Friday, June 15, 2018

FRIDAY MUSIC: The Highwaymen, by JD

The Highwaymen were a country music 'supergroup' comprising four of the best singer/songwriters of the genre: Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Highwaymen_(country_supergroup)

Cash and Nelson have featured on this blog previously so a few words about the other two. Waylon Jennings is probably best known for being the Balladeer of the TV series 'Dukes OF Hazzard' Before then he was one of the artists in the (in)famous package tour of 1959 during which Buddy Holly died in a plane crash. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Music_Died Jennings gave up his seat on the light aircraft in favour of J P Richardson (the Big Bopper) as J P had flu and the tour bus was freezing cold. For a long time afterwards Jennings, by his own admission, felt a sense of guilt about what had happened.

Kris Kristofferson is something of a 'renaissance man' He was a Rhodes Scholar at Merton College where he earned a Blue for boxing. and played rugby for his college. He later joined the US Army and became a helicopter pilot and then flew helicopters servicing the oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico but all the while he wanted to be a songwriter. There is a famous story that he landed a helicopter on Johnny Cash's lawn in order to deliver some demo cassettes of his songs. Cash eventually recorded "Sunday Morning Coming Down" the first of many Kristofferson songs and the rest, as they say, is history!