The Highwaymen: Boxed Set

As rip-offs go, this is one of the more cynical ones — even by comparison with my Marianne Faithfull and Muddy Waters compilations.

This is not an album by The Highwaymen. As an ensemble, they perform none of the 50+ songs on these three CDs. Those songs are recordings made by the four singers who comprised The Highwaymen.

Well, since those four singers are Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson and Waylon Jennings, and (to be fair) they are often better apart than together, you might still expect high standards. Yet the recordings are mostly very poor, almost bootleg quality live recordings of lacklustre performances of the classics, which someone has licensed for a song (ha! ha!) and then issued with the most pedestrian packaging imaginable at what appeared to be a bargain price to dumb customers — of whom I became one when I paid £7.99 in 2001.

Kris Kristofferson comes off best, because they didn't have any rubbish live recordings of him, and used lesser tracks from studio albums instead. Two or three of them are OK.

Ten years before I was talking to some kind soul at North Yorkshire Training and Enterprise Council about The Highwaymen, and she kindly gave me a tape of their first album. My music room is now fully shelved and my cassettes are no longer stuffed in a big box under stairs: I can actually get to them. So I listened to the proper album to take away the taste of the rip-off. It's a million miles away from the stripped down sound Johnny Cash would adopt a few years later: absolutely chocka with session musicians, backing singers and slick production. But the songs are good.

In 1992 I made one of my few visits to Sheffield Arena to see The Highwaymen, with Ian F. We were way back and at the side of the shed. I remember very little, except that Willie Nelson repeatedly outshone the others when he sang lead.

MusicBrainz entry for this album