Country radio in 1970 was not accustomed to hearing a hit sung by the villain. But that is what Waylon Jennings delivered with The Taker, a song written by Kris Kristofferson and Shel Silverstein in which the narrator calmly explains exactly what he is: not the good man who gives a woman attention, devotion, and care, but the other kind — the one who takes what the good man gives, enjoys it, and moves on. No apology, no redemption, no last-verse conversion. Jennings took the song into the Top 5 of the country chart, made it the opening track and half the title of his 1971 album The Taker/Tulsa, and in doing so sent up one of the earliest flares of the outlaw era: a signal that the new Nashville songwriters were writing about human nature as it actually behaves, and that Jennings intended to sing it that way.
An Unlikely Pair of Songwriters
Start with the byline, because it is one of the strangest in country music. Kris Kristofferson was a Rhodes scholar, a former Army helicopter pilot and West Point instructor who had thrown away a military career to sweep floors at a Nashville studio and learn songwriting from the ground up. Shel Silverstein was a Playboy cartoonist, children’s author, and underground humorist who had already written A Boy Named Sue for Johnny Cash. Between them they represented the two poles of the new Nashville: the literary intellectual and the cheerful subversive, both convinced that a country song could carry more truth than the formula allowed.
The Taker is built like a parable with the moral ripped out. Its verses divide the world into givers and takers. The giver is everything a woman is supposed to want — attentive, helpful, devoted, a man who treats her right. The taker, who narrates, makes no counterfeit claim to any of it. He describes, with something close to pride, how he will take the love the giver has cultivated, take the woman’s body and her devotion, and then take his leave. The sting is in the delivery: the song is not a warning delivered by an observer but a boast delivered by the culprit, and its final effect is to make the listener complicit. You have been charmed by a man the song itself tells you not to trust. That tension — between the melody’s warmth and the lyric’s coldness — is pure Silverstein mischief filtered through Kristofferson’s moral seriousness, and in 1970 it was well ahead of what mainstream country was willing to say out loud.
The timing mattered. Nineteen seventy was the year Kristofferson’s songs broke over Nashville all at once: Johnny Cash took Sunday Morning Comin’ Down to No. 1 and won the CMA Song of the Year award with it, Ray Price made For the Good Times a standard, and Janis Joplin — Kristofferson’s friend and sometime lover — recorded Me and Bobby McGee just before her death, sending it to No. 1 the following spring. Every ambitious singer in town was suddenly asking the same question: what else has this man got? Jennings, who had known Kristofferson since the newcomer arrived in Nashville in the mid-1960s, got there earlier than most and dug deeper than most, cutting four of his songs for a single album. It said something about Jennings’s instincts that the song he led with was not the hungover poetry of Sunday Morning Comin’ Down — already claimed by Cash — but this sly, self-incriminating character piece that no established star had touched.
Silverstein’s presence in the story deserves its own emphasis, because he is the easiest of the three men to underestimate. The cartoonist was, by 1970, quietly one of the most successful songwriters in Nashville: Cash had built a signature hit out of A Boy Named Sue, and Silverstein was writing prolifically for Bobby Bare, a partnership that would produce a string of hits through the decade. His genius was for the unreliable narrator and the joke that turns serious halfway through — exactly the machinery The Taker runs on. When people describe the song as ahead of its time, what they usually mean is that it trusts the listener the way Silverstein trusted his readers: to get the point without having it underlined.
Waylon Finds the New Songwriters
Jennings in 1970 was still, contractually and sonically, a man of the old system: an RCA artist recording at RCA’s studios under staff producers. The Taker/Tulsa, released in February 1971, was produced by Danny Davis and Ronny Light and cut in 1969–70 between RCA Studio A in Nashville and RCA in Hollywood. But look at the track listing and you can see the future assembling itself. Four of the album’s ten songs are Kristofferson’s: The Taker, Casey’s Last Ride, Sunday Morning Comin’ Down — already a No. 1 for Johnny Cash — and Lovin’ Her Was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again), which Jennings released here months before Kristofferson’s own version became a hit single from The Silver Tongued Devil and I. Around them sit Don Gibson’s (I’d Be) A Legend in My Time and Wayne Carson’s (Don’t Let the Sun Set on You) Tulsa, which gave the album the second half of its double-barreled title.
In other words, two years before he won creative control of his records, Jennings was already using the one freedom he had — an ear — to align himself with the writers who were about to change everything. He sang Kristofferson the way Kristofferson’s champions knew he should be sung: plainly, without varnish, letting the words land. Where Cash had made Sunday Morning Comin’ Down an anthem, Jennings made The Taker a character study, inhabiting the narrator so completely that the performance becomes the argument. This is a man who has been the taker, the song implies, and knows the type from the inside.
The record itself is economical to the point of audacity: two and a half minutes, acoustic guitars and a prominent, pulsing bass carrying a melody that ambles along almost jauntily while the lyric commits its quiet crimes. Nothing in the arrangement warns you. There is no minor-key menace, no dramatic sting — just a good-looking tune wearing a smile, which is of course exactly how a taker operates. Reviewers revisiting the album have singled out that contrast as the point where the later Waylon first becomes audible: the self-deprecating, morally unsparing storyteller of the outlaw years, present already in embryo inside a conventional RCA production. Jennings would spend the next decade making records that sounded freer than this one. It is not clear he ever made one that was slyer.
RCA released The Taker as a single ahead of the album, and country radio — whatever its qualms about the lyric — played it into the Top 5 of the Hot Country Singles chart. The album followed it to No. 12 on the country albums chart, a solid commercial showing for a record whose contents were, in retrospect, a manifesto in progress.
The Song in the Outlaw Story
What The Taker means in Jennings’s career is best seen from a few years downstream. The outlaw movement is usually dated from the creative-control battles of 1972–73, from Honky Tonk Heroes and Wanted! The Outlaws. But the sensibility was already here in 1970: the suspicion of Nashville polish, the allegiance to a new generation of writers, the willingness to sing morally unresolved material and trust the audience with it. The Taker/Tulsa is routinely described as an early step toward Jennings’s independence, and the title track is the reason why — it is the sound of a singer choosing his material by instinct rather than by committee, and being proved right by the charts.
The personal threads ran forward, too. Kristofferson recorded The Taker himself on The Silver Tongued Devil and I in 1971, but Jennings had it first — as he had Lovin’ Her Was Easier — beginning a lifelong pattern in which the two men, later joined in the Highwaymen, treated each other’s catalogues as common property. Silverstein, meanwhile, kept writing for Jennings: he co-wrote A Long Time Ago with him for the 1978 album I’ve Always Been Crazy, the outlaw’s defining self-portrait. The cartoonist and the Rhodes scholar had found, in Waylon Jennings, the voice their kind of song required.
The Taker is not among Jennings’s biggest hits — it never reached No. 1, and it has no famous cover versions trailing behind it. But it may be the most revealing record of his pre-outlaw years, precisely because nothing about it should have worked within the system that released it: a cynical song, by two outsider writers, sung in the first person by its antihero, cut by an artist still officially under the thumb of the Nashville establishment. It worked anyway. Three years later, when Jennings finally seized control of his career outright, he was not becoming someone new. He was becoming, at last and in the open, the man who had sung The Taker.