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HE SANG IT IN 1964. THE BAND YOU HEAR WASN’T EVEN IN THE ROOM. Phoenix, December 4, 1964. Waylon Jennings walked into a small studio and cut a Bob Dylan song. He wasn’t famous yet. He was a club singer at JD’s in Scottsdale, working the same room for the same faces. Willie Nelson drove out one night just to see what all the fuss was about. The record they made was sold in one place only — the club itself. No stores. It sold out. They pressed more. Those sold out too. He had signed with A&M in 1963 for five percent of sales. He cut more sessions for them. Then the label listened back, and nothing happened. The tapes went on a shelf. Waylon left for RCA in 1965. Five years later, someone pulled those tapes down and handed them to a young staff engineer named Bernie Grundman. Here’s the part most people never notice. Grundman kept Waylon’s vocals — the 1964 ones, the club singer, the man who wasn’t anybody yet. Then he took out every instrument behind him and had other musicians play it all again. March 1970. Eleven songs. The voice is his. The band never met him.

He Sang It in 1964. The Band You Hear Wasn’t Even in the Room.

In Phoenix, on December 4, 1964, Waylon Jennings walked into a studio and recorded a version of Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” At the time, Waylon Jennings was not a star. He was a working singer, holding down nights at JD’s in Scottsdale and building a reputation one audience at a time. The recording did not begin as a grand statement. It began like so many great music stories do: with a young artist trying to prove he belonged.

The song was first tied to a small, local run. It was sold through the club itself, not through regular stores, which made it feel even more personal to the people who found it. Those copies moved quickly. More were pressed. Those disappeared too. In a scene where word of mouth mattered as much as radio, Waylon Jennings had found something rare: a record people wanted because it felt alive.

A Voice Before the Fame

By 1963, Waylon Jennings had signed with A&M Records, and the deal reflected how early this chapter still was. He was not yet the outlaw legend many people remember now. He was still a singer learning how to turn a room full of strangers into believers. Willie Nelson had already heard the buzz and once drove out to JD’s just to see the performance for himself. That kind of attention mattered, because it confirmed what the local crowd already knew: Waylon Jennings had presence.

But the industry did not always move as quickly as the clubs did. The A&M tapes were set aside. Waylon Jennings moved on and signed with RCA in 1965, chasing a new future. For a while, the old recordings stayed quietly on a shelf, as if they belonged to another version of the story.

Then the Songs Came Back

Five years later, those tapes were pulled down again and handed to a young staff engineer named Bernie Grundman. What happened next gives the recording its strange power. Waylon Jennings’ original vocals were kept. The instruments behind them were removed, and new musicians were brought in to rebuild the arrangements around that 1964 voice. The result was released in March 1970 as Don’t Think Twice, a collection of eleven songs.

That detail changes everything. The singer in the booth was still the young Waylon Jennings from Phoenix, but the band around him was not the band he had played with in the room. The performance became a meeting between two eras: the raw, unfinished energy of 1964 and the polished world that came later.

He had not become a legend yet. But the voice was already there.

Why It Still Matters

What makes this recording unforgettable is not just the song choice or the unusual production. It is the feeling that the future was already hiding inside the past. Waylon Jennings sang with conviction before the fame, before the image, before the long road that made him a country icon. When listeners hear “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” now, they hear more than a cover. They hear a young man standing in a studio in Phoenix, giving everything he had to a song that would keep finding new life.

And maybe that is the real magic of the record. The band may have changed. The room may have changed. But the voice stayed the same.

 

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KRIS KRISTOFFERSON MADE AN ALBUM ABOUT DYING AT 76. THREE YEARS LATER HE LEARNED THE DOCTORS HAD BEEN WRONG ABOUT HIM THE WHOLE TIME. In January 2013, Kris Kristofferson released an album called Feeling Mortal. He was 76. He and producer Don Was cut twenty songs in three days and kept ten. The title song is an old man looking at his own face in the mirror, wide awake, counting what time is left. What the listeners didn’t know was why he was writing that way. For years his doctors had told him he had Alzheimer’s, or dementia from all the boxing and football of his younger days. His memory was going. His wife Lisa later said there were stretches when he couldn’t hold on to what he had just done a minute before. He was singing about the end because he had been told he was already in it. Then in February 2016, Lisa took him to a different doctor, who looked at the muscles twitching in his forearms and ordered a blood test. It came back positive for Lyme disease — a tick-borne illness the family believes he had carried for decades. It was never Alzheimer’s. Within three weeks of proper treatment, Lisa said her husband started coming back to her. Kris Kristofferson died at home on Maui on September 28, 2024, at 88 — eleven years after he made the record he thought was his goodbye.

