What it was was a generational shift, and not one that Music Row wanted. In the late sixties, Nashville country music was defined by the string-swelling, countrypolitan gloss of Tammy Wynette and Glen Campbell. RCA executive Chet Atkins was a chief architect of the Nashville sound, and when people asked him to define it, he liked to jingle the change in his pockets and say, “It’s the sound of money.” No tweaks to the formula were tolerated. Even Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, two Texas boys with ideas of their own, were forced to fit the mold. They recorded for RCA, and their records sounded exactly the way Atkins wanted. The rest of the nation had less success maintaining the old order. In cities like San Francisco, the counterculture was popular culture. Hair was long, love was free, and dope smoking was considered tame. The music ranged from the psychedelic extremes of Jefferson Airplane to the rootsier jangle of Creedence Clearwater Revival, with acts like Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead straddling the two. Nashville, with its pompadours, whiskey, and quiet reliance on truck-driver amphetamines, had no use for any of it. When Los Angeles bands like the Flying Burrito Brothers started playing country rock, winking at Nashville in Nudie suits festooned with rhinestone pot leaves, Music Row responded with disgust. Halfway between the coasts sat Texas, where hundreds of honky-tonks functioned as Nashville’s farm system. But that music belonged to the old guard. Texas kids were more interested in the state’s thriving folkie circuit. The hub was a Dallas listening room called the Rubaiyat, from which young singer-songwriters like Steve Fromholz and B. W. Stevenson sallied forth to coffeehouses around the state. The music they played was distinct from the protest songs of Greenwich Village. Texas folk was rooted in cowboy, Tejano, and Cajun songs, in Czech dance halls and East Texas blues joints. It was dance music. And when the Texas folkies started gigging with their rock-minded peers, they found a truer sound than the L.A. country rockers. There was nothing ironic about the fiddle on Fromholz’s epic “Texas Trilogy.” It’s impossible to pinpoint the exact moment when that sound and scene coalesced into something cohesive enough to merit a name, but then again none of the labels people came up with—cosmic cowboy, progressive country, redneck rock, and, ultimately, outlaw country—made everyone happy. Still, the pivotal year was 1972, and the place was Austin. Liquor by the drink had finally become legal in Texas, which prompted the folkies to migrate from coffeehouses to bars, turning their music into something you drank to. Songwriters moved to town, like Michael Murphey, a good-looking Dallas kid who’d written for performers such as the Monkees and Kenny Rogers in L.A. He was soon joined by Jerry Jeff Walker, a folkie from New York who’d had a radio hit when the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band covered his song “Mr. Bojangles.” In March, Willie played a three-day country festival outside town, the Dripping Springs Reunion, that would grow into his Fourth of July Picnics. Then he too moved to Austin and started building an audience that didn’t look like or care about any Nashville ideal. By the time the scene started to wind down, in 1976, Willie and Austin were known worldwide. To say that Nashville eventually got hip to what was happening would be too kind. Rather, the industry identified a chance to make money and came up with the “outlaw” label, which now applies to one more subset of the Nashville establishment. While it rightly conjures images of Willie, Waylon, and the boys, other stars who made careers off it, like Hank Williams Jr., couldn’t have had less in common with hippie poets like Murphey and Fromholz. But something more than marketing persists in the label. It was coined to describe country songwriters who wouldn’t conform to traditional strictures, who insisted on making music that sounded right to them. What follows are their stories of how they pulled that off. Country Stars and Folkies As the seventies began, there were two major schisms bearing down on Austin’s budding country music scene. The first was political. The cultural upheaval of the sixties was still going full force, particularly in Texas, even in a city that considered itself as forward thinking as Austin did. The second related more narrowly to the music. The only route to success for young Texas country songwriters went through Nashville, a stubbornly conservative industry town considered every bit as reactionary as the Nixon administration. Even Kris Kristofferson, a Brownsville-born Rhodes Scholar who followed the traditional path—he worked as a janitor at a Nashville recording studio before he started collecting number ones in 1970—failed to fit in. His writing was considered too