Outlaw Country

It all started the day Waylon Jennings (“Honky Tonk Heroes”) walked into a studio with a fistful of Billy Joe Shaver songs and a contract that guaranteed him total creative control. The system was bucked, and “outlaw country” was born. This is country music played with the freedom that rock ’n’ roll promised — by artists who defined the original outlaw movement and a few young guns who’re still raising a finger to the confines of Nashville. Willie Nelson (“Whiskey River”) reinvented himself with a 1971 move from Nashville to Austin, Texas, where he hooked up with the likes of Jerry Jeff Walker (“Pissin’ In the Wind”) and that fella Shaver (“Georgia On a Fast Train”).

Our outlaw-country posse gets bigger, in Next Steps.

Outlaw country was always about the people who said what they wanted instead of singing what a Nashville song-pusher picked for them. From the leftfield worldview offered by Willie Nelson on his finest album, Shotgun Willie, to the political firestorms ignited by Steve Earle — the man who would pick up and brandish the moniker “hardcore troubadour” — this is country music without constraints, made by artists who seem to take a perverse joy in picking fights with the public’s expectations. Steve Young (here wielding the superbly titled “Switchblades of Love”) never made it big in his own right, but wrote the title track on Waylon Jennings’ seminal 1973 outlaw album, Lonesome, On’ry and Mean, and was influential in forging the movement’s identity.

Unholster those pistols and shoot your way over to Deep Cuts.

The creative explosion sparked by the early-’70s outlaws still resonates with artists today. But it also has a backwards effect, shedding light on dudes like Townes Van Zandt, who had been playing by their own rules all along but gained new fans whose minds had been opened by the success of Waylon, Willie, and anyone else who found inspiration where blues, folk, country, and rock collided. And don’t forget — despite the spit ’n’ sawdust core of the movement, not all country outlaws were men; Jessi Colter, here singing a rocked-up “Fireflies In the Storm” with Tony Joe White, was married to Jennings but earned her outlaw credentials on her own merits, while Sammi Smith told it how it was, no punches pulled, on tough tracks like “Birmingham Mistake.”

In the early ’70s, the creative freedom that drove rock ’n’ roll rode into Nashville. Waylon Jennings fired the first shot, taking control of his music from country music’s mafia of producers, writers, and song-pluggers. His example was followed by mavericks like Willie Nelson (“Pancho and Lefty”), Kris Kristofferson (“Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down”), and David Allan Coe (“Drink Canada Dry”), who turned up their amps and played to crowds where hippies and rednecks stood side-by-side. Their predecessors, peers, and progeny are all here, singing the songs that rocked the country establishment to its core. Here, we give you the movement’s pioneers and standard-bearers . . . and if you’re wondering if the outlaw spirit is alive and kickin’ in the 21st century, just cue up Shooter Jennings (son of Waylon and Jessi Colter) on “4th of July” (featuring old-timer George Jones). Those Nashville rules weren’t broke for nothing.