We met up with his manager, Bill Ham, and I started recounting. I told him of all the phones I used to destroy, dialing a number, putting it to my ear, and walking off. He listened to tales of Hillbilly Central and Dripping Springs, and Joe would keep encouraging me, saying “Tell this story, Waylon, tell that one.”
After I got through talking, Clint pushed back from the table. “I can let you know one thing I’ve gotta do,” he said. “I’ve got to get rid of this goody-two-shoes reputation I’ve got.”
Both Bill and Joe looked at him in horror. “No, no! We just wanted you to hear the stories!”
You never do know where the stones you throw will land. One time, I was at an awards show, and I heard a voice behind me saying “Mr. Jennings, you’re like a god to me.” I turned around and it was Billy Ray Cyrus, offering his hand for me to shake. All I could think of was, if I’m your god, what does your devil look like?
* * *
The thing is, we’re in this together, the old, the new, the one-hit wonders and the lifetime achievers, the writers and the session pickers and the guy who sells the T-shirts. The folks that come to the shows, and the ones that stay at home and watch it on TNN. Those who remember Hank Williams, and those who came on board about the time of Mark Chestnutt, who named his baby boy after me.
In the spring of 1995, I hosted eight shows of a series for the Nashville Network, called The Legends of Country Music. One program featured Jessi and I sitting around with June and John, swapping reminiscences and interrelations. Another found me alongside Bill Monroe, Little Jimmy Dickens, Porter Wagoner, and Carl Smith alternating verses of “The Great Speckled Bird.” Beth Nielsen Chapman, Lyle Lovett, Bobby Bare, Guy Clark, Billy Joe Shaver, and Rodney Crowell came to visit. George Jones cancelled the night before. Kris stopped by, and the father-daughter bluegrass gospel of Jerry and Tammy Sullivan closed each show. We had a tribute to Roger Miller with Chet and Willie, Mary Miller and Roger’s kids. Travis Tritt, Leroy Parnell, Danny Dawson, and Kimmie Rhodes represented country future, while a host of young cowboys joined me for “All of My Sisters Are Girls,” and an equal number of cowgirls backed up Jessi on “All of My Brothers Are Boys.” Country future’s future.
My friends. This town is big enough for the all of us.
CHAPTER 14
I DO BELIEVE
When people ask me who I admire most in the world, I always have the same answer: Muhammad Ali.
I thought he was too smart-ass for his own good when I first heard of him, but after I realized what he was doing, he left-hooked me quick. I guessed he had seen Gorgeous George, the wrestler, and how people loved to hate him as he paraded around the ring with his blonde curls and mincing walk, before he pile-drived his opponent into the mat. Muhammad talked about himself with a grand sense of humor, but it helped that he was probably the most gracefully flamboyant boxer of our lifetime.
I enjoyed watching him fight, and respected him because he stood up for what he believed. When they drafted him, all he had to do was join the army and keep his mouth shut. They probably would’ve let him fight exhibitions and live in a fancy barracks, but he was one of the first to say that the Vietcong had never done anything to him. They’d never called him a nigger. He said no, rejecting the draft because of his religious beliefs, and lost the heavyweight championship belt. Muhammad gave up what he loved most, what he had worked for all his life, because he didn’t believe in the war. For four years, the only fighting he did was to stay out of prison.
He brought such class to boxing, and even after they overturned his conviction, Ali was never bitter about the fact that the government had robbed him of his peak years. Later, I found out what a kind and generous man he was. Watching him in the ring, he’d have his opponent helpless and then start yelling at the referee to stop the fight. He didn’t want to hurt anybody, killer instinct or no.
Kris brought me back to Muhammad’s dressing room the night he won the belt back from Leon Spinks. Before the fight, he was the most calm man you ever saw, sitting on his trainer’s table, waiting, sure it was a done deal. When I left, he simply said “Waylon,” and gave me a big hug.
