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TOMPALL GLASER DID NOT NEED TO OUTSING WAYLON JENNINGS. HE GAVE WAYLON A STUDIO WHERE RCA COULD NOT TELL HIM HOW TO MAKE A RECORD. By the early 1970s, Tompall Glaser was already tired of watching Nashville decide what country singers could sound like. He and his brothers had made money in publishing. They had written songs, cut records, worked sessions, and watched the same system over and over: the label owned the room, the producer ran the session, the artist showed up and sang what everybody else had already decided. So in 1970, the Glaser brothers opened Glaser Sound Studios on 16th Avenue. It did not look like a revolution from the outside. It was just another building in Nashville. But musicians started calling it Hillbilly Central. Songwriters could keep more control of their work there. Singers could bring in their own bands. The room belonged to people who had spent too long being told that country music had to be cleaned up before it could sell. Waylon Jennings was one of them. By 1973, Waylon was fighting RCA over how and where he could record. He had spent years making polished Nashville records with studio musicians and label rules around him. Then he moved sessions for This Time out of RCA’s own studio and into Tompall’s place. RCA did not like it. The label had an agreement with the engineers’ union: RCA artists were supposed to record in RCA rooms with RCA engineers. Waylon had gone around the whole arrangement. For a while, the record was held up. Then RCA gave in. Waylon stayed at Glaser Sound for Dreaming My Dreams. That was where he cut “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way.” The record went to No. 1. The album became the first country LP certified gold, and Waylon won CMA Male Vocalist of the Year. Waylon did not break Nashville’s rules by himself. Tompall had already built him a room where the rules could be ignored.

Country Music

JERRY JEFF WALKER GOT LOCKED IN A NEW ORLEANS JAIL FOR THE NIGHT. THE OLD MAN IN THE CELL WOULD NOT GIVE THE POLICE HIS NAME — SO JERRY JEFF GAVE HIM ONE THAT LASTED FOREVER. In 1965, Jerry Jeff Walker was still drifting more than building a career. He had left home in New York, gone AWOL from the National Guard, changed his name, played wherever somebody would let him, and spent enough time on buses and street corners to know how quickly a night could go wrong. Then one night in New Orleans, he got picked up for public intoxication and landed in the First Precinct jail. Inside the cell was an older Black man with silver hair, worn-out shoes, and a ragged shirt. The man had been arrested in a police sweep after a murder case nearby. When the officers asked his name, he would not give them one. He only said people called him “Bojangles.” The men in the cell started talking. The old man told stories. He talked about dancing in minstrel shows, about travelling, about the dog he had lost. At some point, the jailer told him to dance for the room. He did. Jerry Jeff remembered the soft shoe. He remembered the old man jumping high in a cell full of drunks and strangers. Then he remembered him sitting back down and talking about the dog, the one part of the story that made the whole room go quiet. A few years later, Walker turned that night into “Mr. Bojangles.” The song came out in 1968. Then the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band recorded it and took it into the Top 10. Nina Simone sang it. Sammy Davis Jr. sang it. Bob Dylan sang it. More than a hundred artists eventually recorded some version of a man who may never have known his name had left that jail.

Country Music

THE MAN WHO TAUGHT TOM T. HALL TO PLAY GUITAR DIED BEFORE THE SONG ABOUT HIM WENT TO NO. 1. Before Tom T. Hall became “The Storyteller,” before Nashville knew him as the man who could turn an ordinary neighbor, a waitress, a jail cell, or a small-town memory into a country record, he was a boy in Olive Hill, Kentucky. One of the people shaping that boy was a local musician named Lonnie Easterly. Easterly was not famous. He was not a Nashville man. But he could play guitar, and to young Tom, that was enough to make him larger than life. Hall later remembered him as an early musical mentor — the kind of older man a barefoot kid watched closely because every chord seemed to open another door. Years passed. Tom left Kentucky. He joined the Army. He wrote songs. He fought his way into Nashville. Then, in 1971, he reached back toward the hill where he had grown up and wrote about the man who had first made music feel real. He called him Clayton Delaney. The name was changed, but the memory was not. “The Year That Clayton Delaney Died” told the story of a gifted local musician whose life had gone wrong, and of the boy who could not understand why somebody he admired had disappeared from the world. In the song, the narrator does not stand in front of the town and give a speech. He goes out into the woods alone and cries. Not grief as a grand performance. Grief as something private. A boy walking away from everybody else because the first man who showed him how to make a guitar speak was gone. Released in July 1971, “The Year That Clayton Delaney Died” became Tom T. Hall’s second No. 1 country single. It held the top spot for two weeks and turned one forgotten Kentucky musician into one of the most enduring figures in country-song memory. Lonnie Easterly never became a star. He never stood under the lights. He never saw his name on a marquee. But Tom T. Hall took the man who had once taught him how to play, changed his name, carried him into a studio, and made sure the whole country would remember him. The song was called “The Year That Clayton Delaney Died.” But underneath it was a simpler truth. Tom T. Hall never forgot the man who first handed him a guitar.

Country Music

DOCTORS ERASED MOST OF TOWNES VAN ZANDT’S CHILDHOOD MEMORIES. A FEW YEARS LATER, HE SAT DOWN WITH A GUITAR AND WROTE “WAITIN’ AROUND TO DIE.” Before he became the Texas songwriter Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard would carry to No. 1, Townes Van Zandt had been headed somewhere else. He came from a prominent Fort Worth family. His parents imagined law school, politics, a life with a desk and a future that made sense on paper. Then college started coming apart. Townes was drinking hard in Boulder. He was depressed, restless, and doing things that frightened his family. After he was brought back to Texas, they admitted him to a hospital in Galveston. Doctors gave him months of insulin shock treatment. Later accounts said much of his long-term memory was gone. His mother said allowing the treatment was the biggest regret of her life. Townes went back to Houston. He enrolled in a pre-law program. He married. He had an apartment, a young family, and another chance to become the man everybody had expected. Then he started writing songs. One of the first was “Waitin’ Around to Die.” It was not the kind of song a young law student was supposed to bring home. It was about drifting, drinking, getting beaten down, meeting a friend on the road, and finding out the friend was waiting to die too. Townes started playing coffeehouses for almost nothing. He met Mickey Newbury, who heard the songs and sent him toward Nashville. By the end of the 1960s, he was making records full of characters who sounded like they had already lost their way before the first verse began. Years later, Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard took “Pancho and Lefty” to No. 1. But before the songs reached Nashville, before the records, before the long nights and the legend, there was a young man in Texas trying to build a new life after a hospital had taken much of the old one away. He did not become a lawyer. He picked up a guitar and started writing about people who could not find their way home.