Some country songs start with a heartbreak. “Storms Never Last” started in a doctor’s office. Jessi Colter picked up a magazine there and came across a photograph of a home that a tornado had destroyed. Under the picture was a caption quoting the person who had lived there. Three words: “Storms never last.”
Nearly half a century later, talking with WNYC’s Alison Stewart in 2023, she explained that this was the only time she ever borrowed a title from something she saw written down.
“I was in a doctor’s office and it was in a magazine. I thought, ‘That’s a really cool statement.’ I wrote that song. It’s pretty much inspiration.” — Jessi Colter
She put the finished song at the very end of her 1975 album, I’m Jessi Colter, the same record that carried “I’m Not Lisa” up the charts.
The Name She Left Out
Jessi Colter wanted to mention her husband, Waylon Jennings, in the song. According to Rolling Stone, Waylon talked her out of it. His reasoning was simple: without his name, the song would be more universal. It could belong to anyone riding out a hard season.
That advice carried extra weight coming from him. Two years before her album came out, Waylon had been strikingly honest with Rolling Stone’s Chet Flippo about the shape he was in when Jessi came into his life.
“When I met Jessi, I was pretty well at my lowest point. I weighed 138 pounds and I was bent on self-destruction.” — Waylon Jennings, 1973
In that same interview he said Jessi was the best thing that ever happened to him.
Waylon Sings It Himself
In 1980, Waylon Jennings recorded his own version of “Storms Never Last” for his album Music Man. Jessi isn’t singing on that track. But listen to the very end, and you’ll hear Waylon say her name. The man who kept his own name out of her song made sure hers was in his.
In 1981, the two of them recorded it as a duet for their album Leather and Lace. Released as a single, it was sitting at No. 18 on Billboard’s country chart in April of that year.
A Song They Kept Singing
On Valentine’s Day 1984, Waylon and Jessi performed “Storms Never Last” for a television special filmed aboard the Navy aircraft carrier USS Constellation in San Diego.
Sixteen years later, they sang it together on January 6, 2000, at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. It was the second of two nights recorded for a concert film, and it turned out to be Waylon Jennings’ final full concert. His health was failing. He sat on a stool for the show and told the crowd he had hurt his back and legs. Besides their duet on “Storms Never Last,” Jessi Colter sang “I’m Not Lisa” and joined him on “Suspicious Minds.”
In 2001, diabetes cost Waylon his left foot. He died on February 13, 2002, at 64.
The song outlived him. Miranda Lambert, John Prine and Lee Ann Womack, Allison Moorer, and dozens of others have recorded it since. But it began with three words printed under a photograph of a ruined house, in a magazine Jessi Colter happened to pick up in a doctor’s office.