Mill Town Players Bring Outlaws to Town to Open Season 13

Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer

The Outlaws are coming to Pelzer this weekend, and if ticket sales are any indication, they will receive a rollickingly warm reception.

The Mill Town Players will gather many of them beneath the recently renovated Historic Pelzer Auditorium for “Country Outlaws,” the theater company’s opening production for its 13th season, which will run Friday-Sunday.

The one-weekend concert is a tribute to the music that emerged when country artists such as Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, Kris Kristofferson and Johnny Cash began pushing against the polished constraints of the Nashville establishment.

Tickets are mostly gone for the show, set for four performances: 7:30 p.m. Friday; 3 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Saturday; and 3 p.m. Sunday. 13.

There are songs show carrying a cigarette burn, a court date, a lonely highway and a bad decision made around closing time. These are songs about fugitives, cowboys, drinkers, prisoners, lovers, people left behind and people who have left before the first verse is over.

The concert does not attempt a documentary history of outlaw country, instead offering something more useful: the songs themselves.

The first act opens with Waylon Jennings’ “I Ain’t Living Long Like This,” a title that sets the tone for the concert. It is followed by Willie Nelson’s “Whiskey River,” a song that has outlived the circumstances of countless listeners who believed they might be the one person capable of drinking their memories away.

The program then moves through Jennings’ “I’m the Only Hell (Mama Ever Raised)” and “Why’d You Come in Here Lookin’ Like That,” as well as Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried” and the Willie Nelson-Waylon Jennings favorite “Luckenbach, Texas.”

The first half also includes “Highwayman,” the song associated with the supergroup formed by Nelson, Jennings, Kristofferson and Johnny Cash. It is joined by Nelson’s “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” Kristofferson’s “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” and “Me and Bobby McGee.”

Townes Van Zandt’s “Pancho and Lefty” appears on the bill, along with “Delta Dawn” and “Good Ol’ Boys,” the theme from The Dukes of Hazzard.

It is a survey of the country music’s where men leave town, women wait at home, prisons loom, highways extend indefinitely and nobody seems entirely convinced that redemption is impossible.

The second act opens with “(Ghost) Riders in the Sky,” the old Western standard whose riders are condemned to chase a herd of red-eyed cattle through the clouds. From there, the program returns to Waylon Jennings with “I’m a Ramblin’ Man,” then moves through Chris Stapleton’s “Tennessee Whiskey,” Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” George Jones’ “I Think I’ll Just Stay Here and Drink,” and “Those Memories of You.”

The songs that follow are less interested in good behavior than in emotional accuracy: “I’m Not Lisa,” “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way,” David Allan Coe’s “You Never Even Called Me By My Name,” Steve Earle’s “Copperhead Road,” Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues,” and Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You.”

The sequence brings together several generations of country music, from the haunted Western ballad to the outlaw-country rebellion of the 1970s, from Cash’s prison-yard authority to the late, great Parton’s nearly impossible combination of precision, sorrow and grace.

The Mill Town Players’ “Country Outlaws” cast includes nine local vocalists and musicians:

• Dana Beigay — vocals and guitar

• Adam Buckner — vocals

• Nathan Day — drums

• Nathan Fowler — vocals and guitar

• Courtney Kostuik — vocals

• Mike Tucker — vocals

• Joe Wehunt — guitars and piano

• Cheryl Connelly — vocals and guitar

• Greg Day — bass

The band’s work will be less imitation than translation since country songs of this kind are difficult to perform because they often sound easier than they are. A singer cannot simply hit the notes of “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” or “I Will Always Love You.” The song has to sound as though the singer has been carrying it longer than the audience has.

Outlaw country began, in part, as a rebellion against a smoother, more controlled version of Nashville music. Its best songs retained the textures that polished country sometimes tried to sand away: hard work, loneliness, bad marriages, bad luck, worn-out towns, long drives, barrooms and the stubborn conviction that a person might still start over.

The Mill Town Players will bring those songs to Pelzer for one weekend. The question is whether audience members will leave content to go home — or feeling, briefly, as if the road might be calling.