It had no relationship to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, but four country artists benefited from the outsider implication in the album title Wanted! The Outlaws.
Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Jessi Colter and Tompall Glaser rode the Outlaws album to No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Country Albums 50 years ago, on the chart dated Feb. 28, 1976, in one of the genre’s most misunderstood branding efforts. The misinterpretations are part of what made it successful.
The “outlaw” brand — which would also apply to fellow rebels David Allan Coe, Johnny Paycheck, Jerry Jeff Walker and Kris Kristofferson among others in that era — was about breaking rules in the music industry and refusing to bend to convention. Still, the fact that many of its proponents did spend some time in the pokey or get investigated for criminal activities only added to the mystique around them. The outlaw sound was tough, and if those sonics bled over into perceptions of the artists’ personal lives, well… it definitely made them attractive to a certain audience.
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“It changed the course of country music,” says Ronnie Dunn, who — at age 22 — was in his formative years as a musician when the Outlaws album arrived. “It was probably the most significant wave in 50 years. From my perspective, it turned everything around.”
Country music in the early- and mid-1970s was heavily dominated by sweetened singles, loaded with string sections that somehow made the adult themes of the day — drinkin’, cheatin’ and heartbreak — a little easier to take alongside the genre’s love songs while listening to the radio on the way to work. But the artists who stood up to the system injected some of the rawness, the energy and the brashness of rock into their brand of country.
“That movement developed an attitude that country had never had before,” notes Brothers Osborne guitarist John Osborne. “It went from being kind of like the wholesome music for Mom and Dad to, you know, the outsiders have a chance to listen to this genre.”
Wanted! The Outlaws spent six weeks at No. 1 on Top Country Albums and became the first country album certified platinum by the Recording Industry of America. And it arguably created a niche for itself that has never been matched. There have certainly been other successful multi-artist compilations that documented a certain sound, including The Anthology of Folk Music, the American Graffiti soundtrack and the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack. But rarely, if ever, has a compilation documented a movement while it was happening, thus raising the profile and understanding of that format.
“Then [the genre] just goes to a whole ‘nother level after it comes out,” says filmmaker Eric Geadelmann, whose documentary They Called Us Outlaws premieres March 15 at the SXSW Film & TV Festival in Austin.
The outlaw subgenre emerged in Texas, a state known for its diverse musical heritage. Rock, country, western swing, folk, R&B and various strands of Mexicali music blended into different sounds that all found an audience in the state’s healthy club scene. Those venues are ideal outlets for raw, hardened music, and they mostly draw under-35 demographics. In those conditions, young Texan adults developed a taste for the fusions they were hearing. Thus, Jennings and Nelson were famously characterized as musicians who brought the hippies, the college students and the ranchers together. They also provided a natural space for people who straddled those lifestyles.
“I wouldn’t get my ass kicked as much, standing in cow pastures with guys that used to kick my ass, [because we were] watching the same bands,” remembers Steve Earle, who launches a new tour, “Steve Earle: Fifty One Years of Songs and Stories,” Feb. 27 at New York City’s Gramercy Theatre. “I was always a guy with long hair and cowboy boots, and that was sometimes an issue.”
Jennings, signed at the time to RCA, famously battled the label over its recording policies. The company demanded that its artists record in its facilities, RCA Studio A and Studio B, using tried-and-true studio musicians who routinely knocked out an efficient three or four songs per three-hour session. Jennings wanted to record elsewhere, away from the watchful eyes of the RCA brass, and he wanted to pick his own material, using the musicians who would be charged with playing the songs in concert.
“All he wanted to do was to include his road musicians in his music and the sound that he had imprinted,” Colter says.
She had been married to rock guitarist Duane Eddy prior to Jennings and had taken for granted that every artist had the kind of freedom that Eddy enjoyed in making his albums.
“He could decide who he wanted to produce, who he wanted to [play] on it, and I couldn’t figure out what they were doing here,” she says. “It was just strange. Waylon… was just hoping to make a change.”
