Shooter Jennings

by Steve Leggett
The only son of country legends Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter, Shooter Jennings literally spent his childhood on a tour bus. Born Waylon Albright Jennings, Shooter was playing drums by the time he was five years old and had already begun taking piano lessons, only to break them off and follow his own path to an understanding of the instrument. He discovered guitar at 14 and rock & roll (particularly Southern rock and the loose-limbed hard rock of Guns N' Roses) at 16. Soon he moved from Nashville to L.A., where he assembled a rock band called Stargunn. Stargunn earned a strong local reputation for its live shows, and enjoyed a six- or seven-year run on the L.A. circuit before Jennings rediscovered his outlaw country roots and dissolved the band.
After a short stay in New York, where Jennings assembled material for a country project, he returned to L.A. and put together a second band -- this time with solid country roots -- which he named the .357s. Jennings and the band holed up in the studio, eventually emerging with a rambunctious country album called Put the O Back in Country, which was released in 2005 on Universal South Records. Following in his father's footsteps, but with his own feisty, scrappy sense of country, Jennings placed himself in a fine position to both explore that legacy and to carve out his own. A second album, Electric Rodeo (which was actually recorded before Put the O Back in Country), appeared in 2006, followed by a live set, Live at Irving Plaza, later in the year. Jennings' third solo effort, The Wolf, was released in October 2007, featuring a cover of Dire Straits' "Walk of Life" (whose composer, Mark Knopfler, had been a longtime family friend). His fourth studio album, Black Ribbons, produced by Dave Cobb, appeared early in 2010.