OUTLAW WANTED !

* REWARD *

If you have seen or know the whereabouts of this outlaw please contact this site immediately !

Well, that outlaw has jumped bail and turned up missing in my CD collection, and this desperado is gettin' ornery. It's not often I misplace a CD, but life has been hectic lately and I'm lookin' at about a thousand CD's so there's a stray in the herd and I'm out to get 'er back in the fold.

I've been listening to this CD [and its counterpart by Billy Joe Shaver Old Five and Dimers Like Me shown below] since its release in 1973. While it wasn't the first rock based country album, it was the first by an established Nashville country artist. The young Rock audience had recently been softened up to country influence by the likes of Gram Parsons and The Flying Burrito Brothers and The Byrds, Emmy Lou Harris, The New Riders of the Purple Sage, The Allman Brothers, up and comers like Jerry Jeff Walker, and Kris Kristofferson, and of course Doug Sahm and Dylan. Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis had been around for a long time breaking the rules, and Buck Owens had earlier introduced a pretty rockin' 'Bakersfield sound'. But this was the time for it all to come together - and it did with Honky Tonk Heroes an album of songs written completely by Billy Joe Shaver. The dues had been paid - it was time to cash in !


In later years Cash, Jennings, Kristofferson, and Nelson would team up touring and recording as The Highwaymen, and though Cash and Jennings have passed on Kris, Willie, and Billy Joe continue to carry on the legacy.

Honky Tonk Heroes was not released as a CD until '99 but remains a great milepost from which to trace country and rock backward and forward.

I'll be forced to drag out my vinyl copy of the album till the CD shows up I guess.