Waylon Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 1996 by Waylon Jennings

  All rights reserved

  Warner Books, Inc.,

  Hachette Book Group, 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  First eBook Edition: June 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-446-56237-9

  Contents

  COPYRIGHT

  ME

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1: WEST TEXAS RAIN

  CHAPTER 2: BUDDYS

  CHAPTER 3: PHOENIX, ARIZE

  CHAPTER 4: FROM NASHVILLE BUM …

  CHAPTER 5: …TO NASHVILLE REBEL

  CHAPTER 6: “THERE’S ANOTHER WAY OF DOING THINGS AND THAT IS ROCK ’N’ ROLL”

  CHAPTER 7: COUNTRY MODERN

  CHAPTER 8: THIS OUTLAW SHIT

  CHAPTER 9: BUSTED

  CHAPTER 10: I’M ABOUT TO SING IN MY PANTS; I’VE BEEN DRY-HUMMING ALL DAY AND I’M GONNA GET THE TUNE-ACHES

  CHAPTER 11: WILL THE WOLF SURVIVE?

  CHAPTER 12: THE TROJAN HOSS

  CHAPTER 13: THE FOUR HORSEMEN

  CHAPTER 14: I DO BELIEVE

  EPILOGUE

  WAYLON JENNINGS AND JESSI COLTER: A SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PERMISSIONS

  For Jessi

  If you read this book you’ll know

  why I’m blessed to know her

  ME

  HERE’S TO MY LADY, SHE’S MORE THAN A WIFE

  SHE’S BEEN MY BEST FRIEND THE BEST YEARS OF MY LIFE

  THROUGH THE GOOD AND THE BAD TIMES, SHE’S MANAGED TO SEE

  A LIGHT IN THE DISTANCE AND THE BEST SIDE OF ME

  HERE’S TO MY CHILDREN AND THE LIFE YOU HAVE FOUND

  I LEAVE A LOT TO LIVE UP TO AND A LOT TO LIVE DOWN

  MY STRENGTH AND MY WEAKNESS—THE TRUTH AND THE LIES

  HERE’S TO MY COMRADES THE WEAK AND THE STRONG

  IT’S TIME WE STOPPED COUNTING THE RIGHTS TO BE WRONG

  WE’RE EQUALLY GUILTY FOR THE TROUBLE WE’VE HAD

  WE BRING OUT IN EACH OTHER THE GOOD AND THE BAD

  I’M STILL A DREAMER AND DREAMERS SURVIVE

  AND I’LL KEEP CHASING RAINBOWS EACH DAY I’M ALIVE

  BELIEVING IN PEOPLE AND KEEPING A LIGHT

  FOR WAYFARING STRANGERS AND SHIPS IN THE NIGHT

  © 1991 WAYLON JENNINGS

  PROLOGUE

  Nighttime. Highway. I’ve seen this unraveling dream many times before, endless distance flicking white stripes on a black top. Riding along.

  I sit in the shotgun seat, arms folded across my chest like an old Native American, staring out at the exit signs. Norths and souths. Backs and forths. Crisses and crosses. A life in between.

  It’s like a screen, that big bus window, especially in the dark. You can watch any movie you want, mostly your own, as you roll past the side of the road. We’re coming up on Big Daddy Don Garlits’s hot rod museum, or the Club Risque, whose motto is “We Bare All.” I-75. Must be somewhere outside Ocala, Florida. Could be anywhere.

  Let me see that map. Jigger, you know of a Cracker Barrel near here? Maybe we should stop and grab some breakfast when it gets light.

  I’m enjoying this. You know how to get it out of somebody. Every time I talk to you, I come up with something else I remember. Some of it’s not that pretty, but I’m proud of most of it.

  There’s a lot to sort out. Put in perspective. I’ve been there, and here, and wherever I’ll be tomorrow. Sometimes I feel like I’ve gone around twice over. You’re talking to a guy who never went to sleep. I’ve lived a couple of lifelines. Maybe that’s why I don’t feel tired tonight. We can stay up late. Watch the road. Count off the miles.

  You want to get started?

  CHAPTER 1

  WEST TEXAS RAIN

  The storms boil up out of the west; a red-black cloud taking over the sky, streaming across the New Mexico border into Texas. You can stand there and watch them coming at you, nothing to stop them on the high open plains, seventy, eighty, ninety miles an hour, moving like a dark horse across the flatlands, bringing sand, and dust, and tumbleweeds. Always from the west.

