In 1969, Jessi Colter was traveling with Waylon Jennings, and folded in among her stage clothes was a wedding dress. It was nothing elaborate. In her 2017 memoir, An Outlaw and a Lady, she described it as a plain, suitable outfit she had carried ever since she first went out on the road with him. He had not proposed. She simply had a feeling he would.
“I saw it coming months before.” — Jessi Colter, An Outlaw and a Lady
A Duet on a Box
The two had met years earlier, when she was still Mirriam Eddy, the wife of guitar star Duane Eddy. Duane, a friend of Waylon’s, asked him to sing a duet his wife had written. In a 1988 interview with SPIN, Waylon remembered that she was set up on a box beside him when they sang it.
They did not cross paths again until her marriage to Eddy was ending in 1968 and she had moved back home to Phoenix. Waylon was playing a club there, and she came out to see him. He asked her out. She told him to call her in a month, once the divorce was final. He called.
By his own telling, he did not like her at first.
“She made me madder than anybody in the world.” — Waylon Jennings, SPIN, 1988
Only months later did he realize she had been doing it on purpose. She liked to see what she called his fire.
Two People With Reasons to Hesitate
Waylon was 32. He had married for the first time at 18, and by the time Jessi came back into his life he had already been through three marriages. Years later he admitted the road had not been easy on her, and said she was probably the only person who could have been married to him and stayed.
She had doubts of her own. She was a working songwriter whose songs had been recorded by Nancy Sinatra, Dottie West and Don Gibson. She wondered whether marrying another musician would mean giving up her own career, and what a failed marriage might do to both of their names.
The Proposal
She never laid out exactly how he asked. What she remembered was the silence afterward. She sat without answering for a long time, and then asked him whether it was really that simple. He told her it was.
When she confessed she was not sure, Waylon said her honesty was one of the reasons he loved her. Then he told her he knew her well enough to believe those doubts would not stop her, and that she should say yes so they could get on with it.
Las Vegas City Hall
They did not wait. On October 26, 1969, the couple married at City Hall in Las Vegas. Some later accounts place the wedding in Arizona, at the church where her mother preached, but Jessi’s own memoir describes a quick ceremony in Nevada.
Almost nothing about it was romantic. Waylon’s best man was his bass player, a man she remembered for missing the same notes night after night and whose main job on tour was carrying the briefcase full of cash. The justice of the peace sounded as if he had performed a hundred weddings that day, and he got her name wrong, calling her Mary instead of Mirriam. None of her family or friends were there.
She laughed through all of it. She later explained that she was nervous and frightened, unsure whether this was the best day of her life or the worst, and laughing was the only thing she knew how to do.
Champagne at the Golden Nugget
That night the newlyweds had a champagne dinner at the Golden Nugget downtown. She was still laughing. Waylon finally asked her about it, and she told him that if she stopped laughing, she would start crying. He asked whether those would be tears of regret. She said they would be both kinds.
His answer was pure Waylon. He told her to quit pretending, because there was nobody in the whole world she would rather have married than him.
The Marriage That Lasted
Soon the new Mrs. Jennings was recording as Jessi Colter, a name borrowed from an ancestor who had ridden with Jesse James. In 1970 she and Waylon reached the country Top 40 with their duet of “Suspicious Minds.”
The years ahead were hard. Waylon’s cocaine addiction came close to breaking the marriage before he finally quit, in part for the sake of their son, Shooter, born in 1979. Diabetes followed. At Thanksgiving 2001, after years of her prayers, Waylon embraced the faith Jessi had returned to. That December, doctors amputated his left foot.
Waylon Jennings died in his sleep at their home in Chandler, Arizona, on February 13, 2002. He was 64. He and Jessi had been married 33 years, longer than his three earlier marriages put together.
In 2023, two decades after his death, Jessi married again, to Arlin Brower. But the story of how she became Mrs. Waylon Jennings still begins with a plain dress at the bottom of a suitcase, packed for a question he had not yet asked.