The Last Waylon Party

“Now remember,” my mother began, “Waylon will be there, and you know how he is, how much he loves children.” (Yes, my father agreed, he really does love children.) “If he asks you to sit on his lap and you’re feeling shy, you don’t have to. But what you do have to do—”

“Is be polite,” snapped my father.

“Which you will,” said my mother more softly.

“Of course you will. You have great manners.” My father matched his tone to hers.

“Because he’s your father’s boss, you know,” my mother added.

“I know, I know!” I said, pretending it was no big deal, that Waylon Jennings didn’t terrify me. Not because he was some sinister child molester; that is not where this story is headed. (He was a womanizer—that much is in the public domain, by his own admission.) When my parents said Waylon loved children, they meant it in the most innocent sense. I’m not sure why my mother reiterated that I did not have to sit on Waylon’s lap or what she worried would happen if I did. I’d have faced nothing more traumatic, I’m sure, than a closer whiff of his cigarette breath or a damp embrace against his sweat-soaked flannel.

What scared me about Waylon was not that he was an actual monster, but that he looked like one, like a man halfway through a werewolf transformation. What scared me was the way he talked—fast, in a road language I couldn’t begin to decipher, though my father spoke it, as well. What scared me was his power, a strong undercurrent that held everyone in its grip. Or at least it did me.

The year was 1983, and I was seven. My father, a songwriter and musician named Sonny Curtis, had been touring with Waylon for four years, as long as I’d been forming permanent memories. He and Waylon had both emerged from the same hardscrabble West Texas world. They were born one month apart in the spring of 1937, the tail end of the Dust Bowl, to poor cotton-farming families just outside Lubbock. Waylon spent his early years in a dirt-floor shack, fifty miles north of where my father lived in a dugout, an underground shelter rooted deep in the thick prairie lovegrass.

Music was a refuge for my father, and I assume it was for Waylon as