We had lunch in L.A. a few months later, and after Shooter was born, I called him and told him we were having a christening. “We’d love to have you,” and sure enough, he showed up and flopped down on the couch. “I’m here to integrate this joint,” he said with a smile. Then he cast his eye over to Deakon. “And I’m lookin’ for a heavyweight to fight tonight.” It was the only time I’ve ever seen Deakon say “not me.”
I had just bought the bus we called Shooter I. It wasn’t even furnished yet; I don’t know if it had license tags. Muhammad asked me for the keys, drove to Louisville to see his momma, and then brought it back. He could have kept it for all I cared. He means that much to me, and the world.
“I had a terrible dream, Jessi.”
We were up at Big Cedar Lodge, deep in the Ozarks south of Branson, Missouri. It was the Christmas holidays of 1994, and for the first time we had our entire clan with us, all the kids together at last. Even in the best of families, it’s hard to get siblings to see eye to eye with each other, or their parents; and given the rough times I’d been through in the past, we’d hardly had the best of families.
This was our reunion, in more ways than one.
“Jessi,” I said. “I don’t know what to make of this dream. You were smiling and everything, but whenever I’d ask you to get married, or wonder whether you’d do it again, you’d say no.”
“Well, honey, don’t you worry about that,” she said, giving me a little hug. “I’d marry you a thousand times.”
“Okay,” I replied, a little chirpily. “How about today?”
“Aw, isn’t that sweet.” She didn’t get it.
“I said, let’s get married today.” Slowly it dawned on her that I was serious. And I was.
I’d planned it for weeks. For our first marriage, it wasn’t the most solemn of occasions. I was strung out, and she was laughing her way through it. After twenty-five years, I thought it was time for me to tell her again, in front of the whole family, how much I loved her.
I picked out a wedding dress and they fitted it long distance. I called John and Jeanie Morris, and Debbie, at Big Cedar, and they took care of arranging the details. The funniest part was listening to Jessi on the phone, making dozens of plans for the weekend, arranging lunches and outdoor events, and them just nodding and going along with whatever she said, knowing something completely different was going to happen.
The reunion was meaningful for me on a lot of levels. I wanted to get all of my children together; it felt, somehow, a time that we should make peace and have a healing. Some of my kids have had a tough time, partially because of me and as much in spite of me. At this point, no one needs to put the blame on anyone else. If I wasn’t there for them when they missed me, then I tried too hard to make up for it, and maybe that wasn’t right either. Climbing on the bus to drive from Nashville to Branson, we put all of that in the past. Where it belongs.
Connie Smith came, and Will Campbell arrived to perform the ceremony. Will has united in marriage everyone in my band at least once, and three of my kids. “What if Jessi says no when you ask her?” he joked. “Does this mean you’ve been living in sin all these years?”
We hid them in their rooms until the moment arrived. The dress fit Jessi perfectly; she looked like a sixteen-year-old in it. And when Will got up and said “What the Lord has joined together, man would do well not to piddle with,” I felt we had come full circle.
Will Campbell is a bootleg preacher. You can find him on Saturday night at Gass’s, near Mount Juliet in Tennessee, sitting in with the band and having a nip if he feels like it. He’s my “guru.”
He represents the soul of the South, to me, and he’s one of the only people who I care what they think about my doings. He was raised a Southern Baptist, in Mississippi, which is about as Southern Baptist as you can get. When he graduated from Yal
e Divinity School in 1952, he took a pastorate in a small North Louisiana town. His major interest was social issues, and he was pro-union and pro—racial equality, two topics that didn’t go over too well with some white churchgoers in his 1950s parish. When he spent his Sunday sermons talking about organizing the local mill, and dwelling more than he should on “The Negro Question,” as it was called then, he didn’t last long. That’s how he became a bootleg preacher. It just means he does it wherever he can, and to whoever cares to listen.
The one thing I respect Will most for is that he believes his job is to leave the door open; it’s you who has to walk through. One time, when I was worried about John, I went to Will and asked him what I should do. I knew in my heart that something had to be done, but I also figured that the last thing anybody needs is some righteous ex-addict telling him to get off drugs. He also knew that in my frustration, I was starting to get angry at John.
