Various Outlaws & Armadillos (2-CD)

(Legacy) 36 tracks with 30 page booklet. 2-CD companion to the 'Country Music Hall Of Fame And Museum' exhibit 'Outlaws & Armadillos: Country's Roaring '70s'.

In Texas and in Tennessee, country music's 1970s were a creative flowering, a confluence of art and revelry, whiskey and poetry, bolstered by wild-eyed funkies who gathered to egg each other on at fanciful environs like Nashville's Hillbilly Central and Austin's Armadillo World Headquarters.

Characters including eight-fingered honky-tonk bard Billy Joe Shaver, 'Mysterious Rhinestone Cowboy' David Allan Coe, 'Texas Jewboy' Kinky Friedman, Cowboy Jack Clement (who feared horses and wore comfortable shoes), hard-charging outlaw Waylon Jennings, and braided Buddha Willie Nelson presided over a glorious culture-collision that produced some of country music's greatest recordings.

'Wanna go home with the Armadillo,' sang Gary P. Nunn, in his now-classic 'London Homesick Blues.' Nunn was speaking of Texas, where the homely possum-on-a-half-shell became a signifier of an unrestrained scene that bridged rednecks and hippies, old-school traditions and psychedelic tendencies.

`Armadillos and hippies are somewhat alike, 'cause they're maligned and picked on,' said Eddie Wilson, who ran the beer-soaked Austin venue he named in honor of the armadillo. 'Armadillos like to sleep all day and roam at night. They share their homes with others. People think they're smelly and ugly, and they keep their noses in the grass. They're paranoid. But they've got ne characteristic that nobody can knock: They survive like a sonuvabitch.'
 
The music survives, as well. The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum celebrates that music and the people who made it with the exhibition Outlaws & Armadillos: Country's Roaring '70s.