esoteric. More to the point, his hair was too long. BILL BENTLEY wrote for the Austin Sun, a biweekly newspaper. I was in school in Georgetown in ’68 and would come down to the Vulcan Gas Company [Austin’s preeminent counterculture nightclub] to see shows, then walk over to I-35 at two in the morning and hitchhike home. One time I got picked up by these rednecks, and, man, they drove me out into the country and said they were gonna kill me. It scared the shit out of me. I started leaving the club early enough to catch the last Greyhound back. ALVIN CROW led a western swing band in Amarillo. We had long hair in my band, and a couple of the guys got pulled over in a little town called Ralls. The cops kept them for three days, then shaved their heads. It was even that way around Austin. If you were driving in from Lubbock or Amarillo with long hair, you had to get down on the floorboard in places like Oak Hill because you’d get pulled over. RAY BENSON moved his western swing band Asleep at the Wheel from Berkeley to Austin in 1973. Music separated people. Country music fans were for the Vietnam War, like Merle Haggard and “Okie From Muskogee.” The hippies—and the Grateful Dead and Rolling Stones—were against it. And never the twain shall meet. If you walked in the Broken Spoke with long hair in 1969, you’d get your ass kicked and your hair cut. MICHAEL MARTIN MURPHEY was a songwriter, known then as Michael Murphey. I went to do Ralph Emery’s Nashville radio show, and taped on the studio door was a Flying Burrito Brothers album with “This is NOT country music” written on it in red and X’s through the faces of the Brothers. ROGER SOVINE was an executive at BMI Nashville. The guys who made the records in Nashville were people like Owen Bradley. He had an orchestra that played high school proms on the weekend, but during the week they played on Webb Pierce and Brenda Lee records. They had a round sound, no edge. In Texas you’d hear people like Billy Joe Shaver. They had an edge. DAVE HICKEY was a cultural critic who occasionally wrote songs in Nashville. You have to understand the way Nashville worked. The “talent” were basically slaves of the record company. They’d come off the road once every three months, go into the studio, get handed lyric sheets, sing to prerecorded songs, and then go back on the road. WILLIE NELSON was a Nashville songwriter. I recently found a bunch of my demos from 1961 to ’64, and I like the sound I was getting. But then the record companies overproduced it. They’d have had a real good record if they’d just released the demos. RICHIE ALBRIGHT played drums for Waylon Jennings. Chet Atkins signed Waylon to RCA in 1965 and produced his first few albums. But then Chet cut back on producing and passed Waylon around to guys we didn’t feel we had a whole lot in common with. DAVE HICKEY You couldn’t even cut a song Chet didn’t like, and it produced a war of cultures. In Nashville everybody acquiesced to the class structure. They’d think, “We may be poor, but we don’t want to be destitute, so we won’t make waves.” The temperament of Texas is more optimistic. People in Texas may be poor, but they keep thinking they’re going to win the football pool. There was a cultural optimism running through Waylon, Willie, and Billy Joe. BILLY JOE SHAVER was a songwriter from Corsicana. I had a borrowed motorcycle that I ran up on [legendary Nashville songwriter] Harlan Howard’s porch. I was a little bit inebriated. So I kinda knocked on his door with my front wheel, and he comes to the door, and I said, “God dang, are you Harlan

Howard?” He said, “Yes.” I said, “Well, I am Billy Joe Shaver, and I’m the greatest songwriter that ever lived.” STEVE EARLE was a songwriter living in Houston. We were all essentially folkies who followed Kristofferson to Nashville, rather than Willie or Roger Miller. No offense, but they were traditional writers who happened to be incredibly good. Transcendent. But Kristofferson was post-Dylan. TOM T. HALL had his first top ten country hit with “Ballad of Forty Dollars” in 1968. Kris came to town and created an illusion of literacy. Somebody said once that he and I were the only guys in Nashville who could describe Dolly Parton without using our hands. BILLY JOE SHAVER Chet Atkins didn’t like me for shit—I guess because I was a kind of derelict-looking guy in a cowboy hat. I played some songs for [longtime Nashville star] Charlie Louvin one night, and he said, “Have you been driving a truck or something?” I said, “Yeah, I do just about everything. I’ve been cowboying, driving a truck.” He said, “I’d go back to that. These are about the worst songs I’ve ever heard.” My writing was different. I wrote like I talked, a little off the wall every once in a while. He didn’t get it. DAVE HICKEY I can’t tell you how much these guys scared Nashville. Texans didn’t know who was boss. They were regarded as wild Indians.

