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by: John Sprong
One By Willie: S5 E3: Booker T Jones on “Georgia On My Mind” on Apple Podcasts
To many Willie fans, both the casual and hardcore, his 1978 album Stardust is the best he ever made, and the reverence is well-earned. It’s the biggest-selling record of his career, spending a full ten years on Billboard’s country albums chart. It’s also an undeniably beautiful collection of songs and performances, quiet and contemplative and marked by Willie’s unmistakable affection for the music and his band. Simply put, it’s a perfect record. For all those reasons, it’s easy to forget that Stardust was the most radical move he ever made.
Think back to the year it came out. On the strength of such albums as Red Headed Stranger, Wanted! The Outlaws, and Waylon and Willie, Willie was at the forefront of the outlaw country revolution, and that’s what his label, Columbia Records, wanted to sell more of. But Willie had his own idea. He wanted to record a collection of standards from the American Songbook, and he planned to do so with R&B legend Booker T. Jones, one-time leader of the house band at Stax Records, adding in his Hammond B-3 organ and producing. Oh, and Willie saw no need to record it in a proper studio. He believed these songs he’d grown up loving as a kid would be better served by a more intimate setting; he didn’t want to capture them, he wanted to caress them. Thus was born Stardust.