The Best Outlaw Country Albums of the '70s

Columbia executives heard the finished tapes and thought they were demos — Willie had cut the whole song-cycle fast and cheap at Autumn Sound in Garland, Texas, and refused to let the label sweeten it. Blue Eyes Crying In the Rain, a Fred Rose tune from 1945, became his first country number one with almost nothing on it: nylon-string guitar, his sister Bobbie's piano, air.

Nine of the ten songs are Billy Joe Shaver's, recorded after the writer threatened to fight Waylon in front of everybody unless he listened to them, and Tompall Glaser co-produced. Honky Tonk Heroes the song sways instead of kicking — Ralph Mooney's steel bending around a loose bar-band shuffle that Nashville's session rules would have squared off. The album that turned the outlaw pose into a repertoire.

Jerry Wexler signed Nelson to Atlantic's short-lived country division and let him cut whatever he wanted; the copyright line on this page still reads Atlantic Recording Corp. Whiskey River, a Johnny Bush song, gets its definitive studio reading here — horns and gospel piano behind a voice finally free to phrase behind the beat. He wrote the title track in a hotel bathroom, and it sounds exactly that offhand.

A divorce told twice by design — the woman's side of the record first, the man's second — cut at Muscle Shoals Sound with Jerry Wexler producing for Atlantic. Bloody Mary Morning pushes the Muscle Shoals rhythm section to bluegrass pace under a lyric about flying out of Houston hungover. Spotify's plain-titled copy is the 2005 Warner transfer; no earlier digital edition exists there.

Cowboy Jack Clement produced, and it became the first Waylon album to top the country chart. Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way answers its own question with a phased guitar riff and a four-on-the-floor stomp country radio had no slot for in 1975 — it became the movement's rhetorical anthem anyway. The closer tips its hat to Bob Wills, hedging nothing.

Four standards arrived on one Monument debut — Me and Bobby McGee, Help Me Make It Through the Night, For the Good Times and Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down — written by a Rhodes scholar who had swept floors at Columbia's Nashville studio a few years earlier. Fred Foster produced. The croak on Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down is the point: the demo-rough voice Nashville called unreleasable became the movement's aesthetic.

Steve Young wrote the title song, and Waylon's road band the Waylors play like men let out of a cage — the first full flex of his creative-control win inside RCA. Lonesome, On'ry and Mean rides a growling bass figure and a backbeat closer to Memphis than Music Row. Spotify carries only the Expanded Edition; no plain 1973 copy exists there, so this is best available.

Kris Kristofferson produced these Monument sessions for the writer whose catalog Waylon was cutting wholesale the same year. Black Rose — 'the devil made me do it the first time, the second time I done it on my own' — is the Shaver method in one couplet, sung flat and plainspoken against a loping band that never crowds him. The source code for Honky Tonk Heroes sits one shelf up; Spotify's copy appends two bonus cuts to the original eleven.

Capitol released it with her husband Waylon Jennings and Ken Mansfield producing, and I'm Not Lisa — written by Colter alone — went to number one country and crossed into the pop top five. Her own piano opens the single, one small figure repeated like a door chime before the strings arrive. The only woman in the movement's inner circle, and in 1975 the one with the biggest crossover hit.

Monument issued it in 1972 with Rita Coolidge credited on two duets, and Why Me — a gospel confession with a congregation-sized chorus behind it — became Kristofferson's only number one country single as a performer. The title track is 'owed to John Prine' right in its subtitle. His voice stays a ruin throughout, which is why the hymn lands: no performance in it, just the plea.

Steve Goodman wrote You Never Even Called Me by My Name — John Prine helped and refused the credit — and Coe's spoken final verse piles mama, trains, trucks, prison and rain into the 'perfect country and western song' as a dare. Columbia released it in 1975, and he sings the rest of the record straighter than the outlaw cartoon suggests: barroom baritone over unhurried Nashville playing.

Ed and Patsy Bruce wrote Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow up to Be Cowboys, and this duet reading topped the country singles chart and took the 1979 Grammy for country duo vocal. Two voices that phrase nothing alike — Waylon square on the beat, Willie floating behind it — and the friction is the pleasure. RCA's biggest outlaw seller; Spotify's plain-titled copy tags half its tracks Remastered.

Billy Sherrill — the definitive Nashville system producer the outlaws defined themselves against — ran these Epic sessions, and David Allan Coe wrote the hit. Take This Job and Shove It went to number one and spawned a movie; Paycheck half-talks the verses like a man rehearsing his exit speech at the time clock. Spotify misdates the album 1975; the record actually came out in 1977.

Border case, flagged: Stewart was an RCA honky-tonk singer rather than an Austin insurgent, but the outlaw shelf has claimed this record since 1975 and the wildness on it is real. Drinkin' Thing rides his hiccuping vibrato — a warble no producer could teach — over barroom piano, and She's Actin' Single went to number one that spring. Roy Dea produced.