Performers and audience members get their groove on at the Dripping Springs Reunion, in 1972. Dean Rindy The stage at the Dripping Springs Reunion. Jim Marshall Photography LLC Left: Performers and audience members get their groove on at the Dripping Springs Reunion, in 1972. Dean Rindy Right: The stage at the Dripping Springs Reunion. Jim Marshall Photography LLC

At the end of 1971, while Willie and Waylon were still trying to negotiate the Nashville grind, three transplants to Austin pushed the small folk scene toward a new kind of country. San Antonio native Doug Sahm ended his five-year exile in San Francisco and returned to Texas a full-blown hippie rock star, with two Rolling Stone covers under his belt. Spooked by a California earthquake, Michael Murphey moved to Austin, but not before recording a first album for A&M Records, Geronimo’s Cadillac. And Louisiana piano player Marcia Ball, stuck in Austin when her car broke down on a road trip, decided to stay. BILL MALONE was a graduate student in history at the University of Texas whose dissertation grew into Country Music, U.S.A., published in 1968. The Austin folkies were storytellers, and when that folk revival began to decline, country music was the place for them to go. Guys like Steve Fromholz played guitars, had the twang in their vocals, and filled their songs with the life they knew, which was country life and country people. BOBBY EARL SMITH was a UT law school graduate from San Angelo playing bass in country bands. In early ’72 my band, Dub and the Dusters, was playing at the One Knite. Our drummer was Freddy Fletcher, Willie’s nephew, who was still in high school. When we take a break, he disappears. Fifteen minutes go by, then twenty, and the club owner is on my ass. Well, it’s just a block from the police station, and everybody’s out back smoking dope, so one possibility is he’s been hauled off to jail. Finally he shows up and says, “I just met this long-legged hippie chick with some incredible dope, and she’s a singer. Can we get her onstage?” So we called her up. It’s Marcia Ball. And she sang “Me and Bobby McGee.” That’s the birth of Freda and the Firedogs. MARCIA BALL had just moved from Baton Rouge. I had to tell Bobby Earl that “Bobby McGee” was my entire country repertoire. So he came to my house and taught me all these classic country songs. It gave me goose bumps. It was a real revelation. JOE NICK PATOSKI wrote for Rolling Stone and the Austin Sun. The first time I ever heard country music and saw cool people at the same time was at one of Freda’s Sunday night shows at the Split Rail. That was a transformative experience. BILL BENTLEY Doug [Sahm] knew a good, free backup band when he saw one, so he started sitting in with Freda, bringing his hippie groove. He’d been playing with the Grateful Dead. His leads were sparklier, wilder, they went on a little longer. He didn’t have a beautiful voice. It was raspy, hard-edged, and it put a different spin on country. He showed Marcia that you could jack Patsy Cline up a couple notches. MICHAEL MARTIN MURPHEY Bob Dylan’s producer, Bob Johnston, heard me and [bassist] Bob Livingston play at the Rubaiyat and asked us to come to Nashville and make a record. We said, “When?” and he said, “How about now?” So I borrowed my dad’s Buick, drove all night, and immediately went in and made Geronimo’s Cadillac. Gary P. Nunn [Murphey’s piano player] came up with some of the other guys who later became my Cosmic Cowboy Orchestra. STEVE EARLE Geronimo’s Cadillac is a record I know every second of. It was based on country music, it had a steel guitar, but it really was progressive. MICHAEL MARTIN MURPHEY Geronimo’s autobiography had a picture of him sitting in a car in a top hat and tuxedo, which was like surrealistic art for me. It was a trumped-up publicity stunt that the government circulated to say, “Geronimo is becoming white! Everything is fine!” But there’s an intensity in his eyes that says, “I may be in a denigrating position, but I survived.” So I wrote that song. JOE NICK PATOSKI The frat and sorority kids started digging Murphey. That bigger audience was critical. CRAIG HILLIS was Murphey’s guitarist. The band all moved into an old motor court on North Lamar. The drummer had a cabin, I had one, and Murphey and Gary P. lived in the big house. GARY P. NUNN I called it “Public Domain Incorporated, My Home for Runaway Fathers,” because every wayward musician who came through town would end up staying there. Jimmy Buffett used to come by. The Doobie Brothers showed up in Cadillacs one night. CRAIG HILLIS One night Jerry Jeff showed up looking for Murphey. Jerry Jeff was on his way from Key West to Los Angeles, all jazzed about his new deal with MCA giving him artistic license to make records the way he wants. He sticks his head in, and pretty soon we’re passing around guitars. The cross-pollination starts there.