“Damned if I know, Waylon,” he replied. “I can’t see as we’ve ever been able to straighten anybody out that didn’t want to do it for themselves.”
Then Will told me the story of a poor black woman, standing by the graveside of the white woman who had employed her. She’d been treated badly, yelled at and abused over many years, and though the woman wondered if her employer “knew that I loved her,” she finally couldn’t take it anymore; she left the grave, mad. That night, as she lay there half-asleep, Jesus came to the foot of her bed. He said to her, “If you just love people that are easy to love, that ain’t no love at all. It’s not hard to love somebody if they’re good to you. Yet if you love one, you’ve got to love them all.”
Will himself understands the practice of what he preaches. While involved in the civil rights struggle, he had a dear friend, Jonathan Daniel, shot by a redneck deputy down in Alabama. Will went to the friend’s bedside and was with him till he died, slow and painfully. Then he went directly to the courthouse, where the deputy was in jail, and ministered to him. That, in my personal church, is a preacher.
He considered race relations, and improving race relations in the South, as his calling, and Will was very active in the civil rights movement, more as an observer, he’ll say, since there were no white leaders. They were some who thought they were, but for Will, that was a black movement, black-led, black-organized. There were certain things he could do, however, as a white man, that a black person could not do, including relating to a lot of hard-nosed people on the other side, including some in the Ku Klux Klan.
He knew Dr. Martin Luther King very well, and was the only white person present at the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta. For Will, that was “not quite as romantic and heroic as it might sound.” It was his “job.” His religious tradition came out of the sixteenth century, where the Baptists’ view of the separation of church and state meant they would not go to war or condone the death penalty, and that human beings were born free and created to be free.
I saw this in him the first time I watched Will perform the marriage service. Johnny Darrell was the groom, and Will started out by saying “There’s a passage in the Scriptures which says that you ‘render unto Caesar’s what is Caesar’s.’” He asked the newly Mr. and Mrs. Darrell for their wedding license, signed it, and tossed it aside somewhat contemptuously.
“As far as the state of Tennessee is concerned,” he said, “you’re married. That’s all that piece of paper is, a legal contract, and like any legal contract, it doesn’t entitle you to very much. It doesn’t teach you how to love one another, and it certainly doesn’t grant you happiness. The only thing it gives you is the right to sue each other.”
I cracked up when he said that, and listened harder when he added, “Marriage is about love, compassion, commitment, and caring. It has nothing to do with legality.”
Will lives out by rural Mount Juliet and does his writing in a small log shack about a ten-minute walk through the fields from his house. I go out there sometimes when I need to be centered, when the questioning that I always do is calling for answers. We’ll sit out in the sculpture garden, where he takes metal junk he picks up from his property and welds it together to form found objects of art, and we’ll talk about this and that.
You’re not supposed to question things in most religions. The church gives you the answer; God talks through them, and not to you. I can’t accept that. My whole nature is one of asking why, and who made me that way? Why would He put us on Earth and give us the ability to reason right from wrong, and then tell us to call him about everything we do?
I think people are put on this Earth to make their life count. That is the payback. To be judged by their accomplishments, and not sitting and shaking and shivering in a front-row pew. When my child does something good, whose chest swells the biggest? That’s my credit, in the achievements, not him praising me and telling me how great I am.
God has duties, too. He brought us here, and He should see to it that we have enough to eat. That we shouldn’t suffer, or war over who gets into the uptown section of Heaven. Religion is a personal, individual thing, and everybody that reads their version of a Bible gets a different interpretation. There’s twenty-eight thousand different faiths, and you can’t tell me that only one of them is right.
The same is true with music. When I came to Nashville, I wanted the bottom, the insistent kick drum. I brought it into my songs, and they said, “You can’t use that rock-and-roll beat. It’s not country.” I said, bullshit, there ain’t nothing rock and roll about it. It’s just a beat. We have beats in all music.
