny and George Jones—danced with many of the same devils that had seduced Waylon. Nonetheless I found them fascinating.
Duane had first introduced me to George, who along with Don Gibson had initially converted me to the beauty of country music. George would often drop by Southern Comfort. He adored Waylon and even gave him an 18-karat gold horseshoe-shaped ring set with diamonds. Waylon thought George Jones was the greatest singer in the history of country music but also said, “He’s got more complexes than anybody I’ve ever met. If you can believe it, he’s insecure about his singing.”
Maybe that’s why George drank so much. When he showed up at our doorstep, he was usually high. One time he nearly tore up our living room—I never did know why—until Waylon literally tied him up. Another time he wouldn’t leave until I went to the piano and sang “Darlin’ It’s Yours”—not once, but four times in a row.
Waylon’s relationship with George was much like his relationship with Johnny and Willie: brothers to the bone. It was Waylon who helped George through a rough patch of tax problems. Later, when George was flush, he gifted Waylon a vintage 1927 Ford coupe. We knew George before he met Nancy—the love of his life—and after. He was much easier to deal with after.
Waylon succinctly summed up George when, referring to his hometown, he said, “George Jones is pure Vidor, Texas, 1958.”
Another lovable and incorrigible character, Hank Williams Jr., became Waylon’s little brother. They spent long days and nights in each other’s company, exploring the deep mythology attached to Hank’s father and philosophizing, as country singers are inclined to do, about the meaning of it all.
I loved listening to their duet on “The Conversation,” a song they wrote together in which Waylon says, “Hank, let’s talk about your daddy, tell me how your mama loved that man,” and Hank answers, “Well, just break out a bottle, hoss, and I’ll tell you ’bout the driftin’ cowboy band.”
In short, for all its insomnia-induced insanity, I was grateful to be part of Waylon’s world. Not a dull day, not an uneventful evening. The action was ongoing and, best of all, the creativity was supercharged.
My gratitude reached even higher ground when, in September 1978, I learned I was pregnant. This was the result of deep deliberation and careful planning. It was important to Waylon that we have a child together. The clock was ticking. He was forty-one, I was thirty-five. We loved his teenagers from his previous marriages, just as we loved Jennifer. Terry, Julie, Buddy, Deana, and Tomi Lynne—all wonderful people with unique personalities and special talents. We were blessed to have them in our lives. And yet Waylon knew that, given the difficult and complex circumstances surrounding his broken marriages, he had never been able to realize his full potential as a father.
“If I die without having a shot at being a truly good dad,” he said, “I’ll feel like a heel. And the only way that’s gonna happen, honey, is if you and I conceive a child of our own.”
I had reservations. It wasn’t because my love for Waylon had diminished. If anything, my love had grown. I was worried that his drug use would negatively affect the embryo. Twice I went to the doctor to have my IUD removed and twice I crawled off the table before the birth control device could be removed. I simply wasn’t sure. When I asked God for guidance, that still, silent voice I’d learned to trust led me to Isaiah 53:5: “He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement for our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed.”
This wasn’t the passage I wanted to read. I wanted a passage that would indicate an unambiguous yes or no. So I kept asking God and kept being redirected to Isaiah 53:5. The passage wouldn’t leave me alone.
“Why, Lord,” I asked, “can’t you be any clearer?”
The relevance of the passage did not come quickly. It took me a long while to grasp what God was saying: “Don’t worry, my child. I have carried your sins. I have carried your husband’s sins. I have carried the sins of the world. I was bruised for your iniquities but my love was not.”
Christ’s suffering—the bruising of his physical body, the torture he had endured—led to his victory over death. And because he has risen, we, too, can rise above our own sicknesses, whether of the body or the soul.
I asked Waylon whether he would take my hand and let me pray. He agreed.
“If it is your will to give us a child, Father God, give this child the very best of both of us.”
A month later, I learned I was pregnant.
Ironically, I had no strange cravings while, for his part, Waylon suddenly was compelled to eat great fistfuls of licorice jelly beans night and day. It was hardly news that my husband had an addictive personality.
Nine months rolled by without incident. I worked and traveled normally. I was careful to get good sleep and diligently kept up my standard of what I considered stylish dress. My pregnancy was hardly visible until the final three months.
Then came Saturday, May 19, 1979. I could feel that the birth was imminent and asked Waylon to drive me to Nashville Baptist Hospital. June Carter Cash was already there, waiting to keep us company. Johnny was on his way. To pass the time, Waylon and I decided to play a game of spades, placing the cards on my stomach. It was an amusing diversion.
“Out in West Texas where my other kids were born,” said Waylon, “men weren’t allowed in the delivery room. Here, they are.”
My water broke, the contractions intensified, and we were off to the races.