Freda and the Firedogs in August 1972. Burton Wilson The Armadillo World Headquarters in 1980. Alan Pogue Left: Freda and the Firedogs in August 1972. Burton Wilson Right: The Armadillo World Headquarters in 1980. Alan Pogue

Cosmic Cowboys That impromptu picking session proved fortuitous. A monstrously hard-living folk troubadour out of the Greenwich Village scene, Jerry Jeff had gotten fed up with his previous label, Atlantic, for the same reasons Willie was frustrated in Nashville. Atlantic had paired him with Memphis soul musicians, players whose sound he found too bold and clean. When Jerry Jeff learned that his new label, MCA, had deposited a sizable, three-record studio budget in a New York bank account, he decided to spend it making records that sounded right to him. He got the opportunity to do just that when he decided to stay in Austin. In the spring of 1972, backed by Murphey’s band, he recorded Jerry Jeff Walker. It was a slapdash production, completely unlike the polished work the players had done with Murphey, and it established a new, organic Texas sound. It also introduced the world to the songs of Monahans native Guy Clark, whose “L.A. Freeway” and “That Old Time Feeling” were album highlights. RAY WYLIE HUBBARD was a Dallas folkie. The first time I saw Jerry Jeff was at the Rubaiyat. There was this little statue of Pan, the guy playing the flute, over in the corner. When Jerry Jeff comes up onstage, with a guitar and a harmonica rack, he takes off his hat and sails it across the crowd, and it lands on this statue. He was mesmerizing. GARY P. NUNN Jerry Jeff showed up for a gig one night in a bathing suit, a vest, a cowboy hat, and maybe a bandanna. He’d been drinking Brandy Alexanders all day. We get him onstage, but he couldn’t remember any lyrics. After about three songs, some girl hollered, “Get off the stage, you drunk son of a bitch.” He responds, “F— you, f— you,” and then finally, “You ain’t got no beer. You ain’t got no cocaine. You ain’t got no pussy. You ain’t got anything I want.” Then he fell into the drum kit. The whole band walked out the front door, but he ended up playing by himself until one o’clock. That was the deal: he’d do the craziest things, but it’d always be funny when the story was told. JERRY JEFF WALKER I had a whole lot of money available, and I knew what people like the Band were doing. You buy the equipment, make your record, and when you’re done, you own the shit! I thought that might be a good thing to do. BOB LIVINGSTON Someone had gutted the old Rapp Cleaners on Sixth Street, put burlap on the walls, and made it one of Austin’s first recording studios. We’d been with Murphey in a Nashville studio, and now we’re with Jerry Jeff in this funky little place, plugged into a sixteen-track tape recorder in the middle of the room, with no board, no nothing. We’d get there about seven each night, and Jerry Jeff would be standing in the doorway, mixing sangria in this big metal tub. JERRY JEFF WALKER The sound engineers wanted to bring in this souped-up equipment. I said no. This needed to be like one of those nature shows: [He whispers in an affected English accent]“This is the first time we’ve ever seen the birthing of a Tibetan tiger baby.” I figured if somebody could sneak up on a tiger, we could be recorded where we’re comfortable. CRAIG HILLIS Jerry was the ringmaster. People like [East Austin piano player] the Grey Ghost would just drop in off the street and sit in, and then management would have to figure out later who had played. JERRY JEFF WALKER Murphey constantly told the band what to do. I came from the other school of “You guys are musicians. So if I play a folkie tune like ‘Little Bird,’ play something folkie on it. If I’m playing ‘L.A. Freeway,’ something that’s more rock and roll, play something rocky on it.” HERB STEINER played steel guitar with Murphey and Jerry Jeff. There was always tension between Jerry Jeff and Murphey over the band. One night we were on a break from recording with Jerry Jeff, and I went into the sandwich shop next door. Murphey was sitting there with his guitar and said, “Listen to this.” He’d written “Alleys of Austin.” Just a beautiful song. EDDIE WILSON owned the Austin concert venue the Armadillo World Headquarters. Murphey needed to be more like Jerry Jeff, and Jerry Jeff needed to be more like Murphey. That’s probably what it came down to.

