What Exactly Makes a Country Outlaw?
As Nashville legend has it, a woman named Hazel Smith devised the label that would be applied to so many generations of country artists. A secretary, publicist, bookkeeper, sober person, and self-described “mother hen” at Tompall Glaser’s studio/hideout Hillbilly Central, Smith got a call from a DJ in North Carolina wanting to know what the heck you called this gritty new sound, led by Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson. She said she’d call him back and pulled out a dictionary, flipping through the entries until she settled on the word “outlaw.”
We could have ended up talking about redneck rock or progressive country or even armadillo country, after the tenacious rodent that became the movement’s unofficial mascot. “Outlaw” stuck not just because that strain of music needed an evocative name; perhaps more crucially, the word describes a philosophy of being and thus creating, rather than a particular sound. Outlaw country became a metaphor for the lifestyle: facing off against the establishment, hiding your contraband from the cops, and touring from town to town as though chased by the law.
Since Smith’s phone call back in ’73, outlaw country has been a source of fascination over who gets to wear that particular cowboy hat, what it sounds like, and where it comes from. These issues abound in an excellent new exhibition at the Country Music Hall of Fame, where a mix of media—videos, recordings, concert posters, and some truly astounding artifacts—provides a very specific idea of what that term meant initially and therefore what it means now. The museum defines the movement as geographically disparate and musically permissive, covering Tennessee to Texas, roadhouse blues to honky-tonk twang to strange new takes on western swing. What the outlaws shared was a rebellion against staid country conventions, over how the music got made and what it should sound like. Waylon campaigned on this platform with 1974’s “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way?” (sample lyric: “Rhinestone suits and new shiny cars, it’s been the same way for years. We need a change”), and the idea was further cemented by 1976’s odds-and-ends collection Wanted! The Outlaws, featuring Glaser, Nelson, Waylon, and Jessi Colter. It was the first country album certified multi-platinum and remains one of the genre’s most successful crossovers.
While he’s not the biggest name in the exhibition, it’s actually Bobby Bare who emerges as the first outlaw, insofar as he was the first to negotiate full artistic control of his career. By the early ’70s, he was a country music veteran with an enviable series of pop and country hits, from 1966’s “Streets of Baltimore” to 1970’s “How I Got to Memphis.” He persuaded RCA Records to let him pick his own songs, assemble his own band, and even produce his own records. That his subsequent albums—in particular, 1973’s Lullabies, Legends & Lies—became hits meant that labels were willing to extend similar concessions to other artists.
Most of the outlaws had tried their hands at typical label careers in Nashville, but found the experience stifling. Willie Nelson was so despondent over his floundering prospects that one cold night during a set at the legendary Nashville honky-tonk Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, he lay down in the middle of Lower Broadway and waited for a car to run him over. When none arrived, he picked himself up and played the rest of the show. Following a fire on his pig farm, Nelson relocated to Austin, in his home state of Texas, where he became a figurehead for a new movement that united long-haired hippies and homegrown rednecks.
The outlaws maintained ties to Nashville, which had the labels, the money, and most of the good studios. But the Lone Star State had all the good honky-tonks, including the Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin and the Luckenbach Dancehall in, of course, Luckenbach. One of the most remarkable objects in the exhibition is the door to that fabled venue, which was immortalized on the cover of Jerry Jeff Walker’s landmark 1973 album, Viva Terlingua.
In many ways, the outlaw movement arose from these artists’ attempts to replicate the excitement of their live shows in the studio, but Outlaws & Armadillos suggests that the outlaw ethos extended well beyond music. The gallery is filled with paintings and sketches by artists like Jim Franklin, Sam Yeates, and Susanna Clark, and the concert posters from the Austin scene have a trippy style not unlike the irreverent underground comics of the era. There were outlaw poets, outlaw football coaches, outlaw theologians, even outlaw whatever you call Hondo Crouch, the poet and club owner who put Luckenbach on the map and dabbled in something like performance art. In 1976, he organized an anti-consumerist protest called “Non-Buy-Centennial Celebration” that involved the Blue Angels not performing a flyover; participants gazed up at a sunny Texas sky that contained no airplanes at all.
