Waylon Jennings

In his 1996 autobiography, Jennings named exactly one "Outlaw hero": "If I had an Outlaw hero, someone to set my standard and measure my progress, it was Hank Williams," he wrote, "he had touched me way back in Littlefield, through the strength of his songs and the soul of his voice." The debt wasn't just sentimental. In 1992, decades into his own career, Jennings sat down and recorded thirteen Williams songs whole, released as Waylon Sings Hank Williams — treating the catalog less as inspiration to borrow from than scripture to preserve intact.

listen: upstream & heresource: Bear Family Records -- Waylon Sings Hank Williams product/liner page (tracklist, 1954 Elvis epiphany, Hank/Tubb idols) ↗share

1949

I'm So Lonesome I Could CryHank Williams

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1992

I'm So Lonesome I Could CryWaylon Jennings

listen forWilliams recorded "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" in 1949 with almost nothing behind him — voice, steel guitar, and the silence between phrases doing the aching. On his 1992 tribute album, Jennings keeps that same bare arrangement note for note, changing only what four decades of touring had done to his voice: a lower, road-worn baritone standing in for Williams's high lonesome one, the song's structure left otherwise untouched.

Holly hired Jennings as his touring bassist in 1958 and produced his first single before dying in the plane crash that forever links their names in the public imagination — but the clearest evidence of what actually transferred sits on wax. For his first A&M session in 1964, Jennings cut "Rave On," one of Holly's own rockabilly sides, as a B-side. Critics have heard the debt ever since: Rolling Stone credited him with "a Buddy Holly beat," and Lone Star Music called him "tutored in the big beat rockabilly of Buddy Holly."

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1958

Rave OnBuddy Holly

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1964

Rave OnWaylon Jennings

listen forHolly's 1958 "Rave On" rides a nervous, hiccuping vocal over a tight, clipped rockabilly shuffle, the whole band pushing forward on a fast, jittery pulse. Jennings's 1964 B-side cover keeps that same chugging rhythm-guitar attack but drops it into a lower, tougher register and a slower, more deliberate strut, trading Holly's boyish urgency for something closer to swagger — an early glimpse of the harder voice that would carry the outlaw sound a decade later.

When Elvis Presley passed through Lubbock on his second West Texas swing, Jennings — a teenage radio DJ at the time — went to see him play. "I loved that churning rhythm on the bottom," he said of what he heard, a line he'd repeat in his autobiography years later. No Elvis cover survives in Jennings's catalog; what carried over was rhythmic, not repertoire. Critics point to the same mechanism: Jennings swapped the country two-step's upright bass for a driving electric rhythm guitar, turning that remembered churn into the engine of his own records.

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1954

That's All RightElvis Presley

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1973

Lonesome, On'ry and MeanWaylon Jennings

listen forPresley's 1954 "That's All Right" rides on a loose, slapping upright bass and a rockabilly swing. Nineteen years later, Jennings opens "Lonesome, On'ry and Mean" with the sound that replaced it: a driving electric guitar line and a bass drum thumping "four on the floor," the honky-tonk two-step traded wholesale for a rock and roll pulse — the same churn Jennings once named, now built into his own rhythm section.