Outlaw: Waylon, Willie, Kris, and the Renegades of Nashville

by Michael Streissguth

  If the spell of Bill Monroe and Hank Williams hadn’t lured Waylon out of Littlefield, something else was bound to. He was a rambunctious teenager, playing football, chasing girls, and tumbling into every sort of juvenile delinquency. At sixteen, his father gave him a Harmony guitar, onto which he promptly emblazoned his name in white paint. He warbled country and western songs at talent shows and on his local radio station, KVOW. Dropping out of high school in the tenth grade, Waylon married in 1955 and soon parlayed his KVOW spot into a regular disc jockeying job on the station. The marriage faltered, but he stuck with radio.

  As true then as it is today, radio walked hand in hand with the music industry. From his perch at KVOW and then at other nearby stations, Waylon talked up live performances on the air and spun the latest records. His status on radio made him somebody to know and probably was a big reason that grateful promoters and club owners around West Texas hired him to perform.

  Occasionally, he hitchhiked to Lubbock to appear on KDAV’s Sunday Dance Party, which featured local talent and offered a youthful alternative to the living room atmosphere of Grand Ole Opry. Aspiring musicians mostly performed hillbilly music during their few minutes on air, but a lot of them also embraced the wild rockabilly music rushing into West Texas from Memphis, Dallas, and Shreveport. Rising stars Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins had integrated a world that Jim Crow laws couldn’t touch, incorporating elements of black rhythm and blues into their beloved hillbilly music.

  Waylon was a disciple of Presley, as was a quiet Lubbock native named Buddy Holly, whom Waylon met on the Sunday Dance Party in 1954. Waylon and Buddy really got to know each other in 1958 when Waylon went to work for KLLL in Lubbock. Charmed by Waylon’s freewheeling on-air banter, KLLL had hired him to trip up the competition at KDAV. And he didn’t disappoint: Waylon magnetized area listeners, including Holly, who by then was chasing Elvis with his flashy hits “That’ll Be the Day” and “Peggy Sue.”

  Whenever Holly returned to town, he haunted KLLL, chatting with Waylon about life and Lubbock, and Waylon’s career. “He was easy to get along with, easygoing,” said Waylon of his friend in 1973, “and he was a monkey in a lot of ways, a real cutup. We sure did have a lot of fun. He was one of the best people I knew in my life.” Holly nurtured Waylon, magically arranging a one-shot Brunswick Records session for the twenty-one-year-old disc jockey (with King Curtis on saxophone!), buying him clothes, and, in a final act of generosity, welcoming him to his road band in late 1958 after Holly split with the original Crickets.

  Waylon’s only biographer, the late R. Serge Denisoff, pegged the inevitability of their relationship. “They were remarkably similar men,” he wrote. “Both were highly cautious around people; some called them ‘shy.’ They shared a desire to succeed in the record business. Waylon was, perhaps, more flamboyant, but there were enough similarities to cement a close friendship.”

  In early 1959, Waylon famously gave up his seat to J. P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson on the ill-fated airplane that crashed near Mason City, Iowa, and took Richardson’s life as well as those of Holly, Richie Valens, and pilot Roger Peterson. As if losing his mentor was not bad enough, the crash saddled Waylon with heavy guilt, for he had teasingly told Holly that he hoped the plane would go down.

  Gordon Payne, who played guitar for Waylon in the 1970s, recalls quiet nights on the tour bus when the boss’s thoughts drifted back to 1959. “I heard him say, ‘Why me? Why wasn’t I on that plane?’ I said, ‘Well, you weren’t done yet. It wasn’t your time. God had more for you to do than die in the cornfields in Iowa.’ [Waylon replied], ‘Yeah, but I’ve always felt guilty. Here was my buddy dead and I was supposed to be on that plane with him. And I wasn’t. I didn’t want to look at a guitar for a long time.’”

  Recklessness and disillusionment plagued Jennings in the immediate years after Holly’s death. He retreated to radio, bounced around the club circuit in south-central Arizona, and recorded a dead-end session for a small record label. Then his marriage broke up. He might have limped back to Littlefield but for the promising signals in Phoenix, the last stop on the road to Nashville.