“I’d better run out for some cigarettes,” said Waylon.
“If you go,” I pleaded, “you’ll miss this.”
“All right, I’ll stay.”
A young male junior nurse was busy arranging the room when he noticed Johnny Cash standing in the hall. Thrilled, he rushed out to greet him.
When he returned, I was in the full throes of predelivery pain.
“Oh, my God, Johnny Cash is out there,” the nurse breathlessly exclaimed. “He wants you to know he’s here. It’s actually him! It’s actually Johnny Cash in person!”
With Waylon on the verge of passing out, the baby emerged a few minutes later, a beautiful dark-haired boy.
Waylon Albright Jennings.
He was placed on my stomach where only a few hours earlier Waylon had dealt an ace of spades.
Because I didn’t like the idea of referring to my husband as Big Waylon and my son as Little Waylon, I thought of a western nickname that would fit nicely into our family lore: Shooter.
The name stuck. Shooter had arrived, a blessing in ways we could not yet know. Two months later, Waylon and I sent out an invitation:
IF YOU’VE EVER BEEN IN LOVE
WE WOULD LIKE TO INVITE YOU TO SHARE OUR JOY
AS MAGNOLIAS, MOONLIGHT, AND A CANDLELIGHT DINNER
SET THE STAGE FOR THE CHRISTENING OF
WAYLON ALBRIGHT JENNINGS
ON WEDNESDAY, THE TWENTY-FIFTH OF JULY
8 PM AT OUR HOME.
BRING LOVE, THANKSGIVING, AND BE READY
FOR A NIGHT TO REMEMBER.
WAYLON AND JESSI
I went all out. Our backyard was blooming with white caladiums, white mums, and white impatiens with tender ferns—all planted just for the celebration. A huge white tent was set up on our tennis court. Magnolias were floating on our pool. And then came the rains. From morning on, it poured all day, nonstop, until the clock struck eight. Just like that, the rain stopped as the guests arrived to the lyrical strains of classical music provided by a string quartet.
Among the many guests was Muhammad Ali, who’d been introduced to Waylon years before by Kris Kristofferson. “I’ve never seen two people so taken with each other,” Kris had told me. Muhammad, whose courage and integrity Waylon greatly admired, remained one of my husband’s closest friends.
Of course June and Johnny were there along with manager Neil Reshen and attorney Jay Goldberg, who’d flown in from New York.
We asked Will D. Campbell, a Baptist minister, to preside over the christening. Born in Mississippi, Brother Will was a prominent advocate for civil rights—one of the four adults who escorted the black children integrating the Little Rock public schools in 1957, and the only caucasian present at the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
A tireless antiwar activist, Will had become a dear family friend and one of the few men of the cloth Waylon took to. I’d met the minister years earlier when Johnny Darrell, famous for singing “With Pen in Hand,” invited Waylon and me to his wedding, held inside Will’s one-room log cabin outside Nashville. There must have been forty people squeezed into this rural cabin, empty except for a bed, a desk that held an old manual typewriter, and a stove where a pot of black-eyed peas was cooking. Will spoke with striking simplicity and humility. He reminded me of Mother.
During the christening I held my baby in my arms with Waylon standing on my right. As the ceremony proceeded, Shooter started to wail. With every eye on me, I tried every trick in the book to calm him down. No such luck.
“Give him to me,” said Waylon, with self-assurance.
The minute Shooter slipped into Waylon’s powerful arms, he fell silent, a telling omen of what would evolve into a remarkable father-son relationship.
For all the joy brought forth by Shooter’s birth, problems remained—problems chiefly predicated by Waylon’s headstrong refusal, in spite of the dramatic drug bust, to put down his hurtful behavior.
The burning question I was too afraid to answer was inescapable:
Will Waylon ever find the strength to destroy his drugs before they destroy him?
Part Four
THE RECONCILIATION
Chapter 22
FLYING HIGH, FALLING LOW
A FRIEND RECENTLY REFERRED ME TO THOMAS MERTON, THE Trappist monk and author of the spiritual memoir The Seven Storey Mountain. In that book, Merton imagines living in a land where Christ would direct all things, where Merton’s connection to God “would be as if he thought with my mind, as if he willed with my will.” He speaks of the living Christ dwelling within his heart, “melting me into himself in the fires of his love.”1
These words remind me of my prayers as I continued to live with—and to fervently love—a man who still had not completely found himself. I did understand why—or at least I thought I did. Waylon had never known a day without hard work. He’d started out working the fields when he was ten. In one way or another, he’d never stopped working those fields. All the drugs did was fuel his work ethic to a feverish pitch. Because of his hardscrabble life, I don’t believe Waylon felt worthy of God’s love.
“Grace isn’t anything you earn,” I told him. “It’s a given. It’s a gift.”
