01 Oct Just Four Good Ol’ Boys
Please don’t ask me how or why, but last week, I ended up in a pretty shady corner of the interwebs, on an especially shady website, a horrid, glaring, profoundly indecent site called people.com. I was there specifically to “read” (and it’s People, so I use that term loosely) an article about celebrities who are over 90 years old. I guess I knew he was old – everyone’s old these days – but I was surprised to see, at Number 13 on People’s list, the red-headed stranger himself, Willie Nelson. Willie turned 91 last April.
Now, let’s be honest. I’m glad Willie is still around, and I hope he lives another twenty years (if that’s what he wants), but it’s faaaaaar more likely that he won’t, that one of these days, I’ll open up Twitter/X and see Willie’s name trending for exactly the wrong reason. Knowing this, and knowing that he’s 91 for crying out loud, made the death of Kris Kristofferson the other day, hit just a little bit harder. Willie is now the lone survivor of The Highwaymen and practically the lone survivor of the Outlaw Country Music movement. Waylon died in 2002. Johnny Cash died in 2003. Merle died in 2016. And Kris died on Sunday. There are a few others left, to be sure, but not that many. Hank Jr. is still around, I guess – despite some ladies and Jim Beam trying to kill him for the last 51 years – but he’s a second-wave Outlaw. The originals are all gone now, except 91-year-old Willie.
Before moving on, and getting into the weeds on the Outlaws, I should say a few things about the recently departed, who was probably the second-best pure songwriter of his generation. Like the first-best songwriter, Kris’s voice was somewhat less than beautiful, but man, could he write. Heck, ninety-nine percent of the world’s population didn’t even know “Me and Bobby McGee” was a country song until Kris told them, because his songs transcended genres: country, folk, rock, whatever.
Unlike many celebrities, Kristofferson was educated. Indeed, he was a Rhodes Scholar who graduated from Oxford with a degree in English Literature. Unlike many liberals of his generation, Kris liked and respected the U.S. military. Indeed, he joined the army – in the 1960s, nonetheless – trained as a helicopter pilot, completed Ranger School, and served in the 8th Infantry Division in Germany until he was honorably discharged, as a Captain, in 1965. He got back into the music business almost immediately, without much success, until he famously landed a helicopter on Johnny Cash’s front lawn and almost literally forced Johnny to listen to his demo. Cash was impressed – especially with “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” and the rest, as they say, is history. Kristofferson won his first Country Music Association Award in 1970 (“Sunday Morning Coming Down), a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Musical in 1976 (A Star is Born), and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Score in 1984 (The Songwriter). He won four Grammy’s, including a lifetime achievement award, was nominated another 10 times, and appeared in more movies and TV shows than I can count. As I say, the guy couldn’t sing a lick, but he didn’t let that stop him from becoming one of the most important and most decorated actors and singer-songwriters of the 1970s.
All of that said, Kris’s biggest impact came as part of a movement, the aforementioned Outlaw Country Movement. The Outlaw movement mostly started with Wille and Waylon, who ruffled some feathers and caused a commotion when they managed to negotiate complete artistic control of their music. They – and many others – had tired of the strait-laced, over-produced “Nashville Sound,” and they pushed back hard. Country music always had been and always will be associated with Nashville, but the Outlaws gave it a Texas tinge, made it rougher, harder-hitting, and more rebellious. They changed the country music business and in so doing, helped change the country.
The standard line on the Outlaw movement is that it was Country Music’s version of the Rock rebellion of the 1960s, that it was about throwing off the shackles of the establishment, breaking free from the “squares,” and letting loose. Sex, Drugs, and Country, in other words.
There is a lot of truth in this, of course, and the Outlaws would later admit that the drugs killed their voices and the partying nearly killed each of them. Nevertheless, country “rebellion” looked a heckuva lot different from the Rock rebellion and the culture associated with it. In fact, in some very important ways, the popularity of the Outlaw rebellion was a response to the political and cultural excesses of the ‘60s.
When Kris Kristofferson died on Sunday, he was 88. That means he was born in 1936. Willie, at 91, was born in 1933. Johnny Cash was born in 1932, and Waylon, the youngster, was born in 1937. None of them was a Baby Boomer, in other words, and none of them shared the Boomers’ specific pathologies – most especially their Vietnam fixation and the concomitant anti-Americanism. Kristofferson may have become a Hollywood liberal, and Willie may be a left-leaning pothead, but for the most part, the Outlaws were cowboys, Texas rednecks out to have a good time, not to change the world.
Although they were generally not overtly political – and when they were, as noted, they were hardly right-wingers – the Outlaws contributed significantly to the cultural rebirth of American strength and pride that started slowly in the 1970s and blossomed in the early 1980s. Waylon’s “Luckenbach, Texas,” Hank Jr.’s “A Country Boy Can Survive,” and practically the entirety of Charlie Daniels’ catalog expressed the contempt that the Outlaws had for coastal elites and for the values embraced by progressivism more generally. It is no coincidence that Waylon wrote and performed the theme song, as well as serving as the narrator (“balladeer”) for “The Dukes of Hazard,” the 1980s TV series about the fast-driving, fun-loving, (presumably) moonshine-running rebels, Bo and Luke Duke. Heck, as shown in the picture at the top of this note, even Willie was unembarrassed to show his dislike for the Soviets – and, by extension, his love for America.
The Outlaws presaged the Reagan Revolution, in other words, and America’s recovery from its post-Vietnam malaise. Now, they’re mostly gone – and with them the pride and downright orneriness they embodied.
Mister, we could use a man like Waylon Jennings again. Or Johnny Cash. Or Kris Kristofferson. RIP, Kris. And Willie? Hang on as long as you can. We need you – maybe now more than ever.
