The Ramblin' Man - Waylon Jennings (1974)
“Outlaw country” is the story of country artists in the 70s and onward who tried to establish themselves outside of the big-label assembly-line-style of the Nashville hit factory and its well-groomed image and sound.
Jennings started out as a rockabilly sort of guy, learning from and briefly playing with Buddy Holly himself. You probably know the story: a fluke of fate caused him to give up his seat on the plane that would go down, killing Holly and everyone on board. Plane crashes are a motif in country music lore as prevalent as dumbass prophecies in fantasy books.
He’d spent most of the previous decade laboring in–and chafing against–the polite country establishment. In 1972 Jennings got more artistic control of his music, and shortly thereafter got this gem on tape.
The stripped down, more rock-oriented electric sound wasn’t new: Cash and Haggard had been doing such things for years by then. But like a lot of his fellow-traveller outlaw types, he was equally at home in the singer-songwriter and roots rocker roles. He loved a good hook and didn’t settle for the cheesy wordplay that was stock-in-trade for country songs.
His history of hard living might also have given him a little more of the edge that psychedelics and weed bring to his music, as opposed to the more straight-hard-drinking classic country singer.
The real brilliance here isn’t just what’s new, but also what he’s kept in the mix: there’s still plenty to connect this album to the country tradition of heartbreak and nostalgia, like on Cloudy Days. But that’s followed by the organ-powered Allman Brothers cover of Midnight Rider, and you can see in that one turnaround that this is not a collection of trad country boilerplate.