He looked at me and smiled. He didn’t argue, but I don’t think he understood. The concept of unmerited favor—especially unmerited divine favor—had no concrete parallel in Waylon’s world. In the world of show business, you scratched and clawed for every victory. You cut records, one after another, month after month, year after year. You toured endlessly. You promoted excessively. The grind was relentless. And when you did achieve success, you couldn’t help but see it as a result of some herculean effort on your part.
In the late seventies and early eighties, in spite of—or partly because of—the sensational publicity surrounding Waylon, he was insulated by unprecedented success. The harder he worked, the more wrong he did, the greater his rewards. He was caught in a self-perpetuating cycle that was too insidious for anyone—even a wife—to shut down.
For seven long seasons he was the narrator on one of the most popular TV shows ever—The Dukes of Hazzard—for which he wrote and sang the theme song, “Good Ol’ Boys,” which became a huge hit on its own. He kept turning out hit albums like Ol’ Waylon, What Goes Around Comes Around, Music Man, and Black on Black that in turn generated hit singles like “I Ain’t Living Long Like This” and “Luckenbach, Texas,” a town, ironically enough, Waylon had never seen.
What Waylon did see, though, was an increasingly adoring public willing to follow him wherever he went. He and Willie became the Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth of country music, teammates on an undefeatable squad of champions. Beyond Willie, he sang duets with all the reigning legends—George Jones and he sang “Night Life”; Johnny Cash and he sang “There Ain’t No Good Chain Gang”; Kris Kristofferson and he sang “Chase the Feeling”; Neil Diamond and he sang “One Good Love.”
Like any hardworking artist, he reveled in his triumphs. And, true to his generous heart, he insisted that I share in the success. He was insistent that, after That’s the Way a Cowboy Rocks and Rolls, he produce another Jessi Colter record. It was another spirited effort. We called it Ridin’ Shotgun, and it included a song I wrote with Basil McDavid, “Holdin’ On”—an accurate two-word synopsis of my marriage to Waylon—and one I wrote for and sang with my daughter Jennifer, who had grown into a beautiful seventeen-year-old with a gorgeous voice.
This time around my original compositions—like “Ain’t Making No Headlines (Here Without You)” and “Hard Times and Sno-Cone”—were more whimsical than reflective. Maybe that’s because, unlike in an earlier period of our relationship, I’d made my peace with Waylon. Come what may, I was in it for the long haul.
Knowing my commitment, Waylon lent further support to my career by insisting that we release a duet album, Leather and Lace. The big hit off the record—and the composition of mine that has been covered more than any other—was our version of “Storms Never Last,” the same song I had sung on my first Capitol LP seven years earlier. I loved singing with Waylon. Our harmony was as natural as a sunrise.
In 1981, I decided to throw Waylon a big surprise forty-fourth birthday bash. I wanted it to be a royal occasion and worked up a country-western theme. Once again, we tented the backyard, but this time erected a stage where
bluegrass music would be provided by virtuosos Billy and Terry Smith. Guests were told to arrive in full western gear.
I thought my plan was perfect, since Waylon wouldn’t be returning to town until 8:00 p.m., just in time for the big surprise. But Waylon, being Waylon, strolled in at 3:00 p.m., looked around at the army of caterers and asked, “Where’s my party?”
“What party?” was my lame reply.
The game was up but that night the party was on. The guest list included Hank Williams Jr., LeAnn and Tony Joe White, minister Will Campbell, and, as a special surprise, one of Waylon’s childhood heroes—Ernest Tubb and his Texas Troubadours. The barbecue brisket, ribs, and chicken were sizzlin’. The music was so hot we all got to dancing. Little Jimmy Dickens, then the oldest member of the Grand Ole Opry, was the most outlandishly dressed in his bright orange rhinestone suit and matching orange Stetson. If I do say so myself, my purple getup was pretty dazzling. Shooter, who had turned two, was outfitted to look like a miniature Waylon. Big Waylon had a ball.
I wasn’t without worry, but I was able to live a life in which I staunchly supported my husband. Yes, I fretted about his health. Yes, I saw his habit of going days without sleep as deeply injurious. Yes, I was frightened by what he was doing to his body. Yes, I wanted to intervene, I wanted to scream, I wanted to take control, I wanted to insist that he turn his life over to the love of Christ, I wanted to cajole and threaten and demand. I desperately wanted to change him. But, in the end, I knew I couldn’t. All I could do was love him. And if love, as Jesus promises, is the most powerful force of all, I could do no more and no less than lean on love.
It wasn’t much later that I started working on what I considered the best of my rock-and-roll records. This one was called Rock and Roll Lullaby, named for a song by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. The album was put together by maestro Chips Moman and his piano player partner Bobby Emmons.