Waylon Jennings was born on June 15, 1937.  He was the first son of William and Lorene Jennings, young sharecroppers in the West Texas town of Littlefield.  His beginnings were humble, straight out of an old country song, with dirt floors and cotton fields.   There was every chance he would become just another grain of sand beneath the wide-open Texas sky.  But he didn't.  Waylon A. Jennings always had a mind of his own.

If any one performer personified the outlaw country movement of the ‘70s, it was Waylon Jennings. Though he had been a professional musician since the late ‘50s, it wasn’t until the ‘70s that Waylon, with his imposing baritione and stripped-down, updated honky tonk, became a superstar. Jennings rejected the conventions of Nashville, refusing to record with the industry’s legions of studio musicians and insisting that his music never resemble the string-laden, pop-inflected sounds that were coming out of Nashville in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Many artists, including Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson, followed Waylon’s anti-Nashville stance and eventually the whole “outlaw” movement -- so-named because of the artists’ ragged, maverick image and their independence from Nashville -- became one of the most significant country forces of the ‘70s, helping the genre adhere to its hardcore honky tonk roots. Jennings didn’t write many songs, but his music -- which combined the grittiest aspects of honky tonk with a rock & roll rhythm and attitude, making the music spare, direct and edgy -- defined hardcore country, and it influenced countless musicians, including members of the new-traditionalist and alternative country subgenres of the ‘80s.

Waylon Jennings died on February 13, 2002 at his home in Arizona.

Submitted by

Dusty Owens
TCM Radio News

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