In a special panel at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum Saturday featured a preview of the twelve-hour documentary They Called Us Outlaws, due out in 2023. Narrated by Jack Ingram with Jessi Colter as executive producer, the project that has taken ten years to complete features more than 100 interviews with many of the figures who gave birth to the movement that found a home in Austin, Texas, in the 1970s, as well as rising stars who carry on the tradition.
The segment featured the Armadillo World Headquarters, the Austin venue where such icons as Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Jerry Jeff Walker, Guy Clark, and Townes Van Sandt changed music. The thread that ran through the interviews showcased was the drive to make music their own way: “All you gotta do is be you in Austin.”
At a time when Austin was known as a cheap place to live, musicians could afford to live and work. Fueled by cold beer and cheap pot, the music scene at the Armadillo HQ had cowboys and hippies peacefully coexisting, taking in the music of the singer-songwriters who, like Nelson, left the Nashville scene and made their indelible mark on country music.
After the screening, Frank Liddell moderated a panel with filmmaker Eric Geadelmann and Delbert McClinton and Robert Earl Keen, iconic singer songwriters hailing from Texas and involved in that music scene.
Keen, who retired in early September after 41 years on the road, described his first encounter with Willie Nelson in the summer of 1974 after he graduated from high school. He regaled the audience with the story of his car burning up in the parking lot of Willie’s second Fourth of July picnic.
McClinton, who was central to the blues movement in the Austin area, described bed the time of real magic, the fellowship created in Austin during that era.
The event wrapped up with Chris Coleman and Frank Rische performing “London Homesick Blues,” Jerry Jeff Walker’s song that opened Austin City Limits for years. The audience sang along:
I wanna go home with the armadillos,
good country music from Amarillo and Abilene,
the friendliest people and the prettiest women
you’ve ever seen.
