In December 2001, doctors at a Phoenix hospital amputated Waylon Jennings’ left foot. Diabetes had been wearing him down for years, and an infection had finally made the decision for him.
Most people would have called it the end of the road. Waylon didn’t. His spokeswoman said he had been hobbling for more than two years, that he could walk again with a prosthetic, and that he expected to resume touring in a few months. He still had a handful of concerts booked for the spring and summer of 2002.
He never got to play them. But the way he spent those last two years says everything about who Waylon Jennings was.
The last big night at the Ryman
In early January 2000, Waylon and Jessi Colter were in the middle of leaving Nashville for good. They were moving to Chandler, Arizona, near Phoenix, where Jessi had grown up.
Before they left, Waylon booked two nights at the Ryman Auditorium, January 5 and 6, with cameras and tape rolling. It would be his last Nashville performance. Remarkably, it was only the fifth time in his whole career that he had played a live show in Music City. The town that had fought him for years was finally getting a proper goodbye, and it may not have known it yet.
He couldn’t stand for the whole show anymore. He sat on a stool, and he didn’t hide it.
“I guess y’all noticed I’m sittin’ on this chair, and that ain’t all old age. I kinda hurt my back and my legs, but I’m gettin’ around.”
Then he played like a man who had no plans to stop. He opened with “Never Say Die,” a song he wrote in those final years. His Waymore Blues Band was the band he said he had always wanted, and his friends came to stand beside him. John Anderson joined him on “Waymore’s Blues.” Travis Tritt sang “I’ve Always Been Crazy” with him. A young Montgomery Gentry jumped in on “I’m a Ramblin’ Man.”
And Jessi was there. She sang “I’m Not Lisa” and “Storms Never Last,” and the two of them did “Suspicious Minds” together, the way they had for decades.
The recordings became Never Say Die: Live, released that October. It was the last record of original material Waylon released in his lifetime. A full concert film came out in 2007, five years after he was gone.
Waylon did play a few more shows after the Ryman, but not many. That spring, he had surgery to unblock arteries in his legs. By July 2001, he was in a wheelchair at Chet Atkins’ funeral.
The honor he didn’t show up for
On October 4, 2001, the Country Music Hall of Fame inducted twelve new members at a special dinner in Nashville. Waylon Jennings was one of them.
He didn’t go. He sent his son Buddy Jennings to accept the honor for him.
Some people still tell that story as one last outlaw move, and Waylon didn’t do much to argue with them. A few days later, he told CMT that the induction meant “absolutely nothing, if you want to know the truth about it.” He said the people in charge had told him years earlier that he would never get in, and that had been fine with him.
Other accounts at the time said he was simply too sick to make the trip. Both things can be true. What he said next is the part worth keeping:
“I think you need to play your music and do the best you can with that, and that’s what you’ll be remembered for.”
Two months later, he lost his foot.
February 13, 2002
Waylon Jennings died on February 13, 2002, at his home in Chandler. He was 64. His spokeswoman said he “died very peacefully in his sleep.”
He had come a long way to get there. As a young bass player in 1959, he gave up his seat on Buddy Holly’s plane, the one that went down in an Iowa field. He spent the next four decades making country music on his own terms, helping launch the outlaw movement alongside Willie Nelson.
Jessi Colter had been married to him for nearly 33 years. After he was gone, she put it in a few words:
“Waylon was my life. He was my whole world.”
He was right about how he would be remembered. Not for a plaque or a dinner he skipped. For a man on a stool at the Ryman, legs failing, opening the night with “Never Say Die.”
What’s the first Waylon Jennings song you remember hearing?