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 reputation for its strong live shows
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,
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, was released in 2010 and
received great
critical acclaim and solid sales.