He was the outlaw, in a genre that would soon have people recording his songs, and co-opting his vision for a new version of country, to much greater financial success.īy the time Waylon was singing “Don’t You Think This Outlaw Bit's Done Got Out of Hand,” Kristofferson was a bona fide movie star, a sex symbol and one of the most famous people in America. He was long-haired, anti-war and sang songs with drug use, sex and violence always lurking as dangers in the margins, at a time when Waylon and Willie were wearing sweaters and playing golf on their album covers. He was not signed to RCA working for Chet Atkins when he followed his own muse he was a janitor cleaning up after Bob Dylan’s Nashville sessions, literally landing his helicopter - he flew to oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico as his day job - on Johnny Cash’s lawn to try to convince him to record his songs. Kris Kristofferson, however, was the true country outsider, a man who single-handedly pushed the genre leftward, changing forever the perception of its songwriters, its performers and its message. Waylon and Willie launched outlaw country from inside of Nashville’s hallowed halls, as two men who stopped crooning, grew out their hair and beards and stopped singing three-minute songs that, without the fiddles, could have been meant for Frank Sinatra. ![]() ![]() That story isn’t false by any means, but it leaves out arguably the genre’s biggest outlaw, the man who took the biggest risks to pave the way for Waylon and Willie’s successful runs at the mountaintop. The story of the outlaw country revolution usually, in broad strokes, gets reduced to Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson breaking Nashville’s mold, and steering country music into new aesthetic - you didn’t need to wear suits anymore! - and sonic - country could sound like rock! - vistas, two lone gunmen joining forces for a heist on Music City.
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