#hazel smith

The problem with the “Outlaw country” tag is that’s almost totally a marketing deal. Country music in the late ‘60s/early ’70s had gone through a lot of changes, but country music’s always changing. The honky tonk of Ray Price and Webb Pierce is a quantum leap from George Morgan.

The specific changes in country music of the Outlaw era, though, came as they often do from rock music. Like Elvis and Jerry Lee influenced the faster, more swinging sound of the late ‘50s, ’60s country was heavily influenced by songwriters like Bob Dylan, Mickey Newbury, and Kris Kristofferson, as well as the band dynamic of groups like the Beatles, the Stones, and the Byrds.

The term itself originates mainly because of the music coming from Tompall Glaser’s studio, Hillbilly Central. Formerly part of a brother harmony group that back Marty Robbins, Glaser’s studio became ground zero for musicians who liked to stretch themselves outside the Nashville limitations, like Waylon, Kinky Friedman, and Steve Young. Plus cocaine. Lots and lots of cocaine.

Another big issue was creative control. Willie Nelson had almost given up music by the early ’70s until Atlantic’s Jerry Wexler lured him back for two records and told him to go nuts. That gave us Shotgun Willie and Phases & Stages, the latter a concept album. Waylon Jennings was his label’s highest-selling artist, including any and all rock acts, but he was getting less than he felt was his fair share.

So around the same time the Hillbilly Central thing was going on, Waylon and Willie both renegotiated their contracts and demanded more control and more money. This basically led to Lonesome, Or’nry & Mean by Waylon and Red-Headed Stranger by Willie. Neither was supposed to sell, went the label, but both blew the doors off the sales charts.

Someone doing a story on Hillbilly Central asked publicist Hazel Smith what they called the music coming out of the studio. On the spur of the moment, she called it “outlaw country,” influenced somewhat by Waylon’s 1972 record Ladies Love Outlaws, itself a fairly standard Nashville product, ironically enough.

In 1976, RCA producer Jerry Bradley got the bright idea to put together a collection of previously released songs by Willie, Waylon, Tompall, and Waylon’s wife Jessi Colter, and called it Wanted: The Outlaws. The rest, as they say, is history. The record went platinum, the first country album to do so, selling a million copies before the end of the year and topping the charts for six weeks.

This opened the door for a lot of people to make a buck by calling themselves “outlaw country.” David Allen Coe had put out a couple of blues-rock records that were marketed towards bikers before becoming “The Mysterious Rhinestone Cowboy” and making a string of really groundbreaking stuff. Johnny Paycheck had been a Nashville product for almost a decade and then grew a beard, had a monster smash with the Coe-penned “Take This Job & Shove It,” and became rowdier than anyone thought a country singer could be. For a lot of other folks, like Bobby Bare, it was an excuse to ditch the clean-cut look Nashville demanded, literally letting their hair grow out, and start making records they wanted to make because there was money to be made in them. Hank Williams Jr. slipped out from under his momma’s thumb and began his domination of country music after falling off a mountain.

Amusingly, the musicians on the seminal Outlaw album really didn’t care much for the whole tag. Willie and Waylon both have expressed how people made too big a deal of it and how it distracted from the actual music they were making, especially when their “rebellion” had more to do with getting paid than “destroying Nashville.” It’s telling both became iconic figures in country music, with Willie, in particular, making records that were as far from the honk tonk as one could get. It also brought too much attention to their lifestyle, and especially, their drug use. The bust sang about in “Don’t You Think This Outlaw Bit Has Done Got Out Of Hand” lowered water levels in Nashville, Waylon later joked, because they’d flushed so many drugs before the cops got there.

As for George Jones, he is country music and if “Outlaw country” is part of that, he’s “Outlaw country.” He’s also a guy whose career has come back from the dead more than once because some Nashville producer saw a way to make money out of that incredible voice adjusting to the styles and fashions of the time. Like I said earlier, country music is always evolving and there will always be room for straight product and stuff that pushes the boundaries.