IN 1987, WAYLON JENNINGS TURNED HIS WHOLE LIFE INTO TEN CHAPTERS ON ONE ALBUM. CHAPTER EIGHT WASN’T A PLACE OR A YEAR. IT WAS JUST HER NAME. He called A Man Called Hoss his audio biography. Littlefield. The rough and rowdy days. The drugs. Then Chapter Eight, titled simply “Jessi,” carrying a song called “You Deserve the Stars in My Crown.” They’d been married eighteen years by then, and that’s where he set her down: right in the middle of his own story, in his own handwriting. Fourteen years later, on the morning of February 13, 2002, Jessi came home from an appointment to their house in Chandler, Arizona, and found him in the living room. Paramedics tried. He was 64. No stage, no band, no last verse. Days later she told the press that Waylon kicked ass right to the end, and that he’d won the final round anyway, because he went out his way, at home. But when Jessi talks about the end, she doesn’t start in February. She starts twelve weeks earlier, in a hospital room at Thanksgiving, with a question Waylon asked her that nobody who knew the outlaw would have believed came out of his mouth.
When Waylon Jennings Made Jessi Colter a Chapter in His Own Story A life in ten tracks In 1987, Waylon…