  I’ve seen chickens go to roost at noon, it’d be so dark. The wind howls through those old tar-paper houses, the sand sifting across the road till you can’t see where the blacktop begins, and the grit gets in your teeth. Many a time I’d be going home, running down the street, trying to beat the storm, and I’d have to stop and grab hold of a pole to keep from getting blown over.

  You look under your window, or beneath the door sill, and there’s a pile of sand seeping in, and fine dirt. It covers everything. The sand drifts up against the fences as if it were snow. The wind that blows it circles town from the outside, driving back along Bula Highway, then around to Spade Highway, Littlefield rising out of the whirling dust like a mirage.

  “Lonesome,” Momma used to call the noise the wind made, and it haunts me to this day. It sounded like the end of time to me. Sometimes I think I make music to shut out the wind, to find a place where the sands can’t touch, and the air smells sweet and clear on a spring morning after the rain.

  It rained a lot that spring I was born. More than eight inches fell in the two weeks before I arrived, bringing with it hopes of a bumper cotton crop and the toil of replanting. The hail spared Lamb County, though it wreaked havoc north to Dimmitt, east to Plainview, south to Lubbock. There was a shortage of laying hens. We were on the fringes, seven or so miles northeast of Littlefield. On Tuesday morning, June 15, 1937, Momma went up to the main farm house, owned by a Mr. J. W. Bittner Sr., and birthed me. Daddy got to celebrate his first Father’s Day that Sunday.

  My coming wasn’t recorded in the Lamb County News or Leader. Downtown, where Norma Shearer and Leslie Howard were starring in Romeo and Juliet and the society pages were all fussing about the Duchess of Windsor, they paid no notice to what was happening to us subsistence farmers working the fields. Dirt-poor (we had the floor to prove it), we shared a two-room house with my uncles and aunts and cousins. The bed was in the living room, and there was a kitchen. Twelve people; I don’t know how we did it.

  At least that was a step up from the half-dugout my Uncle Bud lived in, by Hart Camp: a roof over a cellar. Momma and Daddy first got married out there, maybe ten miles from Littlefield, a town that had a school house, a cotton gin, a grocery store, and not much else. Don’t blink, or you might miss it.

  They’d met at a dance, William Albert Jennings and Lorene Beatrice Shipley. He was a musician in a one-man band, just him playing harmonica and guitar. She couldn’t have been more than fourteen, from Love County, Oklahoma. She danced every dance. Momma used to get mad because Daddy didn’t know how to dance, and she’d have to hold the harmonica for him in his mouth—they had no holders in those days—and wouldn’t get to dance every set.

  They got together in 1935 and moved in with Grandpa Jennings. There were sixteen people living in their two rooms, up in a little house on a hill, though, if truth be known, it was more like a bump on the earth. Nobody had any money. They papered the walls with newspaper, pasting it up with flour and water. They did it to stay warm; for insulation, not for looks. It covered up the cracks in the wall.

  My daddy was the hardest-working man you ever saw. He did everything at one time or another. He worked in the fields, he ran a creamery, he owned a gas station, he drove a fuel delivery truck. One time he broke his back; he’d been working over in Hobbs, New Mexico, and a piece of lumber fell on him. He got out of the hospital, in a back brace, and immediately went out and pulled cotton. It hurt so bad he had to do it on his knees, but he wanted to get us money for Christmas.

  It was never easy for our family, even after Momma and Daddy
moved over to the Bittner farm. One time I remember my dad setting in the chair and crying. His head was in his hands. I couldn’t have been more than two years old because my brother Tommy was still a babe-in-arms. (I’ve always had a good memory, even that early, and I can go as far back in time as when I was bouncing in my jumper swing, reaching for my dad’s guitar.) Daddy had worked sunup to sundown, and we still didn’t have nothing to eat. A dollar a day was what he made.

  Yet it wasn’t a rare thing when he laughed. He laughed a lot. He’d tease us unmercifully and give us all nicknames. Daddy called me Towhead, because my hair was light colored, or Little Wart. When he smiled, the whole room lit up. Kids trusted him. My daddy could walk up to any child, and they might be bashful and shy and turning away. In a minute they’d be right over cuddling next to him. He was constantly joking.