Jennings said as much — “We need a change” — in the lyrics of “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way,” a No. 1 single in November 1975. That was a big year for their brand of music. Colter’s “I’m Not Lisa” occupied the summit six months prior, on May 24; and Nelson captivated listeners with the austere production of his concept album Red Headed Stranger, which yielded his breakthrough “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.”
RCA had previously recorded music in the vault from each of those acts, and division chief Jerry Bradley was convinced that if they could position the music as a movement, it would raise Jennings’ sales. Hazel Smith, who ran Glaser’s office, had coined the phrase “outlaws,” and Bradley decided to use it as a positioning statement in the album title. He invited Guy Clark and Bill Joe Shaver to participate; Clark declined, and Shaver’s wife, Brenda, told Jennings she wasn’t allowing her husband to be on it.
“Brenda was in the other room, overheard it, came running in and ran Waylon out,” Geadelmann says. “[She] said, ‘No, he ain’t gonna be on any outlaw thing’ because he’d been in jail and had all kinds of issues going on, and she was trying to straighten his ass out.”
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Since Wanted! The Outlaws was a marketing construct, rather than a package created by a single artist chasing the muse, it didn’t entirely mirror the creative intent that Jennings and his compadres fought to achieve. But it did capture the sonic spirit, and it became a significant introduction to this edgy version of country for consumers who hadn’t put it all together yet.
“I got a hold of a very early copy of it and proceeded to wear it out,” says Earle, who was signed to a Nashville publishing company at the time.
He connected with it in spite of its corporate-driven foundation.
“I knew it was a compilation, and I knew what the motives were for the people that put it together,” he says. “I don’t think we, who were there in [the business in] that moment, saw it the same way everybody else did, but then it becomes a big hit, and we understood why.”
It surpassed RCA’s wildest dreams behind the Jennings & Nelson single “Good Hearted Woman,” fully organizing the raw side of country as its own separate subgenre.
“I was just as surprised as anybody else,” Bradley said during an interview for They Called Us Outlaws. “But I guaran-damn-tee you, the more you heard it on the radio, the more you liked it.”
Earle, with his gruff “Guitar Town,” revived the outlaw vibe in the next generation of country acts, but he was hardly alone at carrying the flame forward. Jamey Johnson, Jason Aldean and Eric Church all emerged in the 21st century’s first decade as self-styled artists making music that cut against the grain.
Other modern-day outlaws include Luke Combs, Zach Bryan, Corey Kent, Red Clay Strays, Stephen Wilson Jr. and Miranda Lambert, not to mention most of the Texas red-dirt artists and the country-centric acts that are classified as Americana.
To be certain, not everyone fully understands the artistic point of the “outlaw” brand. It’s easy to adhere to the surface connotations, rather than the creative motivations it represents, as Earle is frequently reminded in his role as the host of Hard Core Troubadour on SiriusXM’s Outlaw Channel.
“There’s times when I get a little irritated with people that I run into, you know, artists that we play that their interpretation of outlaw country is drugs and alcohol,” he says.
Then again, other creatives — such as songwriter Laura Veltz (“The Bones,” “Speechless”) — are completely on board with its tenets.
“I consider outlaws to be people who take risks and they’re unbothered when someone is bothered by them,” she says. “That’s an outlaw. I’m that through and through. I don’t know if that’s what I write, but it’s certainly who I am.”
And Geadelmann’s teen-aged daughter understood the brand so well that she announced that if They Called Us Outlaws didn’t feature current acts Tyler Childers and Parker McCollum, she would not be watching it. Or telling her friends about it. Both artists are indeed in the film, carrying on the vision of the original outlaws, who didn’t necessarily have a name for what they were doing until Wanted! The Outlaws came along. “At the end of the day, it’s what it’s all about,” Geadelmann says. “It’s not a fuck-you to the industry. It’s an exploration of what it means to be an artist and follow what’s inside yourself.”
