Every outlaw needs a moment when the fight stops being an argument and starts being a fact. For Waylon Jennings, that moment arrived in June 1974, when a short, plainspoken song he had written five years earlier — a song an RCA producer had once dismissed as no good — climbed to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart. This Time was the first chart-topper of Jennings’s career, and it did not come out of the Nashville system he had been battling. It came out of a borrowed studio across town, co-produced by Willie Nelson, on an album recorded in an atmosphere closer to a fraternity house than a hit factory. The song itself lasts barely two and a half minutes. What it proved changed country music.
A Song in a Drawer
Jennings wrote This Time around 1969, in the middle of his long apprenticeship at RCA Victor. He had been with the label since 1965, recording under the Nashville Sound regime of Chet Atkins and his successors: three-hour sessions, house musicians, material chosen by committee. He had scored respectable hits in that system, but he had not been allowed to be himself in it. When he played the new song for whoever was producing him at the time, the verdict was blunt. As Jennings recalled years later in the authorized video biography Renegade Outlaw Legend: “I wrote that song five years before and whoever was producing me then at RCA said it was no good. I was going through some old tapes and happened to find it.”
The lyric he rescued from those tapes is a masterpiece of understatement. Its narrator is a man looking at a love that has worn itself out — a relationship that has tested his patience once too often — and promising, with more sorrow than anger, that this time will not be like the last time. There is no shouting in it, no revenge fantasy. It is the sound of a door closing quietly. Jennings knew something about worn-out marriages: by 1974 he had been divorced three times, and the perspective in the song is that of a man itemizing what repeated failure teaches you. His fourth marriage, to Jessi Colter, would last the rest of his life — but the song belongs to the man who had not yet figured it out.
Part of what makes the song so effective is its refusal to decorate. Where the Nashville Sound would have wrapped a lyric like this in strings and a choir, Jennings’s eventual recording leaves it almost bare: a steady, unhurried rhythm, Mooney’s steel sighing between the lines, and that baritone sitting low and level, as if the singer were too tired to raise his voice. The title phrase does the work of a whole argument. Each return of it carries a little more finality, until the listener understands that the promise is not really addressed to the woman at all — it is addressed to the man singing it, a vow he is making to himself about himself. Songs about leaving are usually sung by people still hoping to be stopped. This one is sung by a man already gone.
The Long Road to a Drawer Song
To understand why the song sat unrecorded for five years, it helps to remember what Jennings’s career looked like in 1969. He was a respected but contained RCA artist, a former Buddy Holly protégé and Phoenix club star whom Nashville had sanded into a countrypolitan vocalist. His records sold steadily; his singles reached the middle of the charts; and the producers who ran his sessions regarded his own songwriting with indifference. The rejected This Time was one casualty of that indifference among many. What changed was not the song but the balance of power. Jennings’s frustration boiled through the early 1970s as he watched younger songwriters — Kristofferson, Shaver, Willie Nelson home from Atlantic — remaking country music in their own image. His 1972 renegotiation, engineered by Reshen, was the turning point: suddenly the man who had been told his song was no good controlled his own sessions. When he went through the old tapes in 1973, he was not just looking for material. He was auditing the years when other people had decided for him, and reclaiming what they had thrown away.
Hillbilly Central
By the time Jennings rediscovered the song, he had already won the contractual war. In 1972, with the help of his manager Neil Reshen, he had renegotiated his RCA deal and won artistic autonomy: his own band, his own material, his own production. But autonomy on paper was not autonomy in practice. He had agreed to keep recording at RCA’s Nashville studios, where, as he wrote in his autobiography, the engineers were constantly calling upstairs to executive Jerry Bradley, reporting everything he did. RCA had even delayed the release of his 1973 album Honky Tonk Heroes. Fed up, Jennings moved his next album out of the building entirely.
The destination was Glaser Sound, Tompall Glaser’s studio at 916 Nineteenth Avenue South — “Hillbilly Central.” Willie Nelson signed on as co-producer. In Michael Striessguth’s Outlaw: Waylon, Willie, Kris, and the Renegades of Nashville, the studio is remembered as an outlaw safe haven: doors propped open, Willie lazing on the front lawn, Waylon haunting the offices at three in the morning, sessions burning into the small hours before everyone peeled out in search of pinball machines, drinks, and greasy food. The first song Jennings cut there, in October 1973, was J.J. Cale’s Louisiana Women, engineered by Kyle Lehning. Glaser later marveled at the difference: “You just can’t believe how different everything sounded when he moved from RCA. The bottom was fat and big again… You could hear the drum, it wasn’t a little tick in the back. It was marvellous.” Jennings agreed: “There was a freedom there that I didn’t have any place else.”
The Album Around It
The album, also called This Time, was Jennings’s twentieth studio LP, released by RCA Victor in 1974. It is a quieter record than its predecessor — AllMusic’s Stephen Thomas Erlewine called it “a subdued, understated album unlike anything in his catalog” — and it documents a community as much as a singer. Nelson contributed four songs, all drawn from his own concept album Phases and Stages, released earlier the same year: Pick Up the Tempo, Heaven or Hell, It’s Not Supposed to Be That Way, and Walkin’. Billy Joe Shaver, whose songs had powered Honky Tonk Heroes, returned with Slow Rollin’ Low. And the album marked the first time Jennings recorded a song by Miriam Eddy — Mona — the ex-wife of Duane Eddy who had renamed herself Jessi Colter and become Jennings’s wife.
The personnel tells its own story. Ralph Mooney’s steel guitar anchors the sound, as it would throughout Jennings’s great decade. Behind the drums on some tracks sat Jerry Allison, and on guitar Sonny Curtis — both of them former Crickets, bandmates of Buddy Holly, the friend whose death in 1959 Jennings had never stopped carrying with him. The outlaw future was being built, in part, by survivors of rock and roll’s first tragedy.
The title track is the only song on the album Jennings wrote alone, and it opens the record. At 2:25 it is over almost before it begins — just that level baritone, the Waylors’ lean groove, and a promise repeated until it sounds like a verdict.
Number One
RCA released This Time as a single in April 1974. In June it reached No. 1 on the Hot Country Singles chart — the first chart-topper of Jennings’s career, arriving nearly a decade after he signed with the label. The irony was rich enough to savor: the breakthrough was a song the company’s own production line had rejected, recorded in defiance of the company’s studio, under a contract the company had been forced to renegotiate. The album followed it to No. 4 on the country albums chart, Jennings’s best showing there since 1967. Later the same year, I’m a Ramblin’ Man gave him his second No. 1, and the pattern of the decade was set: by the time he was done, Jennings had topped the country singles chart again and again, solo and in duets, becoming one of the defining hitmakers of the era. Every one of those runs started here, with a song pulled out of a drawer.
The Long Echo
This Time has stayed in print and in the story. When the album was reissued in 1999, it carried five bonus tracks of Jennings singing songs associated with Buddy Holly — That’ll Be the Day, the Paul Anka-penned It Doesn’t Matter Anymore, and a medley of Holly classics — an acknowledgment of where his music began, appended to the album where his independence began. In 2024, fifty years after the single’s release, American Songwriter marked the anniversary of the song as the starting gun of Jennings’s years as an outlaw hitmaker.
It remains the purest distillation of what Jennings fought for. Not a manifesto, not a duet with Willie, not a piece of borrowed songwriting brilliance — just his own rejected song, sung his own way, in a room full of friends, going to No. 1. The Nashville system had told him the song was no good. This time, the charts answered.