  Daddy finally got himself enough money to buy him a truck. He had a ’41 Ford, short bed; a bobtail, they called them. Grandpa Jennings had traded in his span of mules for a tractor and moved out by Morton, west of Littlefield, near Enochs. He had eighty acres; that was about all you could handle in those days. We were doing all right, even if Momma still tells the story of how she had to put me up on the stove while she was cleaning the house to keep the rats from getting me. That’s kind of country, isn’t it?

  Saturday night, we used to sit on the Bittner farm and see the lights of Littlefield off in the distance. We grew cotton and maize on the patch of land we worked. We were farm laborers, not even sharecroppers, and when Daddy got back from a day in the fields, he had to milk about twenty head of cattle. On hog-killing day, we’d get out the ice cream freezer and break open watermelons. Yellow meat watermelons. They’d weigh fifty or sixty pounds, and nothing tasted closer to heaven.

  They were originally going to name me Wayland: “land by the highway.” It’s no wonder I’ve spent my life on the road. Momma wanted to call me Galen, and my grandmother had a boyfriend that she was going to marry who had died of some disease, and his name was Wade. Daddy thought I should have the initials W.A., which was traditional for the oldest through the Jennings. The first ones that ever migrated to Texas were William Albert and Miriam.

  So it came down to Wayland Arnold. But when a Baptist preacher stopped by to visit Momma, he said, “Oh, I see you’ve named your son after our wonderful Wayland College in Plain-view,” so she immediately changed the spelling to Waylon. We were solidly Church of Christ, saved by baptism instead of faith. She never got around to switching it on the birth certificate. I still hate my middle name, and for a while I didn’t like Waylon. It sounded so corny and hillbilly, but it’s been good to me, and I’m pretty well at peace with it now.

  Littlefield is on the cap rock, right at the foot of the Great Plains as they stretch through Denver all the way north to Canada. It’s up about four thousand feet, but it’s so flat your dog could run off and you could watch him go for three days. They say you can stand in Littlefield and count the people in Levelland, twenty miles away. There’s nary a tree anywhere; and the sky surrounds you like a huge blue bowl. At night it’s almost like you’re being sucked up into the stars.

  When you’re born in Texas, you think that you are a little bit taller, a little bit smarter, and a little bit tougher than anybody else. It’s a country unto itself, it really is. In fact, it was the only place that was a country before it was a state, and the people who live there still feel that way. My wife, Jessi, hit it right on the head when she said “They think the rest of the world is overseas.” Of course, she’s from Arizona. She knows what it’s like being around cowboys.

  We could just dream about being cowboys. For us, life on the farms was all we could look forward to. Littlefield is part of the cotton belt, and it sits astraddle the line between dry-land farming on the west side and wet irrigation to the east. We pulled cotton all around Littlefield, getting up at four in the morning to be in the fields before dawn. It would already be so hot and dry that the gnats would be swarming at your eyes, trying to get at the moisture. By the time the day was too hot for them, we’d be halfway down a row, hunched over, dodging the snakes, pulling the bolls and chopping at them, trying to get to the water jar we had waiting at the end of the row. We were able to stand up when the cotton was high, and virtually stooped in half to reach the low.

  There’s a saying, “He’s in high cotton now,” which means it’s easier to pull. Or to pick it. You don’t have to bend over. For low cotton, which is thicker on the bush, you haven’t lived till you’ve bent over all the way down a row, which may be three quarters of a mile to a mile long, and then tried to stand and straighten your back. Or bent over to get that stuff, pulling a crying kid on a sack. My momma pulled bolls; we didn’t pick it like they did in East Texas. You’d pull the boll and the cotton off the cotton stalk and then they’d have a cotton gin that would separate the boll and the seed. The boll was green, and when it dried out it would open and be real brittle. It would just cut the shit out of your hands if you didn’t wear gloves.

  In the late summer and fall, Littlefield would be full of transient laborers from Mexico. You couldn’t walk down the street on Saturday afternoon, they’d be so packed. We were working right there alongside of them. They delayed school two weeks at the start of every year to chop cotton and gather in the harvest. In the summer we went barefoot, mostly because we couldn’t afford shoes, but every fall till I was fifteen we went out there to get the money to buy our school clothes. I hated the cotton patch.

