Shooter Jennings revives lost Waylon Jennings recordings for Diamonds album

Shooter Jennings is not just preserving Waylon Jennings’ archive. He is deciding which buried recordings will define it, and that makes Diamonds more than a family project: it is an act of authorship over one of country music’s most consequential legacies.

The second album in the archive series is set for release later this year, following Songbird, which arrived on October 3, 2025. Shooter Jennings found the material in the summer of 2024 while sorting through hundreds of his father’s unlabeled multitrack tapes in Hollywood’s Sunset Sound Studio 3, a room where he says he has made about 40 records. What began as an excavation quickly became a three-part release plan, after he realized the vault held fully fleshed-out performances from roughly 1971 to 1985, not just rough sketches.

That distinction matters. Waylon Jennings was one of the central figures in the outlaw country movement, a singer whose sound bridged honkytonk, folk and Southern rock while producing 16 No. 1 hits. His catalog includes I’m a Rambling Man, Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys with Willie Nelson, and the theme song for The Dukes of Hazzard. Shooter Jennings has said the unreleased music makes it feel as if his father is “talking to anyone who knows and loves his voice,” a description that turns the archive into something closer to a public conversation than a private inheritance. He has also called the work deeply emotional and said he is a “crier.”

The title track, Diamonds, shows how carefully that legacy is being shaped. The song was recorded on December 28, 1978, written by Waylon Jennings and Glen Campbell, and includes The Waylors, along with Campbell on guitar. That kind of detail gives the album a historical weight that reaches beyond nostalgia. It places Waylon Jennings back inside the creative network that built his reputation, while Shooter Jennings decides how that history is sequenced, heard and remembered.

For American music history, the question is no longer whether these recordings existed. It is who gets to open the vault, which performances count, and how a son can turn a hidden cache into a living public record. In that sense, Shooter Jennings is shaping Waylon Jennings’ legacy as much as he is reviving it.