Exhibit explores country music’s outlaws, poets and pickers

NASHVILLE, TENN. » If the term “outlaw country” evokes images of Willie Nelson’s hippie braids or Waylon Jennings’ “Honky Tonk Heroes,” then you’ll want to see a new museum exhibit offering a deeper look at the poets, pickers and characters that revolutionized country music in the 1970s.

In the more than four decades since Nelson left Nashville in 1970, the term “outlaw” has become a profitable way of branding the scene that stretched from recording studios in Music City to hippies and rednecks in Austin, Texas.

But for the artists that experienced it firsthand, the movement was less about breaking laws and more about pushing back on traditional production techniques, wresting creative control from their labels and turning their focus to song craft.

“All of the main characters in the outlaw movement were poets, or if not, had the poet’s soul,” said Rodney Crowell, the Texas-born singer songwriter who came to Nashville in the ‘70s.

The “Outlaws and Armadillos: Country’s Roaring ‘70s” exhibit at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, which opened last month and runs through 2021, features never-before-seen photos and interviews with iconic musicians from the era, unique memorabilia, instruments, stage costumes, original artwork and concert posters, as well as special programs and speakers. Displays include Kris Kristofferson’s Army uniform, Guy Clark’s Randall knife, Nelson’s sneakers, a stuffed armadillo and a copper still for making bootleg whiskey that was donated by Tom T. Hall.

Austin-based filmmaker Eric Geadelmann, a co-curator of the exhibit, put together videos for the exhibit’s eight screens featuring interviews with Kristofferson, Clark, Jessi Colter, Jerry Jeff Walker, Billy Joe Shaver and more.

The exhibit’s walls are lined with dozens of concert posters, many of them from illustrator Jim Franklin, who designed surrealistic artwork for concerts held at the Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin.