They keep unearthing hidden treasures, in country music as much as in jazz. The latest, and apparently just the tip of the iceberg of this particular trove, is a parcel of recordings made by Waylon Jennings in 1970 as part of a U.S. military recruitment radio program. The program consisted of 15-minute recorded shows with performances and banter by popular country artists of the day, including George Jones, Dolly Parton, Conway Twitty and Tammy Wynette, and of course Waylon. They were then distributed on vinyl “for promotional use only” to some 2,000 participating radio stations across the country.
Of course in a 15-minute radio show with banter you’d only get a few songs. I imagine there are some copies of those old vinyl recordings in attics and thrift stores around the country, but the bulk of the recordings probably never saw the light of day until the folks at Country Rewind Records dug them up, dusted them off, and digitized them. The Lost Nashville Sessions includes 14 tracks cut by Jennings in 1970 at Scotty Moore’s studio in Nashville and never before released to the public.
One of the 14, probably the best of the lot, was put out on vinyl for Record Store Day in 2014. It’s Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” which was a hit for Johnny Cash. It was previewed online by Rolling Stone magazine in 2014, but isn’t available anymore. It’s a real gem, and the presence of a Hammond B-3 organ on the track definitely identifies it as an alternate to the one that Jennings officially released as a single.
I was not a big Waylon Jennings fan back in the day. I went right from Johnny Cash to Kris Kristofferson and his ilk, the more rebellious and slightly younger generation of singer-songwriters who straddled the lines of folk, country and rock. But you couldn’t have grown up in the ’60s and ’70s without hearing a lot of Waylon Jennings music, including some major hits like “Stop The World (And Let Me Off), “Only Daddy That’ll Walk The Line,” and his covers of AM pop radio hits like “Love Of The Common People” and “MacArthur Park.” They’re all here, and lots more, in really sharp alternate versions, pristine recordings (that were gussied up a little bit in the Country Rewind studios, with some backing vocals and some clams by the bass player replaced). In fact these recordings, by Scotty Moore (Elvis Presley’s guitarist who died earlier this year) really emphasize Waylon’s latent rockabilly, which had always been there in Jennings’s music since his days with Buddy Holly, in songs such as “Only Daddy” and a killer take on Chuck Berry’s “Brown Eyed Handsome Man.”
In 1970 when these recordings were made, Jennings was just on the cusp of growing a beard and longer hair, leaving his frustrations with Nashville behind, and joining the “outlaw” movement with Cash, Kris and Willie. It’s a valuable document of a key musician at a historic time in American music. Plus it’s a hell of a lotta fun to listen to. These recordings demonstrate just what an earthy, rootsy singer Waylon Jennings was.
(Country Rewind, 2016)
