1980 · Behind the Songs

Willie Nelson — “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys”: The Movie Song That Rode to Number One

Written by Sharon Vaughn, cut first by Waylon Jennings, and carried to No. 1 by a Robert Redford film.

Some of Willie Nelson’s biggest records were songs he never wrote — and “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys” is one of the quietest of them. The ballad came from the pen of Sharon Vaughn, a songwriter far better known inside Nashville than outside it. And the first artist to cut it was not Willie at all: it was Waylon Jennings, who recorded it for “Wanted! The Outlaws,” the landmark 1976 compilation that helped give the outlaw movement its name.

Four years later, the song found its second life at the movies. Sydney Pollack’s 1979 film “The Electric Horseman,” starring Robert Redford as a faded rodeo champion reduced to pitching breakfast cereal, needed music with dust on it — and Nelson’s version of “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys” was chosen for the soundtrack. Columbia released it as a single in January 1980, backed with “Rising Star (Love Theme),” with production credited to Nelson and Pollack himself.

What followed was one of the stealthiest chart runs of Nelson’s career. The single became his fifth No. 1 on the country chart, holding the top spot for two weeks and spending fourteen weeks on the chart overall. It crossed over to No. 44 on the Billboard Hot 100, topped Canada’s country chart, and closed out 1980 at No. 13 on the year-end country tally. All of that for a song its singer had neither written nor recorded first — proof, if any were needed, that Willie could make almost anything sound like his own autobiography.

In a sense, it was his autobiography. The lyric sets a child’s wide-eyed dream of growing up to be a cowboy against the worn-down reality of the life itself, where the heroes turn out to be ordinary, aging men rather than silver-screen legends. Nelson, who had spent the 1970s turning his own road-worn image into myth, sang it like a man reading from his own diary. The Western Writers of America would later place it among the Top 100 Western songs of all time.

It remains one of the least fussed-over No. 1s in the Nelson catalog — no grand crossover moment, no concert-opener mythology, just a songwriter’s ballad, a film soundtrack, and a singer who understood exactly what the words meant. Sometimes the deepest cuts are the ones that were hits all along.