The record in context

Lonesome, On’ry and Mean was Waylon Jennings’ eighteenth studio album, released on RCA Victor in March 1973 — and the first record of his life that he produced and recorded himself. That fact is the whole story. For years, Jennings had been one of Nashville’s most frustrated talents: a singer with a baritone like weathered leather and a live show that filled dance halls, making studio records that sounded like neither, because his producers would not let him choose his own songs, play his own guitar, or use his own band. The fight for artistic freedom reached its breaking point in 1972, when his new manager, Neil Reshen, renegotiated his RCA contract on terms unprecedented for a Nashville recording artist — an advance of around seventy-five thousand dollars, an eight percent royalty rate, his own custom WGJ label imprint with his wife Jessi Colter, and the freedom to produce his own records wherever he wanted. RCA had offered him the same five percent deal he had been stuck with since 1965, with a five-thousand-dollar bonus attached to another five years of obedience. He walked away from the table, and Reshen walked him back with power. In late 1972, with that new contract in hand, Jennings began recording Lonesome, On’ry and Mean — and for the first time, the man making the record was the man whose name was on the cover.

The title song came from an outsider, which was fitting. Steve Young was born on July 12, 1942, in Newnan, Georgia, and he never fit comfortably inside any branch of American music — he absorbed gospel, country, blues, folk, and rock and called the mixture “Southern music,” while record companies kept trying to put it on a shelf. He had already written “Seven Bridges Road,” the song that would make the Eagles sound heavenly, and he had written and recorded “Lonesome, On’ry and Mean” himself before Waylon ever heard it. Young’s own version was devastating; Waylon’s would be transcendent. When Waylon took the song and made it the title track of his 1973 album, it sounded less like a cover than a declaration — Steve Young had written the words, and Waylon Jennings used them to name a new identity. Waylon’s admiration for the man ran deep: he once called Young “the second greatest country music singer behind George Jones, he has no idea how great he is.” It was the highest praise the notoriously unsparing Texan ever gave a fellow singer, and it told you everything about where Waylon thought real country music lived — outside the system, with the renegades.

The record’s reputation has only grown. The AllMusic review by Thom Jurek calls Lonesome, On’ry and Mean “the quintessential Waylon Jennings outlaw record,” noting that “Waylon produced the set — the first unfettered by the bonds of RCA — with his own band, and the results are nothing less than electrifying,” and concluding that the album was “the first seriously pitched battle in the 1970s country music wars.” It was the third in a series of albums, after Good Hearted Woman and Ladies Love Outlaws, that established Jennings as one of the most prominent representatives of the outlaw country movement — but it was the first where the independence was total. Steve Young himself would be championed by Jennings in the years that followed: signed to RCA in 1976, he cut the outlaw-era landmarks Renegade Picker and No Place to Fall, and Jennings took him on tour as his opening act. Young died in Nashville on March 17, 2016, at the age of 73, remembered as a songwriter’s songwriter and a country-rock pioneer. The title song he gave Waylon became the signature tune that set the singer off on the outlaw trail — and it is still sung at every Waylon Jennings tribute worth its name. At Waylon’s own memorial, it was Travis Tritt who sang it, a measure of how completely the song had passed from one man’s record into the genre’s bloodstream.

Listen closely

Start with the title track, and listen to what Waylon does with someone else’s confession. Steve Young’s original is raw and haunted, a man alone with a hard truth about himself. Waylon’s version is an anthem. “On a greyhound bus, Lord, I’m travelin’ this morning,” he begins, and from the first line the song is bigger than one man’s loneliness — it is a condition, a way of being, a flag planted. The arrangement drives where Young’s drifted: the band pushes the beat forward, the bass walks with purpose, and Waylon’s baritone turns “lonesome, ornery and mean” from a self-indictment into a credo. Listen to how he bites off “mean” — not cruel, but unmanageable, the sound of a man telling Nashville exactly what it is getting. Young’s version asks for sympathy. Waylon’s does not ask for anything. That transformation — from devastation to transcendence, as the critics put it — is the entire outlaw movement in one performance: take the truth as the outsiders wrote it, and sing it like you own the building.

Then listen to the lyric as a self-portrait, because every line of “Lonesome, On’ry and Mean” fits the man who sang it in 1973 like a tailored suit. The greyhound bus, the cheap motels, the woman who tried to love him and the road that would not let her — this was not fiction. Waylon Jennings had been born in Littlefield, Texas, in 1937; he had been a teenage disc jockey in Lubbock spinning records at KLLL; he had been Buddy Holly’s bass player on the Winter Dance Party tour of 1959, the tour that ended in the Iowa cornfield that took Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper; he had spent the 1960s bouncing between Phoenix nightclubs and Nashville studios, making records by committee. By 1973 he had lived every verse of the song twice over. When he sings it, there is no distance between the narrator and the singer, and that is why the record electrified people. The Nashville Sound had spent a decade smoothing the rough edges off country singers. Here was a singer insisting that the rough edges were the point.

Listen next to the sound of the album as a whole, because the production is the message. This is the first record Waylon made with his own band, the Waylors, under his own authority, and you can hear the liberation in every track. The records RCA had been making for him were careful — session players, string sections, arrangements approved upstairs. Lonesome, On’ry and Mean is none of those things. It is lean, live-feeling, and seamless in its execution: the band plays like men who have done these songs on stage a hundred times, because they have. The album even makes room for a Johnny Cash composition among its tracks, a quiet nod from one restless giant to another — outlaws recognizing each other across the aisle. Compare the consistency of this record with the patchwork quality of Waylon’s late-1960s LPs and the change is startling. For the first time, a Waylon Jennings album sounds like a Waylon Jennings show. That had been the whole fight, and he had won it.

Finally, listen for the record’s place in history, because it is the foundation stone. Together with Honky Tonk Heroes, recorded almost back to back in the same burst of newfound creative control, Lonesome, On’ry and Mean proved that self-produced, musician-driven country music could be made and released by a major label — even if the label had to be dragged along. Decades later, when Vinyl Me, Please assembled its vinyl box set of Waylon’s outlaw-era RCA albums, it opened the collection with this record, skipping Honky Tonk Heroes entirely — a curatorial choice that tells you how the era is now understood. The hits would come later: “I’m a Ramblin’ Man” in 1974, “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way” in 1975, the platinum triumph of Wanted! The Outlaws in 1976. But the war was won here, in March 1973, on an album whose title was a warning and whose sound was a promise. Lonesome, ornery, and mean — and, at last, free.