Waylon Jennings may not have invented outlaw country, but with Honky Tonk Heroes he gave the movement its clearest distillation of purpose; its manifesto, its aesthetic framework, even its narrative vocabulary. Naturally, for a movement so rooted in myth-making, there’s an important backstory. Jennings, along with his pal Willie Nelson, was increasingly frustrated with the overly-conservative interventions of the Nashville overlords, inching toward a more rambunctious sound that wedded country storytelling with the defiant stance of rock and roll, the latter supplied by Jennings’s…