Michael Murphey (left) and Bob Livingston at the Rubaiyat in 1972, the night Murphey was discovered by Bob Dylan's producer. Courtesy of Bob Livingston

While Jerry Jeff was working on his record, Willie was contemplating dramatic changes of his own. Though he was one of the most successful songwriters in Nashville, eight years of jumping through RCA’s hoops in an effort to become a recording star had worn him out. After his Tennessee home burned down two days before Christmas in 1970, he spent the next year in Bandera, occasionally returning to Nashville to record. By early 1972, the house was rebuilt, but Willie was done with Music Row. He wanted to start over, and as he considered locations from which to do so, he booked a gig that would point the way. The Dripping Springs Reunion was a three-day country music festival held over the course of a long weekend in March. Its Dallas promoters had high hopes, investing $250,000 in the show and expecting 60,000 people a day. Rolling Stone sent Annie Leibovitz to take photos. But nobody really knew what they were doing, and by the end of the weekend, barely 12,000 people had shown. Worse, since the concert was held in dry Hays County—meaning vendors couldn’t sell beer—the few who did come didn’t spend much money. By any standard measure, it was a colossal failure. But two things happened during the Reunion that would alter the course of country music history. During a backstage guitar pull, Waylon Jennings first heard the songs of Billy Joe Shaver. Even more important, Willie had a good time. WILLIE NELSON When Woodstock happened, I saw all those folks come together to listen to all kinds of music. I decided that would be a good thing to do around Austin. So we threw the Dripping Springs Reunion, with me, Roy Acuff, Tex Ritter, and so on. DAVE HICKEY The promoters were old Dallas frat brothers of mine, and I booked the talent, almost all Nashville acts, like Tom T. Hall and Loretta Lynn. The best was Charlie Rich, who just sat in his Cadillac smoking dope and played whenever somebody didn’t show up. But there was also a lot of cultural exceptionalism being felt. We all loved “Texas music.” So I hired songwriters like Billy Joe, Lee Clayton, and Terry Allen, who would go out and fill in the gaps between the big acts. BIG BOY MEDLIN wrote for the Austin Sun. It was a real culture clash. We all thought, “Wow, look at these rednecks.” Tex Ritter, who emceed, was an asshole. He’d complain about how long it took to change bands: “Maybe if some of these stagehands would get haircuts, they could see the equipment and move it better.” Half the crowd was hippies wanting to dance, and the other was rednecks looking for something else entirely. Even Kristofferson said something to the hippies like “Why don’t you guys sit down and listen one time?” BOBBY BARE had his first top ten country hit with “Detroit City” in 1963. I played a number of Willie’s picnics, but I don’t think I was at that first one because I remember Billy Joe coming back to Nashville from it and telling me he’d done some peyote or something and just disappeared. He said, “I don’t know what happened, I just wanted to take a walk.” So I decided I’d do the second one. BILLY JOE SHAVER I got into that dang peyote and got to thinking I was Jesus. I was just walking around, healing people. I baptized a bunch of them. DAVE HICKEY Billy Joe came out of that Reunion a cult hero because he sang “Black Rose.” It was hillbilly, it was about black people, and Billy Joe only had three fingers. Everybody loved it. BILLY JOE SHAVER I was in a trailer passing a guitar around and started singing “Willie the Wandering Gypsy and Me.” Waylon bounced over and said, “Whose song is that?” I said, “That’s mine.” And he said, “I’m going to record that.” ALVIN CROW I went to that Reunion with my mother and father. And it was great. Charley Pride, Hank Snow, Dottie West, Roger Miller. But also an Austin guy, Kenneth Threadgill, who yodeled old Jimmie Rodgers songs. That’s when I realized I needed to move to Austin. WILLIE NELSON That first Reunion didn’t draw because the promoters didn’t know how to promote it in Austin. They spent all the money in Dallas, the big cities. They didn’t let the local people know where to go. But I saw that it was a good idea. The following year I put on the first Fourth of July Picnic in the same place, and we got 50,000 people.

Doug Sahm at Soap Creek Saloon. Burton Wilson Jerry Jeff Walker playing at the Armadillo on March 7, 1971. Burton Wilson Left: Doug Sahm at Soap Creek Saloon. Burton Wilson Right: Jerry Jeff Walker playing at the Armadillo on March 7, 1971. Burton Wilson