On Nov. 26, 2002, country superstar Tim McGraw released his album Tim McGraw and the Dancehall Doctors. As the title suggested, McGraw recorded the album using his longtime road band instead of the usual Nashville session pros. To compound the heresy, the whole crew decamped to upstate New York for the sessions, rather than laying down the tracks on Music Row. This divergence from the standard practice was loudly trumpeted as an act of unprecedented boldness and bravery. Anyone who recalled the fierce battles between Waylon Jennings and his record label, RCA, over control of his music must have found all this amusingly familiar. In 1974, Jennings fought successfully to make his album This Time with his road band and in the studio of his choosing—in this case, Tompall Glaser’s “Hillbilly Central” at 916 19th Ave. S., not quite McGraw’s Catskills but a universe away from the label’s in-house facility. Jennings’ efforts at artistic self-determination culminated in the Jan. 12, 1976, release of Wanted! The Outlaws, an 11-song compilation consisting mostly of material that Jennings, his wife Jessi Colter, Willie Nelson and Glaser had previously released. Wanted! sought to sum up—and cash in on—the emergence of what had come to be known as “Outlaw music,” a singer-songwriter-driven, ragged, rock-, soul- and blues-influenced brand of country distinguished by its emotional and sonic directness. Outlaw music celebrated the auteur theory of country, the artist as primary visionary in a business that had long been defined by the control of the record labels and producers over the product. Ironically, the album was the brainchild of RCA producer Jerry Bradley, whose father, Owen, had helped construct the sweet, poppy, producer-driven and suddenly anachronistic Nashville Sound of the late ’50s and ’60s. On one hand, Wanted! The Outlaws (Jennings bristled at the album title, worried that fans would confuse it with the then-emerging Southern-rock band The Outlaws) was a marketing ploy devised by a record label to exploit its catalog. The album was released on RCA, which happened to own most of the recordings. Like pretty much every other piece of musical product, its impetus was financial. Jennings had won his fight with RCA in the first place only because he made money for the label, and it didn’t want to lose him. And Jennings knew his way around a budget. “He really was practical,” remembers Colter. “If you knew how much [Wanted! The Outlaws] cost, you would fall over. It was so cheap.” By the end of 1976, Wanted! had become country music’s first album to be designated platinum, signifying sales of over 1 million copies. (It has since gone double platinum.) The fact that the success of Wanted! was in part the fruit of a well-executed business strategy doesn’t mean that it didn’t also crystallize a genuinely vital moment, an organically arrived-at exchange of keys to the kingdom. “We were simply living our music,” says Colter, “and the rest followed.” The Outlaw movement had begun coalescing in 1973 around Glaser’s Hillbilly Central studio and offices, where Jennings set up shop during the making of This Time. The window-deprived building buzzed with talented visitors day and night: Nelson, Colter, Shel Silverstein, Kinky Friedman, Bobby Bare, John Hartford (who married Hillbilly Central receptionist Marie). “If Elvis had walked in the front door, I would have just said, ‘Elvis, can I help you?’ ” chuckles Hazel Smith, the current CMT and Country Weekly columnist who worked at Hillbilly Central as a publicist. “That’s how it was.” Smith gave the genre its name when a disc jockey called asking how he should refer to the music currently laboring under the label “progressive country.” She reached for the blue collegiate dictionary under her desk and came up with “outlaw.” “The definition said, ‘Living on the outside of the written law,’ ” she remembers. “I just stopped. I thought, ‘Well, God knows these guys are not doing what Chet [Atkins] and Owen did, by no stretch of the imagination.’ It seemed to me like ‘outlaw’ would be a good thing to call it.” Jennings was initially unenthusiastic. “Waylon frowned,” says Smith. “He just frowned. Tompall said, ‘Don’t tell nobody it come out of this office.’ ” The movement’s roll call extended far beyond the four faces on the cover of Wanted! Silverstein, Bare, Kris Kristofferson, Billy Joe Shaver, David Allan Coe, Sammi Smith, Jerry Jeff Walker, Hank Williams Jr. and Johnny Paycheck all fell under the rubric. Iconoclastic role models like Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard were made honorary Outlaws retroactively. Just as quickly as the window of opportunity opened, it closed again. By 1978, Jennings was in the Top 5 singing “Don’t You Think This Outlaw Bit’s Done Got Out of Hand.” The slick “Urban Cowboy” sound quickly took the Outlaw bit’s place, incorporating the movement’s visual signifiers, even as it bastardized the renegade spirit. But the Outlaws’ influence wouldn’t die. In the 1980s, “New Traditionalists” like Steve Earle, Dwight Yoakam and Cash’s daughter Rosanne kept control over their work, and managed to have hits anyway. The echoes reverberated through the ascendancy of Garth Brooks, whose zealous interest in his business affairs often seemed an end in itself rather than a defense