Waylon Jennings

Waylon Jennings

Person / 1937 - 2002 / United States

US country musician

country outlaw country country rock progressive country nashville sound

Biography

Waylon Arnold Jennings was an American country music singer, songwriter, musician, and actor. He is considered one of the pioneers of the outlaw movement in country music.

Source: Wikipedia -- text available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Image via Wikipedia -- Waylon Jennings.

Elsewhere

Analysed songs (10)

Can't You See

Waylon Jennings

A short, obsessive breakup lament built almost entirely around one plea repeated over and over: some accusation aimed at a…

heartbreak escape and flight self-destruction

Clyde

Waylon Jennings

A loose, novelty-style country blues number about a laid-back dog named Clyde who supposedly plays bass and sings the blues on a…

rural leisure comic anthropomorphism stubbornness/inertia

My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys

Waylon Jennings

A meditation on the gap between the mythic cowboy and the man who tried to live inside that myth. The song traces how a…

disillusionment with myth loneliness and rootlessness masculinity and emotional detachment

Never Could Toe the Mark

Waylon Jennings

A plainspoken defense of romantic independence, delivered in Waylon Jennings' outlaw drawl. The narrator explains, without…

romantic independence resistance to conformity outlaw self-mythology

Rebel Soldier

Waylon Jennings

This is a traditional Civil War-era ballad, recorded by Waylon Jennings for a tribute album, in which a soldier addresses his…

war and loss homesickness romantic devotion

The Conversation

Waylon Jennings

Waylon Jennings imagines a barroom conversation with Hank Williams Jr. about his late father, using it as a vehicle to reckon…

musical inheritance/legacy myth-making around dead legends fatherhood and absence

Theme from "the Dukes of Hazzard (Good Ol' Boys)"

Waylon Jennings

This is a theme song that doubles as a character sketch and a wink at its own singer, framing rural outlaws as harmless folk…

rural outlaw mythology folk-hero framing of crime Southern identity and pride

Tonight the Bottle Let Me Down

Waylon Jennings

A drinking song that inverts the usual barroom brag: the narrator's nightly ritual of numbing himself fails for once, leaving…

failed escapism heartbreak alcohol as false friend

Where Corn Don't Grow

Waylon Jennings

A grown narrator recalls the day he told his farmer father he wanted a life away from the land, and revisits his father's quiet,…

generational conflict rural vs. urban life regret and hindsight

Wrong

Waylon Jennings

A country ballad built around a single stinging word used as both title and chorus hook, tracing two failed relationships that…

disillusionment the unreliability of certainty repeated romantic failure