![]() He kicked off the vamp and we just started playing.” Clement was known to dance around the studio control room when the song sounded right. “Basically, what he started playing was what we’d do on the road,” Reynolds said of the recording session, “If he started a song, sometimes it was just a vamp. In a studio nicknamed Hillbilly Central, Jennings pulled an envelope out of his pocket with lyrics he’d written the night before, and started in on his guitar. Jennings’s wolfish growl has a new life, but it also sounds like a band that’s played hundreds of dates, because that’s how they wrote it. There’s a swaggering muscularity to the song. Guitarist Billy Ray Reynolds’ electric is prominent right from the opening measures – “brought the guitars way up there” in the words of producer “Cowboy’ Jack Clement. Atkins had generally pushed the band out of the studio in favor of crack Nashville session players. Part of the freedom Jennings fought for wasn’t just for him, but for his band, the Waylors. “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way?” is the lead song on Dreaming My Dreams, the first Jennings album to sound like the music that drew crowds to see him live. What he did with that freedom was like nailing reformation theses to the doors of RCA Studio A. Jennings shouted “I want off the label!” down the hallways of the label offices, a negotiating tactic that wore a weary Atkins 1 down as he was preparing to resign his post, and Jennings won a new contract that gave him the freedom to choose where to record and with whom. Business-hours recording sessions didn’t fit Jennings any better than the shiny suits he foreswore for jeans and leather vests. Even in the early 1970s, all RCA Nashville artists were obligated to record at RCA Studios using RCA engineers. ![]() All that damn sand I swallowed in Texas was in my singing.” What earned Jennings his outlaw reputation, however, isn’t just that he challenged the primacy of the Nashville sound but Nashville’s way of doing business. That pop country sound didn’t suit Jennings, who said, “I was rougher than a goddamned corn cob. ![]() When asked what the sound of the Nashville Sound really was, Atkins replied, “money.”Ītkins tried to mold Waylon Jennings into a country star, but the mold broke around him. Harman was also on producer Owen Bradley’s A-Team of session musicians, which put him at the center of another ruckus raised over what was or wasn’t country: the sophisticated Nashville Sound that Bradley developed and was further propagated by Chet Atkins, a onetime session guitarist who became a star producer and RCA label executive. When the Opry hired a staff drummer in Buddy Harman in 1959, audible drums officially became permissible on country records. The Grand Ole Opry forbade drumkits for decades, for example, until Bob Wills’s popularity forced the issue in 1944. As with any genre or tribe, it’s easier to define yourself by what you’re not. What is country? It’s a question that country music often seems to ask itself. Tell me one more time just so's I'll understand ![]()
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