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JOEY FEEK SANG ABOUT LEAVING HER HUSBAND BEHIND. FOUR YEARS LATER, THE MUSIC VIDEO THEY MADE BECAME THEIR REAL LIFE. On May 17, 2012, Joey + Rory filmed the video for “When I’m Gone” on their Tennessee farm. Joey sang from the point of view of a woman preparing the man she loved for life after her death. In the video, Rory was left alone in their farmhouse while Joey was imagined buried beneath the sassafras trees in their backfield. At the time, neither of them knew how painfully real those scenes would become. Joey was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 2014. After the disease returned and became terminal, she died on March 4, 2016, at just 40 years old. Rory went home without his wife — though this time, he had their little daughter Indiana beside him. Years later, Rory looked back at that old video and wrote that three and a half years after they filmed it, “that video would come true.” What had once been acting was now his life. And Joey’s voice was still there, telling him he would somehow be alright when she was gone.

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HE WAS TOO SICK TO STAND. THEN JESSI COLTER WALKED OUT — AND WAYLON SANG HIS LAST FULL CONCERT FROM A CHAIR. January 6, 2000. The Ryman Auditorium. Waylon Jennings was 62, and his health was already failing badly enough that he could no longer stand through a full show. He sat on a chair and addressed it before anyone else could. “I guess y’all noticed I’m sittin’ on this chair, and that ain’t all old age,” he told the crowd. His back and legs were hurting. Then came the old Waylon defiance: “Y’all don’t worry about me. I can still kick ass.” And he did. John Anderson, Montgomery Gentry and Travis Tritt joined him that night. But the most personal stretch came when his wife, Jessi Colter, walked out. They shared four songs — “Love’s the Only Chain,” “I’m Not Lisa,” “Storms Never Last,” and “Suspicious Minds.” “Storms Never Last” carried a different weight now. Jessi had written it years earlier, and the two had sung it together long before Waylon’s body began failing him. That night, they sang it together again. Waylon never performed another full concert. Two years later, he was gone.

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JOEY FEEK SANG ABOUT LEAVING HER HUSBAND BEHIND. FOUR YEARS LATER, THE MUSIC VIDEO THEY MADE BECAME THEIR REAL LIFE. On May 17, 2012, Joey + Rory filmed the video for “When I’m Gone” on their Tennessee farm. Joey sang from the point of view of a woman preparing the man she loved for life after her death. In the video, Rory was left alone in their farmhouse while Joey was imagined buried beneath the sassafras trees in their backfield. At the time, neither of them knew how painfully real those scenes would become. Joey was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 2014. After the disease returned and became terminal, she died on March 4, 2016, at just 40 years old. Rory went home without his wife — though this time, he had their little daughter Indiana beside him. Years later, Rory looked back at that old video and wrote that three and a half years after they filmed it, “that video would come true.” What had once been acting was now his life. And Joey’s voice was still there, telling him he would somehow be alright when she was gone.

Uncategorized

HE WAS TOO SICK TO STAND. THEN JESSI COLTER WALKED OUT — AND WAYLON SANG HIS LAST FULL CONCERT FROM A CHAIR. January 6, 2000. The Ryman Auditorium. Waylon Jennings was 62, and his health was already failing badly enough that he could no longer stand through a full show. He sat on a chair and addressed it before anyone else could. “I guess y’all noticed I’m sittin’ on this chair, and that ain’t all old age,” he told the crowd. His back and legs were hurting. Then came the old Waylon defiance: “Y’all don’t worry about me. I can still kick ass.” And he did. John Anderson, Montgomery Gentry and Travis Tritt joined him that night. But the most personal stretch came when his wife, Jessi Colter, walked out. They shared four songs — “Love’s the Only Chain,” “I’m Not Lisa,” “Storms Never Last,” and “Suspicious Minds.” “Storms Never Last” carried a different weight now. Jessi had written it years earlier, and the two had sung it together long before Waylon’s body began failing him. That night, they sang it together again. Waylon never performed another full concert. Two years later, he was gone.

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