That sort of thou-shalt-not thinking leads to a tribal mentality, dividing and separating and turning brother against brother. If you don’t belong with us, if you won’t join our exclusive sect, then you’re an infidel and you’ll burn in hell. That’s what the church says. Ignorance is no excuse, they’ll threaten you, despite the billions who have never heard of the Bible, or the entire populations that are being killed at this moment over how they worship and pay tribute to their faith. If that’s a way to honor God, then I need to wonder why. All the hair-splitting, the baggage and the trappings, of how many angels can sit on the point of a needle and sex is nasty nasty nasty, what’s it worth?
Those were the question marks that turned me against the Church of Christ, what I rebelled against as a young child looking for reassurance. There was no room for grace; it was all hell-fire and brimstone. I’d gone through enough hell on my knees pickin’ cotton, and living in poverty, without going to church and reliving the despair, or putting it off to the next world. I wanted to hear a message of hope, of respect for other human beings and all of humanity. Human kind.
Religion should be liberating, like music. It should be about deliverance, not worship. Freedom.
Will came out on the road with me a few years ago. I gave him a job, but I never told him what it was. Mostly I liked having him around. After a few days of wondering why he was along, he started cooking for us on the bus. Late at night, we’d talk.
We were going from Greensboro to Tampa when Will turned to me and asked, “Waylon, wha’chu believe?” That’s how he said it; a Southern expression. Chu. It’s almost a greeting, or a serious question, depending on the context.
“Yeah,” I replied, way down in my throat.
If you’re going from Greensboro to Tampa on a “stagecoach,” you know a conversation need not be rushed. We were quiet for a long time. Finally, Will said, “‘Yeah?’ What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Uh-huh,” I answered. The conversation ran aground.
Will thought about that exchange, reflecting on the state of my cast-iron soul, and all he knew of me, and the next day he told me it was one of the most profound affirmations of faith he’d ever heard in his life.
Yeah.
Uh-huh.
I didn’t understand it that well myself. All I was telling him was that I was a believer, whatever that was. There wasn’t much else to say. That I could say.
Over the next
fifteen years I thought about the question he’d asked me.
What is believing? I knew it wasn’t like those television preachers, with their thousand-dollar suits and trimmed mustaches and gold chains, saying you could be saved depending on how much money you donate to their theme park. And I understood that there were things we couldn’t understand, that we had to take on faith, like the love I feel for Jessi, the bond a father feels for his child, or the spirit of music as it touches Heaven.
In my own way I’m a believer
In my own way, right or wrong
I don’t talk too much about it
It’s something I keep working on
I don’t have much to build on
Just a faith that’s never been that strong
I started writing the song in 1993, trying to be as plain with the words as I could. Sometimes poetry obscures the meaning of what it’s trying to say, and I didn’t want to confuse myself. I kept thinking of when Will was invited to speak at a congregation on the border of Harlem, in New York. I don’t know if it was a black church or a white church, but when they asked how they could do something to benefit the community, he looked around at the sumptuous furnishings and fine decorations, and shrugged his shoulders. “You people wanted me to come and talk to you about how you might break down some of the barriers between you and those living across the street. Maybe if you sold this building and spread the proceeds around a little bit, that might help a lot.” They didn’t invite him back; he didn’t tell them what they wanted to hear.
There’s a man there in that building
He’s a holy man they say
He keeps talking about tomorrow
While I keep struggling with today
He preaches hell and fire and brimstone
And heaven seems so far away
It’s not the religion. Being born, it’s between you and God. That’s the one-on-one. For me, your contribution to the world is what you’ll be judged on, come judgment day. It’s something from deep inside of you. Help one another along, and try not to intentionally hurt anybody. We’re here for each other. God loved David’s singing, his harp playing, and maybe, just maybe, He was amused by David’s dogged determination to find his own place in the world. That may be one man’s interpretation, but at least it’s mine.
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