The Highwaymen: Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson.
1. Highwayman
2. The Last Cowboy Song
3. Jim, I Wore A Tie Today
4. Big River
5. Committed To Parkview
6. Desperados Waiting For A Train
7. Deportee (Plane Wreck At Los Gatos)
8. Welfare Line
9. Against The Wind
10. The Twentieth Century Is Almost Over
www.BoulderCityReview
By Tanya Vece
Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson are forever cemented in Hoover Dam’s history. The four legendary singers, along with National Academy of Songwriters Lifetime Achievement Award recipient Jimmy Webb, all played a big role in the song “The Highwayman.”
Webb originally wrote “The Highwayman” for his 1977 album “El Mirage.” The song is about reincarnation and follows one man’s soul throughout four different times as he lives life as a highwayman, a sailor, a construction worker on the Hoover Dam and as a starship captain.
Webb told performingsongwriter.com the song was inspired by a vivid dream so real that it was destined for greatness. “I sat up in bed, sweating through my pajamas. Without even thinking about it, I stumbled out of bed to the piano and started playing ‘Highwayman.’ Within a couple of hours, I had the first verse.”
In the song, Webb references Boulder City, writing “I was a dam builder. Across the river deep and wide. Where steel and water did collide. A place called Boulder on the wild Colorado. I slipped and fell into the wet concrete below.”
Prior to writing “The Highwayman,” Webb composed songs for Elvis Presley, Barbra Streisand, Frank Sinatra, Art Garfunkel, Linda Ronstadt, and R.E.M. Webb also wrote the hit song “MacArthur Park,” which was recorded by Jennings in 1969 before being redone in 1978 as a disco tune by Donna Summer.
After “The Highwayman” didn’t gain success on “El Mirage,” Webb’s friend Glen Campbell decided to rerecord it. Capitol Records didn’t want Campbell to release the song, but Campbell believed in the song so much that he left Capitol Records after the company refused to record it. Like the wandering main character of the song, “The Highwayman” was about to be reborn.
Eight years after transitioning from dream to ink, Campbell played Webb’s “The Highwayman” for his friend Cash. Cash had formed an unnamed supergroup with Nelson, Jennings and Kristofferson. Campbell thought the four verses to “The Highwayman” would be perfect for the group to cover. Campbell also knew the unnamed quartet needed a proper song to mirror their outlaw country personas.
With four reincarnations of the same soul represented in “The Highwayman’s” lyrics, each singer took a verse. Nelson as the highwayman, Kristofferson as the sailor, Jennings as a builder of the Hoover Dam and Cash as the starship captain. Not only did the song work out perfectly for the group, the men adopted its title as the root of the super group’s name, The Highwaymen.
During their tenure as The Highwaymen, the quartet starred in a 1986 film titled “Stagecoach,” which filmed around the Arizona/Nevada desert border, not too far from Hoover Dam. Then, in 2005, Cash’s life, and part of his friendship with Jennings, was documented in the award-winning film “Walk the Line” starring my friend and actor Joaquin Phoenix as Cash. Jennings’ son, musician Shooter Jennings, portrayed his father in the film.
“The Highwayman” ended up winning a Grammy Award for best country song. The single became such a classic country staple that Nelson and Kristofferson revived it, performing it at the 2014 Grammy Awards with Merle Haggard and Blake Shelton.
More recently, Rolling Stone declared “The Highwaymen” as one of the best supergroups of all-time next to Mad Season with Layne Staley (Alice in Chains) and Mike McCready (Pearl Jam).
Webb went on to become the only artist to receive Grammy Awards for music, lyrics and orchestration. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1986 and became its chairman in 2011. His book, “The Cake and the Rain: A Memoir,” was published this past April by St. Martin’s Press. It contains 352 pages of fascinating recollections and stories of peculiar events, like an epiphany during his teen years to speed to Las Vegas so he could meet Elvis.
Webb’s memoir is available in all major bookstores and on Amazon.com. You can follow Webb on Twitter at @RealJimmyWebb and review his tour dates at www.jimmywebb.com.
Tanya Vece is an entertainment and music writer who resides and volunteers in Boulder City. You can follow her adventures on Instagram @hollywoodwriter.
On February 10, 1986, “The HighwayMan” album, is certified gold for Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson
1. Highwayman
2. The Last Cowboy Song
3. Jim, I Wore A Tie Today
4. Big River
5. Committed To Parkview
6. Desperados Waiting For A Train
7. Deportee (Plane Wreck At Los Gatos)
8. Welfare Line
9. Against The Wind
10. The Twentieth Century Is Almost Over
From the Highwayman tour, in Aberdeen, Scotland 1992
The Highwaymen – Johnny Cash (left), Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson and Waylon Jennings
With this new limited edition eau de parfum scent, Laurie uses a scented language to express her passion for life, love, and the wanderlust that we all feel now and again.
“I’m evoking new beginnings with this perfume,” Laurie says. “I’d been listening to The Highwayman, a song sung by Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson… It’s a song about reincarnation and life’s changes and heartbreaks. That rambling, roaming change and the fluid nature of our lives is at the heart of this perfume.”
A winding road of citrus, berries, cedarwood, vanilla, and blue spruce.
“Highway” is a perfume that speaks to the romantic, restless part of all of us that longs to be swept away, to sit by an open fire in the Scottish highlands drinking fine whisky or making love under the stars on a gently swaying sail boat that’s dropped its anchor somewhere far from prying eyes. It’s learning to tango and rekindling the passion with your partner that’s been hidden away in your everyday life of diapers and dishes. It speaks to faraway lands and far away lifetimes and the promise that if we breathe deeply enough and are willing to risk everything that we think that we are, that we can recreate ourselves to become the very person that we’ve always longed to be.
I get that this is a whole lot of promise for one little bottle of perfume, but synergistically that’s the way that this scent works. Laurie Stern works only with the finest botanical essences and many of them are extremely rare and very very old, which is why her finest perfumes are limited editions. Most of them are accords that you’d never have the privilege of experiencing any other way. Her “Highway” is the story of the long, passionate and winding road of life, as told by one of the most skilled perfumers alive today and it’s impossible to smell it and not have it evoke a deep excitement and lust for life.
-BETH SCHREIBMAN GEHRING, Perfumerotica 2016
Other air dates, or at least here in Colorado:
www.pbs.org
Director and producer Jim Brown talks about the making of The Highwaymen: Friends Til The End, his admiration for the musicians’ camaraderie, passion for music and having a clear purpose in their careers. American Masters — The Highwaymen: Friends Til The Endpremieres nationwide Friday, May 27, 2016, at 9/8c on PBS (check local schedule) as part of the 30th anniversary season of THIRTEEN’s American Masters series, exploring how these men came together and the fruits of their historic collaboration.
www.cmt.com
by: Samantha Stephens
It’s Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson like you’ve never experienced them. That’s because this concert footage has never been seen before.
CMT has the video premiere of the super group’s performance of “Good Hearted Woman,” recorded live at the Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, New York, on March 14, 1990.
It’s all part of the new collection The Highwaymen Live — American Outlaws, a CD/DVD package arriving May 20 with previously unreleased concert performances from the legends.
In addition to the complete concert from their 1990 tour, the Columbia/Legacy package includes various performances at Farm Aid and a previously unreleased version of Cash and Jennings’ take on Bob Dylan’s “One Too Many Mornings.”
American Masters — The Highwaymen: Friends Till the End, a new feature-length documentary on the supergroup, will premiere May 27 on PBS.