Waylon Jennings

Country music singer-songwriter Waylon Jennings lived a life straight out of a classic country song. With a baritone growl for a voice and a musical style that blended folk lyrics, rock rhythms, and honky-tonk-style instrumentation, Jennings’s songs reflected the highs and lows of life on the road. In the 1950s he was mentored by pioneering rocker Buddy Holly, and he narrowly missed ending up a casualty of the same plane crash that killed Holly and two other young rockers in 1959, inspiring the expression “The Day the Music Died.” In the 1960s Jennings spent years trying to fit into the mainstream Nashville music scene before spearheading the outlaw music movement with Willie Nelson. Their efforts transformed country music in the 1970s, and years after his death Jennings’s vocal and musical style continued to influence new generations of country artists.

West Texas childhood

Jennings was born on June 15, 1937, in Littlefield, a small town in West Texas that he once described to talk-show host David Letterman as being “the suburbs of a cotton patch.” The eldest child of William and Lorene (née Shipley) Jennings, he was named Wayland, meaning “land by the highway.” But, after learning of a school in Texas named Wayland Baptist College (now Wayland Baptist University), his mother began calling him Waylon. As Jennings later explained in his autobiography, his family was not Baptist but “solidly Church of Christ.” The family’s church frowned upon musical accompaniment during worship, but the family enjoyed listening to the Grand Ole Opry on the radio at home. Jennings’s father, who held various jobs, including farm laborer and truck driver, was an amateur musician who played harmonica and guitar.

Jennings worked in cotton fields as a child. He began learning guitar at a young age, hoping it would be his way out of Littlefield. When he was 14, he started working as a disc jockey for a local radio station, by which time he had been performing around town. Two years later Jennings dropped out of high school and quit picking cotton. He married his first wife, Maxine Lawrence, when he was 18. About this time he began playing gigs in Lubbock, Texas, where he got a job at a radio station.

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Buddy Holly and “The Day the Music Died”

In Lubbock, Jennings befriended Buddy Holly, a local rock-and-roll singer-songwriter whose star was on the rise. Holly produced Jennings’s first record, a Cajun song called “Jole Blon” (1958), and recruited Jennings as a bass player for a series of gigs across the Midwest called the “Winter Dance Party of 1959.” The tour also featured young rockers Ritchie Valens and J.P. Richardson, known to rock-and-roll fans as the Big Bopper.

On February 3, 1959, the musicians were to play a gig in Moorhead, Minnesota. Shortly after their previous night’s show in Clear Lake, Iowa, Jennings gave up his seat on the small plane that Holly had chartered. Richardson, who was feeling ill, could not tolerate another night traveling on the group’s unheated tour bus and had begged to take his place. As Jennings recounted many years later, before the plane’s departure, he and Holly traded banter. Holly joked, “I hope your damned bus freezes up again.” In return, Jennings quipped, “I hope your ol’ plane crashes.” A few minutes after takeoff, the plane went down, killing Holly, Richardson, and Valens.

(Read Britannica’s article on “The Day the Music Died.”)

Nashville years

For years Jennings was haunted by the crash and his last conversation with Holly. He struggled to find his career footing, but he eventually secured a gig at a nightclub in Scottsdale, Arizona, that launched him on the road to success. He recorded his first album, Waylon Jennings at JD’s (1964), and caught the ear of Nashville performer Bobby Bare, who spread the word of Jennings’s talent to country musician and RCA record executive Chet Atkins. Jennings signed a contract with RCA and moved to Nashville, where he became roommates with singer-songwriter Johnny Cash. (In his autobiography, Jennings described their arrangement as “like a sitcom; we were the original Odd Couple. I was supposed to clean up, and John was the one doing the cooking.”)

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Jennings found some commercial success, scoring top 10 hits with songs such as “Only Daddy That’ll Walk the Line” (1968). In 1969 he earned a Grammy Award for his collaboration with the Kimberlys on a country version of the song “MacArthur Park.” That same year he married his fourth wife, singer Jessi Colter, with whom he recorded a Grammy-nominated cover of Elvis Presley’s “Suspicious Minds” (1970).

Yet he chafed under what he considered to be Nashville’s formulaic country sound, and he rebelled by diversifying his music. He hired jazz musician Miles Davis’s manager as his own, booked gigs in rock venues such as Max’s Kansas City in New York City, and began working with new songwriters such as Kris Kristofferson, whose songs helped change the direction of country music in the 1970s. What’s more, Jennings renegotiated his label’s contract to gain full artistic control over his records and insisted on working with his own band in the production studio instead of with session musicians.

Jennings’s most important collaboration was with singer-songwriter Willie Nelson, a fellow misfit in the mainstream country milieu. They began recording songs that foretold of a shake-up in country music, including “Good Hearted Woman” (1971).

