They Called Us Outlaws

The trailer for a 12-hour mega documentary that cloverleafs in the X-ring of my musical world has dropped. The music of Waylon Jennings, the songwriting of Kris Kristofferson, Guy Clark, Billy Joe Shaver and second-generation artists like Steve Earle shaped me in the same way and at the same time as reading The Frontiersmen for the first time. The sound, the aesthetic, the ethos — and the excess — fit seamlessly with my frontier obsessions, and what they called “Outlaw” music has always been the soundtrack for, well, the whole works.

What happened in Austin and in Nashville in the late 1960s and early 1970s was nothing less than a tectonic shift in country music.

From Tennessee to Texas, musicians were breaking rules, flouting tradition, and accepted ways of making music and doing business in what would become the biggest game-changer of them all.

Presented in association with The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, “THEY CALLED US OUTLAWS – The Cosmic Cowboys, Honky Tonk Heroes & Rise of Redneck Rock” tells that story in a full-blown series of SIX feature documentary films created by Award-Winning and Critically Acclaimed filmmakers, Eric Geadelmann and Kelly Magelky. 

For all the books, magazine and newspaper articles, and television programs written and aired about the movement, none has given the artists and musicians who made it all happen the opportunity to tell their tale unvarnished.  Until now.  The creators are the main characters of the film, telling their stories in their own voices; along with a new breed of songsmiths and singers that share the outlaw ethos and are carrying it forward in a manner worthy of their heroes.

Mainstream country music in the late 1960s was defined by Chet Atkins, the Nashville Sound, and an assembly-line system of making hit records. Yet at the same time, country music’s biggest star, Johnny Cash, was digging deep into American folk roots and collaborating with Bob Dylan, an ascending star named Waylon Jennings was fighting the Nashville system to win artistic control in the recording studio, and a studio janitor named Kris Kristofferson was writing powerful songs and making music against the grain that would lead the way in slowly but surely bringing change to a sound not known for change.

By the early 1970s, other musicians were beginning to take their cues from a successful songwriter and struggling performer named Willie Nelson, who had headed back to his home state Texas after his pig farm outside of Nashville burned down just before Christmas 1970.  Willie found solid ground in Austin, where a nascent folk music community that produced the singer Janis Joplin converged with an edgy form of rock and roll being created at a psychedelic music venue called the Vulcan Gas Company to create a whole new sound, whose focal point was a former National Guard Armory known as the Armadillo World Headquarters.  Austin became the staging area for the Dripping Springs Reunion, the first country music-oriented outdoors festival patterned after Woodstock, the Willie Nelson Fourth of July Picnics that followed, KOKE-FM the radio station to program progressive country music, and a new television series called Austin City Limits, culminating in the first platinum certified country music album, “Wanted! The Outlaws,” starring Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, the spiritual leaders of the movement and featuring a stunning singer/songwriter, Jessi Colter.

The pickers, the players, composers, and performers in these two emerging music scenes in two very different cities (egged on by an influential group of long-haired Southern California rock and rollers who injected twang into their sound and started dressing up in sparkly Nudie suits) altered the course of country music and forever changed people’s perceptions of music’s place in popular culture.   This is their story.