An Outlaw and a Lady

February 13, 2017
Colter’s often touching memoir is a fast-paced chronicle of her life, loves, and Christian faith. Colter gained fame as the wife of hard-drinking, wild-living country music outlaw Waylon Jennings, but music flowed in her life long before she met him. Born the sixth child of a car repairman father and a preacher mother, Colter learned to love music very early, writing melodies on an upright piano in her mother’s church. Eventually she met and married rock guitarist Duane Eddy, who took her to Nashville to meet musician Chet Atkins. He got her songs recorded by country artists such as Dottie West and pop singers such as Nancy Sinatra. After her divorce from Eddy, life moved quickly: she married Jennings, changed her name to Jessi Colter, and released her first album. Over the years she and Jennings endured ups and downs, surrounded by friends such as Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, and Willie Nelson,; throughout, her Christian faith sustained her. Colter’s moving memoir fits nicely beside Jennings’s own memoir (Waylon: An Autobiography) and Terry Jennings’s recollections of his father, Waylon: Tales of My Outlaw Dad.

April 24, 2017
Radio personality and voice-over actress O’Day brings considerable poise and warmth to the new memoir from Colter, widow of country music legend Waylon Jennings and an accomplished songwriter and recording artist in her own right. O’Day strives diligently to portray Colter’s essence, particularly her resolve to practice deep religious faith enthusiastically without coming across as preachy to her late husband and his fellow bad boys in the rough and tumble “outlaw country” scene that took Nashville by storm in the 1970s. Most of the figures about whom Colter reflects—Jennings, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, and others—are male and low-voiced, and O’Day doesn’t necessarily try to recreate the baritones and basses, yet the character and style come through. Thanks to O’Day, the listener gains a strong a sense of Colter as a master storyteller with a keen eye for human foibles and eccentricities. O’Day’s talent especially shines in such entertaining episodes as the banter between Jennings and Cash as both recover from similar heart procedures during the same week in the same hospital ward. A Thomas Nelson hardcover.