Outlaw music

In 1973 Jennings released two seminal albums, Lonesome, On’ry and Mean and Honky Tonk Heroes, unveiling a sound driven by bass guitar and lyrics with a defiant honky-tonk sensibility. The following year he was rewarded for his risk-taking when he achieved his first number one single, “This Time.” More chart-toppers followed, including “I’m a Ramblin’ Man” (1974) and “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way” (1975). The latter song took the country industry to task by lamenting that one of the genre’s greatest heroes, singer-songwriter Hank Williams (who had died in 1953), would not be welcome on the contemporary Nashville scene. Jennings’s lyrics summed up the concerns and aim of what was now being called outlaw music:

Lord, it’s the same old tune, fiddle and guitar
Where do we take it from here?
Rhinestone suits and new shiny cars
It’s been the same way for years
We need to change

In 1975 Jennings won the Country Music Association (CMA) Award for male vocalist of the year. But he was cynical about his sudden acceptance by the industry. In his autobiography, he wrote, “I knew that block voting and mass trading between the big [record] companies—we’ll give you two hundred votes for your artist if you give your four hundred votes to our writer—probably had more to do with [my winning] than anything else.”

The following year, Jennings, Nelson, Colter, and singer Tompall Glaser released Wanted! The Outlaws, a compilation of their previously released songs. An astounding crossover success, it reached the Top 10 on the pop album chart and became the first certified million-selling album in country music. It included a re-release of “Good Hearted Woman,” which hit number one on the country chart in 1976 and won the CMA Award for single of the year. Nelson and Jennings were named duo of the year at the CMA Awards presentation, and Wanted! The Outlaws won the award for album of the year. Two years later, Jennings and Nelson picked up a Grammy for their duet “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.”

Outlaw music made Jennings a country superstar. He racked up 16 number one hits and 11 number one albums on the Billboard country charts. But songs such as “I’ve Always Been Crazy” (1978), “Don’t You Think This Outlaw Bit’s Done Got Out of Hand” (1978), and “I Ain’t Living Long Like This” (1979) reflected the toll that success and touring could take on family and health. Indeed, Jennings spent years using amphetamines and, later, cocaine. In an interview with Spin in 1988 (four years after he achieved sobriety), he estimated that he was spending $1,500 a day on cocaine by the time he decided to quit. He also was concerned about his relationships with Colter and their young son, Shooter, telling Spin, “I thought, I want to see [Shooter] grow up. And I really had no intentions of quitting until I did that, until my mind cleared up and I saw what I was doing, that I was killing people around me.” Wanting to serve as a better role model for Shooter, Jennings earned his high-school equivalency in 1989.

The Highwaymen, The Dukes of Hazzard, and “We Are the World”

In the 1980s Jennings’s solo music output slowed, but he found success as one of the Highwaymen, a supergroup that included Nelson, Kristofferson, and Cash. They released three studio albums and scored a major hit with the song “Highwayman,” which was nominated for a Grammy in 1985.

Jennings cemented his legacy in pop culture history by writing and recording the theme song for the TV show The Dukes of Hazzard (1979–85). In 1985 he was invited to sing on “We Are the World,” a star-studded charity single to benefit famine relief in Ethiopia. Jennings sang in the chorus for the song, though he walked out during its recording (which occurred late at night after that year’s American Music Awards ceremony), peeved by a drawn-out argument between Stevie Wonder and other performers about whether the chorus should sing some lyrics in Swahili. (Jennings’s infamous walkout was captured in the 2024 Netflix documentary The Greatest Night in Pop.)

Other projects

Jennings occasionally acted, including in the TV movie Stagecoach (1986) and the film Maverick (1994). He published his autobiography, Waylon, written with Lenny Kaye, in 1996. Though he stopped touring in the late 1990s, he continued to play occasional concerts and record music.

Death and legacy

Jennings was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2001. Only a few months later he died of complications from diabetes. In 2015 several generations of country artists came together for a tribute concert in Austin, Texas, celebrating Jennings’s music and legacy. Performers included his widow, Jessi Colter, and friends Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, and Bobby Bare. Representing the new generation were Sturgill Simpson, Kacey Musgraves, Lee Ann Womack, Alison Krauss, Toby Keith, and Jennings’s youngest son, Shooter Jennings, who has forged his own music career. The event was released as an album and a documentary, Outlaw: Celebrating the Music of Waylon Jennings (2017).

Colter and Terry Jennings, his eldest child with Maxine Lawrence, each published a memoir of Jennings. His impact on country music is discussed in the books Outlaw: Waylon, Willie, Kris, and the Renegades of Nashville (2013) by Michael Streissguth and Willie, Waylon, and the Boys: How Nashville Outsiders Changed Country Music Forever (2024) by Brian Fairbanks.