Waylon Jennings Recalls His Daughter Bringing A Boy Home To Meet Him – Without Telling The Guy Who Her Dad Was

Meeting your girlfriend’s dad is stressful enough…even without the dad being one of the most famous artists on the planet.

Waylon Jennings had his own mischievous side, so it’s not really any surprise that he passed some of that down to his kids. And in a vintage interview on TNN, the country music legend recalled a time that one of his daughters played a hilariously cruel prank on a guy she was talking to.

As Waylon recalled, the guy was an aspiring songwriter himself, so there’s no doubt that meeting Waylon Jennings would be enough to have him sweating – even if he wasn’t the dad of the girl that he was talking to. But to make matters worse, his daughter didn’t tell the guy who her dad was before she brought him over to meet one of the biggest artists in country music:

“I have a daughter. One of my daughters is awful mean… I’ll tell you what she did. This guy didn’t know who she was, she didn’t tell him her last name. They had gone out once before, so that night, she said ‘Come with me, I’m going over to some friends’ houses.’

So this old boy was a songwriter and a struggling singer, and she brought him in through the door and she walked him right up to me and said, ‘This is my father, Waylon Jennings.'”

As if that wasn’t enough, it wasn’t just Waylon who was there at the time: He happened to be hanging out with a couple of other legends at the time:

“And on one side of me was Muhammad Ali, and on the other side was Johnny Cash. Now you’ve seen that donkey’s eyes on ‘Hee Haw’? That old boy’s eyes just kinda spun a little bit.

I said, ‘It’s a hard life, ain’t it hoss?’”

Amazing.

What I really want to know, though, is who this guy is so that we can get the story from his perspective. Did he end up making it in the music industry, or is he just a middle-aged insurance salesman now who happened to meet Waylon Jennings when he dated his daughter?

@johnnycashnation

“This is my father, Waylon Jennings.” #waylonjennings #johnnycash #muhammadali #country #countrymusic @Waylon Jennings

♬ original sound – Ty Plumlee

Shooter Jennings Says He Used ZERO AI On Forthcoming Waylon Jennings Album

Earlier this year, Shooter Jennings announced that he had discovered a treasure trove of unreleased Waylon Jennings music, which he managed to turn into three separate albums that are slated for release in October.

The first one, Songbird, will be out on October 3rd, and features songs he recorded decades ago, during the height of his career, but for whatever reason never made it to an album or got completely finished. Shooter, who produced the project, said they didn’t need too much work, but he did add some background vocals and other instrumentation just to polish it up and make it ready to be put on a professional album in the modern world of 2025.

But of course, because these tapes are so old and AI has already been used in the country industry, probably on many songs we don’t even know about in terms of both the writing and production, and legends like Randy Travis have openly used it to create entirely new music where he obviously didn’t sing a note in real life. People have speculated that other archival projects, like the Johnny Cash one that was released last year, Songwriter, used AI in some way, and it’s a fair question considering the nature of this project in a technology-driven world.

During a podcast appearance on The Drifting Cowboy podcast this week, Shooter put those rumors to bed, saying he actually went out of his way to do it all as old school as possible and did not use AI for any aspect of the project, including marketing or artwork, and he went out of his way to do it that way:

“Oh, the AI thing? It’s so amazing that like right when AI happens, we get a new Waylon record. I mean, I would probably be the guy saying that, you know, cause I’m cynical… That’s why we took so many painstaking steps to ensure that… of course, it’s not AI.

Like, I don’t even know how to use AI to make music, right, and I’d rather think it would be able to do that. But also just as far as everything involved with it, like making sure there’s nothing AI related, or there’s no steps even in the art or in anything. Because I can’t pollute the material.

Because the Waylon thing, man, what’s so cool about it is like, if we mixed it, I mixed it on a 1976 custom API in the Sunset Sound using only outboard gear. We didn’t use any kind of digital processing.”

He explained how much he went through to ensure the state of the tapes stayed at the highest level of integrity:

“I used ProTools to prepare the tracks in the sense where, when they were open, they were exactly as they were put. They were digitized, but they were exactly as they were on those those tapes.

So they were like 24 track sessions, the older stuff were 16 track, but most it was all 24 track. What I didn’t wanna do is do anything that would degrade that, the state of it. So what I did, some of them had like five vocal takes or six vocal takes, so I used ProTools to comp the way I would comp Charley’s records or Turnpikes.

In the sense that out of those five vocals, I’ll go through and make a vocal track of the best vocal, which was really cool to do on my Dad, right? Just to hear all the different takes and go through it.”

Shooter also explained how the whole process worked with mixing the previous vocals and instruments, which each individually had multiple takes per song, and there were over 100 songs.

Shooter has done it all so tastefully, and it makes me respect him even more knowing he went out of his way to do it the hard way, with integrity, to entire the music was done right, just as his father would have done it. That type of character is hard to find, especially in the music industry, and I’m sure his dad would be proud and obviously Waylon fans like me can’t wait to hear it because of how well it’s been done.

There’s a reason Shooter’s probably the most highly sought-after producer in country right now, and this is a perfect example of why.

The full podcast is available below.

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