  THE INTERURBAN ELECTRIC train service, which ran a line north to Dallas from points south, kept a station in the hamlet of Abbott, but the early years of the Depression depleted the town and by the time Willie Nelson was born there on April 29, 1933, residents had to flag down the engineer if they wanted to ride. Abbott, population two hundred, resembled Waylon’s Littlefield: bereft of opportunities and reliant on the local cotton crops. When cotton prices shriveled up, residents migrated to Dallas.

  Willie’s parents drifted away from his older sister, Bobbie, and him early in his childhood. His father, Ira, a musician in some demand, stayed drunk most of the time, and his mother, Myrle, abandoned her children before Willie turned one, choosing a vagabond’s life that must have both fascinated and repulsed Willie later in life, for he, too, adopted drifting ways though not always at the expense of his children. Ira’s parents, Nancy and Alfred Nelson, whom Willie and Bobbie dubbed Mamma and Daddy, raised them. Mamma taught piano while Daddy farmed and plied his blacksmithing skills.

  In 1940, Daddy died from pneumonia, forcing the family to leave its home for a splintered replacement nearby. Mamma found work in Abbott’s school cafeteria, and everybody took turns picking cotton, hopping on the farm-worker trucks that trundled out to the fields each morning during harvest time. “I didn’t like picking cotton one bit,” Willie told biographer Michael Bane. “I used to stand in the fields and watch the cars go by and think, I want to go with them.”

  But the cotton patch’s omnipresent labor songs redeemed the back-aching experience. He heard black people moaning the blues, Mexicans crooning in Spanish, and whites humming their church hymns. The radio was no less influential. “I remember when we used to sit around and watch the radio. Because it was new in the house,” Nelson told journalist Bill DeYoung in 1994. “There was somethin’ there that had some entertainment comin’ out of it. The first thing that we tuned in was WSM in Nashville, the Grand Ole Opry. That was a regular. . . . I was up late at night a lot, and I’d turn the dial and listen to anything I could really. A lot of boogie and blues, back in the days of Freddie Slack and Ella Mae Morse, and Ray McKinley. And Glenn Miller and those guys.”

  Nelson, Kristofferson, and Jennings learned from the same Grand Ole Opry textbook. But one influence that appears much stronger in Nelson’s childhood than in Kris’s and Waylon’s was the church. Kris rarely attended, and Waylon detested his parents’ Church of Christ, whose rejection of instrumental accompaniment rendered the music indigestible.

  Willie, on the other hand, waded deep into sacred song. “We went to a very small Methodist church,” his sister, Bobbie, told Texas Monthly in 2008. “My grandmother was there every time the doors opened. Willie and I were practically born in that church. The first music we learned was from the hymnbooks. Willie had such a beautiful voice. I’d play piano, and he would sing. Then he learned to play guitar, and my grandmother taught us to play together, showing Willie the chords on the guitar and me on the piano and telling us when to change chords. That’s the way we learned to play together. ‘Great Speckled Bird’ was the first one she ever taught us.” When church let out, Willie and Bobbie scampered to the county seat of Hillsboro, where gospel singing conventions shook the walls of the town’s courtroom, of all places. Hymns such as “I’ll Fly Away,” “In the Garden,” and “Amazing Grace” permeated him.

  The eleven-year-old also embraced Frank Sinatra, who modeled the breath control that Mamma talked about when she talked about singing. In years to come, he wielded that breath control to great effect, singing behind the beat and then catching up in a way that surprised and delighted listeners. Indeed, his hard Texas twang would test the uninitiated, but the masses admired how it danced and flirted with the rhythm.

  Willie graduated from high school in 1950, and he joined the air force for a stint that he would always dismiss, according t
o biographer Michael Bane, “with as few words as possible.” He didn’t last a year, receiving a medical discharge linked to a back problem. Like Waylon Jennings, Willie spent the first years of the new decade negotiating a young marriage, working in radio, and taking practical jobs that paid the bills when radio jobs were scarce. He also wrote songs and lugged his guitar in and out of various bands that melded toe-tapping western swing with the less polished, though more emotionally urgent, hillbilly sounds.

  For the rest of the decade, Willie serenaded barroom crowds and sold his songs to any willing buyer, lighting out from his home state from time to time when fields elsewhere appeared greener, but frequently returning to the clubs and the bandleaders and the big Texas skies that were always glad to see him. These were the years in which Willie Nelson created his very own Texas, its borders defined not by rivers and surveyor’s lines but by roads between radio stations that invited him to perform on their airwaves and the clubs whose dancers craved rhythm. It would be his refuge in the frustrating Nashville years ahead of him.

