Willie the Wandering Gypsy and Me

I thought I’d posted this once upon a time, but I guess not. It’s Waylon Jennings playing “Willie the Wandering Gypsy and Me” at one of Willie Nelson’s Fourth of July Picnics, sometime in the early 1970s. The song was written by Billy Joe Shaver, who also wrote most of the rest of the songs on Waylon’s Honky Tonk Heroes, which is widely considered the first Outlaw Country album.

It’s one of my favorite albums of all time, and if you’re a Cormac McCarthy fan, you’ll find it popping up here and there in his work. My favorite bit comes in Blood Meridian when McCarthy riffs on the line “There Ain’t No God in Mexico.” As Waylon sings it, “there ain’t no way to understand how that border crossing feeling makes a fool out of a man.”