Waylon Jennings was always destined to be a pioneer of outlaw country. A gifted musician, who mastered the guitar early on and won childhood talent shows with his singing, by the time he entered his mid-teens, it was apparent that his life wouldn’t be normal.
Although it appeared a great sleight in the moment, he was actually afforded a substantial nudge in the right direction, when after several disciplinary issues, he was persuaded by the High School superintendent to drop out at 16. Being out on his own saw him take up an array of jobs, and crucially, gave him the opportunity to dive headfirst into music.
There’s no doubt that the most important part of this formative chapter was when Jennings met rock ‘n’ roll pioneer and fast friend Buddy Holly in a Lubbock restaurant, helping him learn the sound he would later fuse country with. However, another crucial experience came in 1956 when he started working as a DJ at local radio station KVOM in his hometown of Littlefield, Texas.
While he played lots of the white-dominated country music, he also played bits of the flourishing rock ‘n’ roll, which stoked an angry reaction from the locals due to many of its primary drivers being Black.
Although Littlefield wasn’t segregated like much of the Lone Star State and the South, playing music by Black artists was still beyond the pale for most of its white denizens. Demonstrating his refusal to give into the standards of the day, and his outlaw country spirit, Jennings recalled in his autobiography, Waylon, that he had asked his dad about mixing the sounds from both sides of the racial divide: “What if they mixed black music with the white music? Country music and blues?” Presciently, his dad told him, “That might be something”. Accordingly, he would also travel to the Black side of Littlefield to watch blues and early rock artists, and was captivated.
Recalling how he got fired from KVOM for playing the effervescent rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Little Richard, Jennings wrote: “On my radio show we’d do some of the rock ‘n’ roll things: Chuck Berry, Ray Charles, Little Richard. Every time I played a Little Richard record the owner would come all the way back to the station from home. He wouldn’t even call. He’d just cuss me, until one night I played two of them in a row and he fired me.”
Years later in 1983, after Jennings had brilliantly fused country and rock, and pioneered the outlaw country sound, he would pay homage to Little Richard, by covering his masterpiece ‘Lucille’. It went to number one on the country chart, and showed just how far music and culture had come since his days of defiantly spinning the sounds of an America that had always existed, and was fighting for equity.
Editors’ Picks
- 1950s Music
- Black Music Influence
- Buddy Holly
- Country Rock
- Little Richard
- Music History
- Outlaw Country
- Radio Rebellion
- Texas Music
- Waylon Jennings
