Outlaw Book Review

Michael Streissguth offers insight into the experiences and thoughts of three influential and successful country music artists with immense detail in, Outlaw. The story collects how Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson came to be successful in Nashville and the struggles they had along the way. It included various quotes, memories, and assorted bits of philosophical and biographical believes shared from interviews and acquired research. Outlaw is more than a peculiar, captivating assortment of biographical facts. It is unique because the book brings in the voices of various stars of country and the renegades of Nashville, which add texture and context. Producers, songwriters, and musical acquaintances supply first-person accounts…show more content…
He arrived in Nashville as a young, neat, and carefully groomed country singer who, while recognized by some, never really caught on until he returned, in the late 1960's to Texas, where the Austin music scene was just beginning to emerge. He allowed his hair to grow long and began writing and performing a large number of songs which were recorded by others and, as he set out on his never ending bus tour, became a recognized character whose persona reflected the merger of cowboy values with the hippy counter-culture which was born out in his well known use of marijuana. When he returned to Nashville, he had sufficient audience to demand and get the right to record with his own traveling band in his own idiosyncratic style. Introducing his audience to re-styled pop classics as well as his own compositions, he forged a huge career. Kris Kristofferson was born in Brownsville, Texas in 1936. He was the son of a career air force officer who moved frequently. He settled in Southern California where he was recognized as an athlete and scholar. Graduating with honors from Pomona College, he studied at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship. Later, as an army helicopter pilot, he began song-writing and performing. His break out hit, “Me and Bobby McGee,” propelled him to a career as a song writer and later increasingly polished performer. His good looks and ironic, laid back personality also brought him to Hollywood, where he experienced…show more content…
“Nashville,” writes a New York jazz critic in town on assignment, “is a pallid, tasteless town.” (9) The critic, Streissguth writes, went on to attack “the quality of Nashville’s food, urging visiting New Yorkers to bring their own canned goods because the city’s restaurant fare soured the stomach.”(9) With a few notable exceptions, country music culture has been provoking these sorts of patronizing, casually repulsed responses from the start. These so called “hillbillies” or “poor white trash” were, the “great majority, probably 95 percent, can neither read nor write English. Theirs is a community all to themselves. [They are] illiterate and ignorant, with the intelligence of morons.” (14) The Outlaws were among the exceptions. They may have been white trash, but they weren’t illiterate or ignorant. Albums like Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger (1975), Jenning’s Dreaming My Dreams (1976), and the compilation Wanted! The Outlaws (1976) were noteworthy favorites, chart topping cultural events; mellow, backwoods dispatches that nevertheless sounded progressive and managed to captivate the general record buying public in a way that few country acts ever had. The artists live on “the border between conformity and the outlaw life.” (123) They were evidence that the counterculture had finally breached the South and had begun influencing even its most native forms, a rare period of overlap, it seemed, between