  There’s nothing I have ever heard in my life as mournful as the whistle of a steam freight train in the distance when you’re kneeling down in a field. It sounds like death. I’d be out in the cotton patch, dragging a sack twelve foot long and half full, putting in dirt clods to bring up the weight, and that lonesome howl would just go plumb through me. That train was on its way out of town and I wasn’t on it. I knew that there was a better way somewhere else. I didn’t know where, but all I had to do was go looking for it.

  The last time I was pulling cotton I was about sixteen. I said, “I didn’t plant this shit, and I ain’t never gonna pull it up no more.” And I quit. I left that sack sitting right there. It may be there to this day, as far as I know.

  The Shipleys and the Jennings were complete opposites. My grandpa Jennings wouldn’t take a drink or say a cussword if he had to. My dad was that way, too. We couldn’t keep dice or even mention the word “sex” in our house.

  My grandpa Alfred Blevins Shipley was a hard-working man and could get drunker than ole Cooter Brown. It was not a sickness with him. It was just something he liked to do, but not until there was plenty of food in the house. He was a strong man, a good provider and protector of his clan. He was the boss ’til the day he died. In a lot of ways I’m like him. I wanted to be. He may have been where I learned to cuss—he was good at it—but I couldn’t get into the snuff dipping. He was good at that too.

  He drove a truck all his life, bringing fruits and vegetables back and forth from South Texas. I don’t know how he ever made any money. He would go down to San Antonio, load up, bring it back to Littlefield, give half of it away, and sell the rest. Then he would repeat the whole process again. When he started home (four or five hundred miles away), if he had any money left, he would buy some whiskey and get drunk. I’m talking about drunk. Stone blind and weaving drunk. Trying to keep it between the lines. (In twenty years, the only accident he had, he went off the road into a ditch.)

  There were two kinds of people Grandpa didn’t trust, a preacher and a cop. He’d say “They both think they’re sanctified in everything they do.” It’s no wonder he was always arguing with Grandma. Grandma, Dessie Bell Shipley, was a Jehovah’s Witness, and I swear Grandpa would study the Bible just to tell her how wrong she was about it, and nothing made him madder than catching her on a street corner selling the Watchtower. They fought most of their lives and I never heard them say much good to each other. But that was between them, and no one else had better join in.

/>   The Shipley line had come to Texas through my great-grandfather, who was a farmer and a lawman. He rode a horse all the way from Tennessee and had a handlebar mustache. He wound up in Hart Camp after being a constable in Leon, Oklahoma, and a sheriff in Marietta. Along the way, a lot of Indian blood mixed in. My grandmother Dessie Bell’s maiden name was West, and her father had been a cotton farmer. He never worked a day in his life. His six boys did most of the hard labor. He was really a trader, and could make fifty dollars in an afternoon just sitting on a sack of beans. I heard he was part Comanche, and her mother was Cherokee. Full-blood.

  She had traveled the Trail of Tears to Fort Smith, Arkansas, where she went to school till they burnt the fort down. My great-grandfather’s name was Wily West. He was so skinny that he could go somewhere, sit down, cross his legs, and both feet would lie flat on the floor.

  Let me get this right now. If I don’t, I could get shot by some relatives. My great-grandfather West married a woman who already had a daughter about twelve years old. He had another child by this woman, whoever she was, which was my grandmother. Now my grandmother had a sister, right? We thought that my grandmother’s mother had died, but we found out later that wasn’t true. She had run off and left both kids with him. So he married the original daughter, which made my grandmother’s sister her stepmother.

  Nobody knew this until Grandma Shipley died. Then it came out. On the marriage certificate for Great-grandfather West and Grandma’s stepsister, it said her mother was colored. That was the way they referred to Indians in those days. I guess that happened a lot back then, her half-sister becoming her stepmother. Being out in the middle of nowhere will do that to you.

  It might’ve been even more complicated had not Wily West been such a rounder. Great-grandpa West, my grandmother’s father, and my grandfather’s mother, Delilah Shipley, had known each other when they were young. Supposedly they’d been in love. He called her Lila; she was some piece of work. She was beautiful and carried a gun. They might’ve been going to get married, but he went off on one of his tears and he took off. When he came back she was gone. She’d married the sheriff of Ardmore, Oklahoma. They never saw each other again until his daughter and her son met and were married.