The Rise of “Outlaw Country” (Part 3, Jul 23, 2023)
Willie Nelson’s and Waylon Jennings’ move back to Texas and their subsequent influence and collaboration with a number of other younger Texas artists had spawned record crowds at their gigs and began to attract new fans to country music—many who were originally rock aficionados who were turned off by the rise of the new “disco” sound of Pop music—but by the mid-1970s the new music, other than Jennings’ “Dreamin’ My Dreams” album, had not yet had a great effect on the acts’ record sales or getting play on country radio. The latter effect was particularly damaging for these new “Progressive Country” artists. Radio airplay is what drove record sales in country music and the establishment in Nashville and their “Nashville Sound” had country radio locked down tightly. However, two new albums were about to change the equation.
Willie Nelson, like Waylon Jennings had done with RCA, had negotiated the rights of artistic control over his albums with Atlantic Records in 1973 and while the records had not sold well, Nelson, as well as Jennings and the mild success of Michael Martin Murphey’s “Geronimo’s Cadillac,” was charting brand new ground that began to gain the attention of record executives. However, Nelson was one of the few even token successes that Atlantic Records’ Nashville operation had, and the larger corporate executives decided to end their country division in 1975. That left Nelson without a label, but that turned out to be fortuitous for the crooner. Warner Bros. was looking to make a huge splash in country music, and they offered Nelson a lucrative contract. Nelson, in turn, asked for artistic control and Warner Brothers balked, so he said no. Shortly after he had turned Warner down, Nelson received a visitor to his Austin home/office from Columbia Records. Columbia was a major record label who had had large success in the country market, namely through its long-time collaboration with Johnny Cash. However, Cash’s sales and popularity had begun to lag in the early- to mid-1970s and they were looking to find the “next big thing,” and that led them to Willie Nelson. Columbia agreed to what Warner Brothers did not, giving Nelson complete artistic control over the production of his albums within his contract. He would take full advantage of that and produce a ground-breaking album titled “The Redheaded Stranger.”
Early in his career, Nelson had served as a DJ for a Fort Worth children’s radio show. Much of the appeal of the show was that parents wanted something to help their kids lie down for a midday nap, and Nelson obliged with a series of songs he called “Tale of the Red-Headed Stranger.” When he began to formulate ideas for his next album, he knew he wanted to record another “concept album” like he had done with his previous “Phases and Stages” tracks, but he was not sure of his topic. His wife at the time, Connie, encouraged him to “flesh out” his Red-Headed Stranger songs and make it a complete “story” to tell in the album. Nelson took her advice, and the rest is history.
Nelson went to work with engineer Phil York at his Autumn Sound Studio in Garland, TX. Nelson stripped the music and arrangements down to a bare form—he used almost all acoustic instruments and instructed York that he wanted no “damn Nashville gloss in this.” Freed from his strings, Nelson recorded the entire album in less than a week; Bassist Bobby Earl Smith told an interviewer later that Willie “laid down ‘Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain’ (an old Fred Rose country standard) in one take.” The songs on the album are really short vignettes—no song is much more than two minutes, with Nelson alternating between the “Stranger’s” first-person accounts and his own third-person narrative. The album is almost haunting as the audience witnesses a man’s descent into a personal hell.
“Hell” is what CBS executives thought when they heard the masters for “The Red-Headed Stranger” the first time. They thought Willie was truly crazy because the record sounded nothing like what passed for country music in 1975. They initially refused to release the record, but Nelson’s attorneys and manager made sure those executives could read Nelson’s contract and the label reluctantly issued it in mid-1975. They put little fanfare into its release and spent little promotional money on what they thought would be a huge failure. They were as wrong as wrong could be. “The Red-Headed Stranger” became a runaway hit and the single “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” became Nelson’s first #1 hit. The album also would have been the first country million-selling album if another record that came out just after it was released didn’t beat it to the punch, a record that Willie Nelson would also have a hand in making a sensation.
The success of Waylon Jennings’ first records after coming back to Texas as well as the growing popularity of Nelson, Michael Martin Murphey, Guy Clark, and other Texas artists who were leading the vanguard of this new wave of country music eventually stirred the ideas of dollar signs in record executive’s minds. The powers-that-be at RCA Records wanted to get more than Jennings on the gravy train of success of what was now being called “Outlaw Country,” a term coined by country music journalist Hazel Smith in a 1975 article on these rebels who were shaking up the Nashville establishment. However, the only “outlaw” they had under contract was Waylon Jennings and he was insistent on doing his own thing and did not adhere to a recording schedule that the RCA bosses wanted. However, an RCA VP had a vision in late 1975. RCA had some old master tracks that Jennings had recorded years earlier, and he knew of other record companies who had the same of some of Nelson’s early “outlaw” recordings. So, RCA bought some previously recorded material by Nelson, Waylon Jennings’ wife Jessi Colter, who was fresh off her smash release of “I’m Not Lisa,” and relatively unknown Tompall Glaser and the Glaser Brothers. Glaser, a native of Nebraska, had been a fixture on the Nashville scene for years, but mostly as a songwriter and record producer. In fact, most of Jennings’ last couple of albums were recorded at Glaser’s studio, one he dubbed “Hillbilly Central.” RCA packaged the tracks together and titled the album “Wanted: The Outlaws” and then waited with bated breath to see how it turned out.
Released in early 1976, it became a smash, racking up sales so fast that it became the first country album to be certified platinum within a few months of its release, not that the artists saw their share of the profits. In a 1997 interview, Jennings—as only Waylon could—told his interviewer, “Hell no, we didn’t make any money off that album. It was almost all corporate record company b—sh--. They made out ok, but we certainly didn’t.” It, combined with Nelson’s “Red-Headed Stranger” finally broke the embargo on radio airplay for “Outlaw Country.” It was now a sensation, one that by the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s had transformed country music. Now, every record company had to have an “outlaw” under contract and the Nashville Sound gave way to this new “neo-traditional” subgenre. “Outlaw Country” was now, mainstream.
Next week the Texas music series will continue with a look at songwriter Cindy Walker
The East Texas Historical Association provides this column as a public service. Scott Sosebee is a Professor of History at Stephen F. Austin State University and the Executive Director of the Association. He can be contacted at sosebeem@sfasu.edu; www.easttexashistorical.org.
