RCA Nashville chief Jerry Bradley did not set out to make a statement. He set out to sell records. In early 1975, his label was moving roughly 250,000 copies of a Waylon Jennings album, and Willie Nelson had just walked into Autumn Sound Studios in Garland, Texas, with his touring band and recorded a concept album so spare that Columbia's own people thought it was a demo. When Red Headed Stranger came out in May 1975 and went to number one on the country chart, eventually selling more than two million copies, Bradley saw an opening. The result, released January 12, 1976, was Wanted! The Outlaws, the first country album ever certified platinum, and one of the most instructive crossover stories in the genre's history, because the crossover happened from the inside.
Bradley went all in on the outlaw concept, hiring Rolling Stone's Chet Flippo to pen liner notes and looking to a Time Life book about the American West as inspiration for the album's iconic cover, which featured photographs of Colter, Glaser, Jennings, and Nelson on a parched, bullet-riddled wanted poster. The music on that cover had mostly been recorded years earlier. The album mostly consisted of previously available material. Seven of the original album's eleven songs had been released in different versions as far back as 1970. Bradley compiled the tracks, with Jennings okaying the project on the condition that a couple of Glaser tracks be included. The four new recordings included the live duet of "Good Hearted Woman," recorded at Geno McCoslin's Western Place in Dallas, though Nelson's vocal was overdubbed onto the edited track afterward. The whole thing was, in a strict sense, a product of the Nashville system that the outlaw movement had spent years pushing against. In its cruelest twist of irony, the "outlaw" country movement, which relied on a "screw you Nashville" attitude, got its biggest boost from the Nashville machine embracing the concept.
That irony cuts deep, but it does not diminish what the album actually was. The outlaw movement had earned this moment the hard way. Jennings had been dubbed an outlaw in Nashville for demanding, and eventually getting, what rock groups had been used to having for years: the right to record the material he wanted, in the studio he wanted, with the musicians he wanted to use. He had released the seminal Honky Tonk Heroes in 1973, widely considered the first outlaw album, and This Time in 1974, recorded at Glaser Sound Studios, an independent studio in Nashville owned by brothers Chuck, Jim, and Tompall Glaser. Nelson's path ran parallel. Following the success of his recordings with Atlantic Records, coupled with the negotiating skills of his manager Neil Reshen, Nelson signed a contract with Columbia Records, the label that gave him total creative control over his works. The songs on Red Headed Stranger featured sparse arrangements, largely limited to Nelson's guitar, piano, and drums. Nelson presented the finished material to Columbia executives, who were dubious about releasing an album that they at first thought was a demo. Nashville producer Billy Sherrill wanted to overdub it. Nelson had complete creative control, and it was released without any further modifications. The music that Bradley was now packaging as outlaw mythology had been built by two men who had spent years refusing to let anyone touch it.
The term "outlaw" itself arrived by a similar sideways route. One plausible explanation for the term is its use by publicist Hazel Smith of Glaser Sound Studios to describe the music of Jennings and Tompall Glaser. In the 2003 documentary Beyond Nashville, Chet Flippo recalled, "The appearance and the marketing of the album were extremely important in making a Nashville album look hip for the first time." What Flippo understood, and what Bradley understood even if he came at it from a different angle, was that the audience for this music was not just country radio listeners. Both Waylon and Willie had artistic identities in contrast to staid Nashville, fitting in alongside other Texas-based acts in an upstart wave dubbed "progressive country," music that came out of that era's back-to-basics ethos and was scruffier than Nashville's assembly line. The rock audience was paying attention, and the wanted-poster cover gave them a visual grammar they already knew. Tompall Glaser stated in the documentary, "People were so hungry for something different than what was on the radio that they just ate it up. And it sold a million in the first two weeks and it went on up to five million."
The album's two singles told the story plainly. "Good Hearted Woman," co-written by Jennings and Nelson, peaked at number one on Billboard's Hot Country Singles and at number 25 on the Billboard Hot 100. The Jennings and Colter duet "Suspicious Minds" had originally been released in 1970, peaking at number 25 on the country chart, but upon its rerelease in 1976 shot up to number 2. Wanted! The Outlaws even reached number 10 on the Billboard 200, a pop-chart peak for everyone involved except Nelson. The album won the CMA's Album of the Year award, "Good Hearted Woman" was named CMA Single of the Year, and Jennings and Nelson earned the CMA Duo of the Year honor. The Nashville establishment, which had spent years trying to sand down these artists, was now handing them its highest prizes.
Jennings and Nelson began selling records in numbers previously associated with rock album sales, and the Nashville system gradually moved away from a producer-dominated order to one in which the artist shares power. That is the real legacy of Wanted! The Outlaws, more durable than any single or chart position. The album did not prove that outlaw country could survive the mainstream. It proved that the mainstream could be moved, and that the way to move it was not always a clean break from the machine but sometimes a leveraging of it. The song "Luckenbach, Texas," which followed the album's success in 1977, ensured that "Waylon and Willie and the boys" entered the mainstream lexicon as shorthand for a simple way of life, one that country music has pined for ever since. The outlaws had crossed over. The question their music kept asking, and that Tyler Childers and Colter Wall and Cody Jinks are still asking today, is whether the crossing changes the country you came from, or whether you carry it with you regardless.
