Jessi Colter Announces Memoir About Life With Waylon Jennings

The lone female on the seminal Wanted! The Outlaws album is releasing her autobiography. Jessi Colter, singer, songwriter and the widow of Waylon Jennings, has announced An Outlaw and a Lady: A Memoir of Music, Life with Waylon, and the Faith That Brought Me Home. The memoir will be released April 11th, 2017.

Written with David Ritz, An Outlaw and a Lady chronicles Colter’s journey from singing in church to performing alongside one of the architects of outlaw country. But Colter, fiercely independent, was never relegated to Jennings’ shadow. As a solo artist, she scored a Number One country song with “I’m Not Lisa” and a Top 10 hit with “What’s Happened to Blue Eyes,” and established herself as an important female vocalist in country music. Later, her collaborations with her husband, specifically Wanted! The Outlaws‘ “Suspicious Minds,” and “Storms Never Last,” off their 1981 duets album Leather and Lace, made strong impressions on the charts. The latter became Colter’s signature song, with the singer performing it regularly in concert, including at CMA Music Festival in 2014, where she joined her and Jennings’ son Shooter Jennings onstage.

Colter’s memoir is also set to address the difficulties in her marriage to Jennings, who lived out his rebellious image with a harrowing cocaine addiction before eventually kicking the drug. He died from complications of diabetes in 2002.

Colter, who resides in Arizona, turned 73 in May and is working on a new album.