  WILLIE’S FRUSTRATION IN Nashville alternately hinged on his anemic record sales and RCA’s tight reins on his recording sessions. However, Waylon’s early Nashville years shaped up pleasingly. But only pleasingly. Chet threw plenty of Waylon’s records against the wall and more than a few stuck. And if a fan sniffed at Waylon’s straight country songs, he could always choose something else among the rockers, folk ballads, and pop-influenced baubles that populated his discography.

  In stark contrast to the assertive vocal style that marked his outlaw recordings of the 1970s, Waylon in the mid-1960s was controlled, even gentle, which helped put over the polite sound that defined much of his repertoire, but not his true style. Chet continued to work the contemporary folk angle with Waylon, as he had with RCA’s John D. Loudermilk, Bobby Bare, Eddy Arnold, and George Hamilton IV, although the songs shied away from the protest themes of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, hewing more to the tales of rambling and gambling that cropped up in Gordon Lightfoot’s “For Lovin’ Me,” which Waylon recorded in 1966.

  Apparently, Chet also envisioned Jim Reeves as he devised Waylon’s path in the studio. Reeves, along with Patsy Cline, who was produced by Owen Bradley, became the embodiment of the Nashville Sound when his sweet-sounding “Four Walls” climbed the country and pop charts in 1957, around the same time that Cline was surging with “Walkin’ After Midnight.” Reeves and Cline proved that easy-listening music produced in Nashville could compete commercially with Elvis Presley, Pat Boone, and Debbie Reynolds, and both singers enjoyed even bigger hits—Reeves with “He’ll Have to Go” in 1960 and Cline with “I Fall to Pieces” in 1961—but they died soon after in separate airplane crashes.

  Waylon (left) strums a twelve-string guitar while Chet (right) looks on in the RCA Studio.

  Courtesy of Sony Music Entertainment

  When Chet learned of Reeves’s death in 1964, he broke down in the RCA offices while session musicians looked on. In time, the realization that he’d lost not only a friend but the goose that laid the golden egg moved him to fill the void. In a conversation in the mid-1990s, Chet refused to speculate about finding a replacement for Jim Reeves, but he may have nominated Waylon Jennings. Of course, the famous country balladeer Eddy Arnold proved to be the heir to Reeves’s audience, but at the time of Waylon’s first sessions Arnold had yet to score his breakthrough country-politan hits “What’s He Doin’ in My World” and “Make the World Go Away.” So Waylon’s early hits found him reaching for distant places in his range on songs such as Harlan Howard’s “Another Bridge to Burn,” Don Bowman’s “Now Everybody Knows,” and Waylon’s own arrangement of “I’m a Man of Constant Sorrow,” all of them drenched in background vocals as if they were Jim Reeves records.

  And Waylon clearly enunciated his lyrics, again like Reeves, even on his cover of Johnny Cash’s “You Beat All I Ever Saw,” a far cry from the boozy delivery first proffered by the Man in Black in 1966. One of the early hit singles, “Anita, You’re Dreaming,” cowritten by Waylon and Bowman, found Waylon in a serious and cautious vocal mode that remembered Reeves, only this time with traces of Marty Robbins, whose famous Latin sound rose up on Waylon’s albums more than a few times in the 1960s.

  After two years of emulating Reeves and Robbins, not to mention the likes of Buck Owens and George Jones, Waylon finally showed signs of asserting his own style on 1967’s album Love of the Common People, which boldly featured Mel Tillis’s “Ruby Don’t Take Your Love to Town,” a rare commentary on the personal toll of war, and Lennon and McCartney’s “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away.” Waylon’s vocals broke out of the safe zone, creating drama or leering playfulness as the lyrics demanded. Waylon hewed particularly toward the title track, “Love of the Common People,” another smooth folk-styled ballad, first recorded by the Four Preps in early 1966. “It had it all,” wrote Waylon, “the horn stabs that I loved so much, an insistent piano figure that lodged in your brain, and four (count ’em) key modulations upward, so that the song never stopped getting you higher. The lyrics were especially meaningful, for a poor country boy who had worked his way up from ‘a dream you could cling to’ to a spot in the working world of country music.”

  Billy Ray Reynolds in a Nashville studio.

