Waylon Jennings Once Recalled the Pivotal Moment He Heard This Musical Icon for the First Time: “It Went up My Spine”

When Waylon Jennings was a kid growing up in Littlefield, Texas, he asked his dad if there would ever be a time when white music and Black music combined. His dad mused that it was a real possibility. And on one fateful morning in 1954, the future country music star heard something on the radio that proved just how right his father was in his assumption.

Jennings was 17 years old, driving his brother to school. KVOW’s Hillbilly Parade, which aired every morning for fifteen minutes between 8:15 and 8:30, was on the radio. The featured performer of that segment was none other than Elvis Presley, still a rising star at that point, singing “That’s All Right” and “Blue Moon Of Kentucky”.

“The sound went straight up your spine,” Jennings later wrote. “The way he sang, the singer sounded Black. Maybe it was the flapping of the big doghouse bass, all wood thump, and the slapback echo of the guitars wailin’ and frailin’ away. It just climbed right through you. I thought, ‘What a wild, strange sound.’”

Eventually, Waylon Jennings Was Able to Meet Elvis Presley

The first time Waylon Jennings met Elvis Presley was in Lubbock, Texas, while he was on tour with Billy Walker, Jimmy and Johnny, and Tillman Franks. “Elvis was just jumping around everywhere, bouncing and bubbling over with enthusiasm, full of more energy than anybody I ever saw. He was talking to me like he’d known me a thousand years,” Jennings recalled.

As Jennings’ own star rose, he had more opportunities to meet with the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll. Many of their meetings were in Las Vegas in the late 1960s, some of which were more positive than others. During one such occasion, Presley noticed a leather wrist strap Jennings was wearing to alleviate arm pain after a bone fracture. “He kept admiring it, ‘You hillbillies sure know how to dress,’ and calling attention to it,” Jennings wrote. Elvis never got it, though.

What Elvis (and his crew) did get from Jennings during a separate occasion was an earful after a bodyguard of Elvis’ acted recklessly around Jennings’ wife, Jessi Colter. According to No Depression, Sonny West was playing with a handgun when he pointed it at Jessi. Jennings told Presley’s bodyguard, “Hoss, if you point that thing at my wife again, you better grease it up, ‘cause I’m gonna stick it up your a**.” 

The music industry is a long, strange, and winding road—one that can start with a morning trip to school in an old pickup truck and eventually get to where you’re cussing out the companions of the voice you heard on the radio all those years ago.

Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

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