of his artistry; even so, close attention to one’s own balance sheet is also part of the Outlaws’ legacy. In 2000, 24 years after Wanted! The Outlaws became country’s first million-seller, Brooks celebrated the sale of his 100-millionth album. Most artists, it turned out, were content to leave the control the Outlaws won for them on the table. Colter complains that Nashville executives “are still calling the shots, and all the artists are still dumb enough to let them. If they’d stand on what’s been done, things could move a lot faster.” Colter hopes young performers will start looking to the Outlaws for an example. “I think sometimes referring to your roots will give you a sense of direction,” she says. “I think they’re needing that. It needs a shakeup and a change, and maybe we’ll see it soon.” Whether young artists take advantage of the advances made in the 1970s or not, at least they now have options. “I don’t know what it was like before those guys did that,” says Jack Ingram, an indie stalwart from Texas who recently signed to Nashville’s Big Machine imprint. “I just hear stories about how bad it used to be. All I have to say is what I want, and most of the time it’s what I get. I think that’s because of the Outlaws.” Once in a while, a mainstream act with sufficient leverage makes the same realization that Jennings made: that the label needed him more than he needed them. The Dixie Chicks made that discovery and recorded 2002’s commercially risky Home in Texas, with handpicked players. Chicks nemesis Toby Keith came to the same conclusion and last year opened his own label, Show Dog Nashville, with the backing of corporate giant Universal Music Group. Keith and McGraw—along with Keith Urban, Brad Paisley, Gary Allan and Gretchen Wilson, among others—regularly use the latitude afforded by their multiplatinum status to make music that, if radio-ready and comfortably mainstream, can at least be considered their own. It remains generally true that only artists at the level Jennings had reached in 1973 have that liberty. It’s instructive to remember that upon the release of Wanted! The Outlaws in January 1976, none of the principals were exactly fresh-faced newcomers: Jennings was 38, Colter 32, Nelson and Glaser 42. Having gained control of their art and product, it was incumbent upon the original Outlaws not to waste it. Ornery until the end, Jennings followed his muse until his death from complications of diabetes in February 2002. “He was the only one who stayed in Nashville and fought,” says Colter. “Willie went to Texas, Kris went to Hollywood. Nobody else fought like Waylon fought. Nobody.” Colter herself eased out of the spotlight, returning last month with her first album of new material in two decades, the graceful Out of the Ashes. Nelson, whose 1975 Red Headed Stranger is one of Outlaw music’s crown jewels, has released a dizzying array of projects in a seemingly endless number of styles, always returning to easy Texas swing, as on his new You Don’t Know Me: The Songs of Cindy Walker. Glaser is tougher to figure. The man whose studio was the hothouse in which the Outlaw movement reached full flower eventually fell out with Jennings, and hasn’t released an album since 1986. He failed to turn up at a scheduled appearance at Belmont University in late October. Smith says the last time she saw him was at the February 2005 funeral of Hillbilly Central regular Roger “Captain Midnight” Schutt, where he arrived in a wheelchair. “He’s not well,” she says. The Outlaws’ fellow travelers likewise remain true to their ideals. Bare recently released the critically hailed The Moon Was Blue, his first album in 22 years. The still-outspoken Coe has experienced a resurgence under the patronage of Kid Rock. Kristofferson’s new This Old Road is an unadorned, affecting chronicle of experience and perspective. Asked whether the Outlaws have lived up to their values over the last 30 years, Kristofferson is unequivocal. “I’d have to say we all have,” he declares. “I know that I never changed anything they told me I couldn’t say.” Throughout the years since, the Outlaws’ shadow has lengthened. When the airwaves are clogged with junk and timidity is the watchword, the music they made and the boundaries they pulverized offer hope that—if things ever get completely out of hand—another revolution could break out at any minute. “The legend grows that they were flipping the finger to the Nashville establishment,” says Ingram, “and that’s fine and fun and romantic. But the fact is, all they were doing was desperately trying to hold onto their vision. And it worked.” Colter concurs. “It wasn’t a fight against anything,” she says. “It was a fight for creative freedom.” Don Was, who produced Jennings, Nelson and Kristofferson individually and in The Highwaymen (their supergroup with Cash), believes the lessons the Outlaws taught aren’t just for artists. “The truth is, the people who have it all are the people who stick to their guns,” he says. “It doesn’t just apply to music, it applies to everyday life. Don’t do something if it doesn’t ring true to you. If you live your life that way, you’ll come out OK.” Colter says that, every now and then, she gives Wanted! The Outlaws a spin. “It’s still a good album,” she says. “It was simple. It was what we always did.”