  Courtesy of Billy Ray and Jesse Reynolds

  It was also meaningful to American Indians, who demanded the song whenever Waylon galloped into the New Mexico reservations to perform. “He was like an idol out there, to the Navajos especially,” says guitarist Billy Ray Reynolds, who toured with Waylon. “They’d come in there loaded down in the back of a pickup truck. They wouldn’t go in the building until they saw Waylon. We could set up all we wanted to; they wouldn’t go in the building and pay the money until they saw Waylon’s face. The minute they saw Waylon, you couldn’t move in the building.” The men would slip outside the side door to drink, says Reynolds, and then circle back to the entrance and pay again for admission. “They’d come in and grab the first girl they could, and they did that strange Indian dance that they did and they’d go right through the crowd, almost knocking people over to get up to the stage. And they’d just slap on the stage and say, ‘Waylon, “Love of the Common People.” ’ We’d do that song about twenty times a night.”

  WILLIE NELSON MAY have been a likelier replacement for Jim Reeves. He mastered the intimate delivery like nobody else, including Waylon Jennings. Drawing perhaps from the big-band vocalists who pierced the airwaves of his childhood or his radio jobs that demanded crystal-clear patter, Nelson enunciated everything and projected necessary emotions as if he were turning on a flashlight. He made it sound so easy, so cool, darting in and out of the rhythm as if playing a game of hide-and-seek.

  But initially Chet played it strictly country with Willie, pairing him with the genre’s beloved standards and Willie’s own classic compositions and releasing a live album recorded at Panther Hall in Dallas, which caught Willie in his raucous element, the Texas dance emporium. Interestingly, Chet also released a cut from the concert so disturbing that it would surely dispel any possibility of Willie fitting in among the sweet Nashville Sound. “I Just Can’t Let You Say Goodbye” recounts a strangling murder in the first-person, in real time, recalling the cruel murder ballads “Knoxville Girl” and “Cocaine Blues”—the likes of which had fallen out of favor in country music by the 1960s. Predictably, Willie’s drama receded after two weeks on the singles charts.

  Willie onstage in the 1960s.

  Courtesy of Sony Music Entertainment

  In 1966, Chet put aside murder ballads and reached for the country-politan sound on the album Make Way for Willie Nelson. It featured only one Nelson original, “One in a Row,” a dramatic heartbreak ballad that danced easily with the pop standards “Have I Stayed Away Too Long” and “What Now My Love,” which also appeared on the album. Willie also sampled from the catalog of Cy Coben, a New Jersey songwriter who’d been coming to Nashville since the 1940s and pitching song
s to Steve Sholes and then Chet. His whip-sharp lyrics brought a taste of Tin Pan Alley to Nashville, and when Willie tried on his “Make Way for a Better Man” it left no questions about his versatility: he could breezily deliver swinging pop songs and punch out the country stuff. In future years, Willie would complain that Nashville producers buried his voice in a mix of strings and brass instruments during the 1960s, but on Make Way for Willie Nelson nothing could have been further from the truth: Willie’s voice pulsed above the mix, very urbane, careering among his lyrics like a Cadillac on a smooth and curving highway.

  And yet the album sold little, raising a thousand questions. Why couldn’t the golden songwriter with the more than pleasing vocals float to the top? Were the high forehead and the spiderweb wrinkles around his eyes liabilities? Or did his conservative dress, which communicated insurance sales and car dealerships, repulse the audience? Folks in the industry insisted that he deserved the success of Porter Wagoner and Roger Miller but admitted that his lyrics were too complex for the market. Willie complained about lack of promotion. And he resented the handicap of recording without his road band. “I just didn’t feel comfortable in that kinda situation. You’d walk into the studio and they’d put six guys behind you who’d never seen your music before, and it’s impossible to get the feel of it in a three-hour session. That was true for me, at least.”

  Willie also charged that he was kept around RCA so his stable mates could pillage his poor-selling albums for material. That may have been true, but the releases suggest that RCA and Chet Atkins respected Willie’s artistry. Indeed, his lyrics oozed complexity, standing a sure step above the standard fare churning in the Nashville barrel. However, by hauling in the best of the arrangers—such as conservatory-trained Bill Walker, who embroidered a rich sound, Chet seemed to be giving Willie’s gifts their appropriate showcase. Modern lyrics required modern embellishments, so here and there appeared a lonely violin, a moody electric guitar, even a sitar.