The life story of Waylon Jennings is the stuff of country music legend. And it’s all true, from his youth picking cotton in Texas to teenage radio DJ to playing bass with Buddy Holly – giving up his plane ticket on that fateful day the music died.

And that was just the Fifties.

It’s one of my minor musical disappointments that on the one occasion I got to see him play live, at the annual International Country Music Festival at Wembley Arena in the late Eighties, I didn’t know enough about him – or his songs – to appreciate it properly.

Back in 1973 he hooked up with then unknown songwriter Billy Joe Shaver for a surly, stripped-back set of songs that would define the Outlaw Country style – a gritty fusion of Texas honky tonk and a rock’n’roll approach to playing country that was a rejection of Nashville’s pop-country production line.

Honky Tonk Heroes was their signature tune.

Waylon had been playing professionally since the late Fifties, when he moved to Lubbock and met Buddy Holly, who became his mentor, teaching him guitar and producing his debut single Jole Blon – Buddy Holly on guitar, King Curtis on sax – in 1958.

Hired to play bass in his band The Crickets, Waylon was all set to fly to the next gig during that fateful tour when he gave up his prized plane ticket to fellow performer The Big Bopper, who was feeling poorly with a cold, agreeing to take the draughty tour bus instead.

Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens were all dead when the plane crashed.

After Holly’s death Waylon moved to Arizona and formed his own rockabilly band, The Waylors, before moving to Los Angeles where Herb Alpert tried unsuccessfully to mould him into a pop star.

Jennings then moved to Nashville, alternating solo recordings with work as a session man, befriending Johnny Cash and collaborating with a struggling singer-songwriter called Kris Kristofferson, and another called Willie Nelson.

In the Eighties those four would form the superstar Outlaw Country group The Highwaymen, a reaction to Nashville’s increasingly formulaic production of lush, string-drenched pop-country songs from the same roster of songwriters and studio musicians. Jennings also provided the theme song and narration for The Dukes Of Hazzard.

At the same time he was struggling with a massive cocaine habit (as can be clearly seen in this sweaty late-Seventies live clip) and he became less productive as his health deteriorated in the Nineties.

Complications from diabetes forced him to have a foot amputated before his death in 2002. But what a life he had…