One of the most intriguing aspects of the outlaw movement was its self-referentiality. They wrote country songs about country songs, often naming other musicians in their lyrics. Kristofferson opened 1971’s “The Pilgrim Chapter 33” by calling out a who’s who of outlaws, including Dennis Hopper, Johnny Cash, and “funky Donnie Fritts.” Jerry Jeff Walker, also named in that song, affectionately satirized that bit of myth-making by using a similar intro on 1975’s “Pissin’ in the Wind.” Even as they romanticized the outlaw life, they consistently undercut it, tracking the trend in real time. In 1978, Waylon released “Don’t You Think This Outlaw Bit Done Got Out of Hand,” which addressed his well-publicized drug problems and their effect on his marriage to Jessi Colter.
Armadillos & Outlaws marks that year—1978—as the official end of the outlaw movement. Not only had Waylon’s troubles caught up with him, but that same year Willie traded the desert heat of Texas for the ocean breezes of Malibu and released a very non-outlaw standards record called Stardust. Embracing Cole Porter and Hoagy Carmichael, the Booker T. Jones-produced album blurred the lines between jazz, pop, and country, portraying Nelson as an artist with more range than the outlaw world demanded. The outlaw bit had gotten out of hand, and the restrictions of the scene were becoming just as stifling as the establishment from which these artists fled just a few years earlier.
That’s where the exhibition concludes, but the idea of outlaw country continued for decades, interpreted and reinterpreted with each new generation of artists. The term survived to become a persistent label for any artist outside the Nashville mainstream, regardless of politics or aesthetics. It has become as much a market as a movement, with a traveling Outlaw Music Festival tour (featuring Willie and Sturgill Simpson, among many others) and even an annual Outlaw Country Cruise (with the Drive-By Truckers and Lucinda Williams headlining next winter). It’s now a general adjective, somewhat similar to “alternative” in that it is usually defined in response to something else.
Consequently, the meaning of Hazel Smith’s chosen word changes as the establishment changes. In the early 2000s, for example, Big & Rich distinguished themselves from the conservative sound of country music by incorporating hip-hop production elements and, to a lesser degree, an inclusive message into hits like “Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy)” and “Love Train.” That was enough for them and their associated acts—namely, Gretchen Wilson and Cowboy Troy—to wear the outlaw mantle like a dusty old poncho. In the 2010s, however, their innovations have become the dominant sound of country radio, as heard on the AutoTuned hits of Sam Hunt and the twangless songs of Hunter Hayes.
That’s now the establishment against which a new generation of outlaws can rebel. Practically the only mention of young artists at Outlaws & Armadillos was during the opening-night concert, held on May 25th at the CMA Theater in Nashville. Organized by Shooter Jennings (Waylon and Colter’s son) and producer Dave Cobb (who has worked with just about every artist dubbed a modern country outlaw), the event featured old-timers and newcomers alike—original outlaws playing with musicians young enough to be their grandkids. In front of state flags for Tennessee and Texas, Ashley Monroe covered Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” Jason Isbell sang Townes Van Zandt’s “Pancho & Lefty,” and Colter Wall brought fire and menace to Nelson’s “Red Headed Stranger.” One of the more poignant moments was the reunion between Billy Joe Shaver and singer/fiddle player Amanda Shires, who got her start as a teenager backing the grizzled outlaw. They played two of his songs together—including “Honky Tonk Heroes,” a 1973 hit for Waylon—before she performed an a cappella rendition of “Star in My Heart,” which she described as her favorite song of his.
The show was clearly imagined as a torch-passing moment, a way to celebrate the old guard and herald the new, but the effect showed the wide gulf between them. It’s not just that old-timers like Gary P. Nunn and Ray Wylie Hubbard upstaged their younger counterparts; that’s to be expected when you’re dealing with artists who’ve been playing these songs longer than Shooter or Cobb have been alive. The concert, much like the exhibition itself, shows how the first-generation outlaws broke from tradition to make that change Waylon called for. For this new generation of outlaws, however, that break has become the tradition in and of itself.
Being branded an outlaw is very different in 2018 than it was in 1973. Acts now have the benefit of a broader market encompassing what we now think of as roots music, an established touring circuit, and more clearly defined audiences for left-of-center country acts. It’s tempting to think that the outlaw ideal has been absorbed into the country establishment and defanged, especially when the movement is commemorated in a museum. To its credit, Outlaws & Armadillos argues something different and much more compelling: that the outlaws of the roaring ’70s accomplished the herculean task of redefining country music and expanding its scope to encompass the freak fringes.
