By Tom Geddie
Think of Eric Clapton’s song “Tears in Heaven.” Think of Steve Winwood’s “Higher Love” and “Valerie.” Or Dionne Warwick’s “I’ll Never Love This Way Again,” Barry Manilow’s “Looks Like We Made It,” and Whitney Houston’s “Didn’t We Almost Have It All.”
And Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On,” from the movie Titanic, a song said to be the most-played ever on radio.
Jennings, who lives in Santa Barbara, California, close to much of his work, has won four Grammy Awards, three Academy Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, a British Academy of Film and Television Arts Award, and a whole slew of nominations.
He spent his youth fishing at lakes from Gun Barrel City east to the Louisiana border, and believes the freedom from those days contribute to his songwriting success.
“We lived mainly in the country, near town, and spent a lot of time fishing and hunting,” he said. “You don’t say it was real beauty when you look back on it, but there was a certain freedom in everything that was going on with that. I appreciate almost everything that goes around, and has some beauty to it.
“The first house we lived in, between Tyler and Kilgore, was next to a cotton gin and it was almost like living in the wild,” he said. “There’s some kind of feeling that goes into you. I suppose that’s because you are not dominated by machines, but by what kind of day it’s going to be. Is it going to be hot or cold? Are we going to get some birds or not?”
Freedom is one essential element of art. Often, not always, so is uncertainty. There’s that sense of wanting to know what happens next.
“Vagary” is a good word in this context, too, an unpredictable or wandering nature.
Even after writing a few hundred songs — with an album collection of 6,000 or so — and being the go-to guy for so many well known artists, Jennings still isn’t sure, he says, what makes a good song.
“I don’t know. In one sense, it’s whatever the ear wants to hear,” he said. “Somebody who loves Puccini or mezzo sopranos might not like Hank Williams or Janis Joplin.
“My great accident was I grew up on everything including jazz and classical.
Jennings played a bit of trombone, guitar, and baritone horn growing up, and spent a couple of seasons in the Tyler symphony orchestra as, in his words, “the very lowest in the trombone section.”
He taught English composition at Tyler Junior College and then at Stephen F. Austin before teaching at Wisconsin-Eau Claire for three years and then became a full-time songwriter, first in Nashville and then in California.
“My wife and I went to Nashville in 1971, I think, and got banged around and then things kept going. It wasn’t easy or quick.”
Jennings’ anecdotes are thick with understated success.
“Music is almost endless if you let your heart open, your head open, your ears open,” he said. “My good fortune was that when, for example Rodney Crowell and I got together, we had a kind of East Texas blues, and we got right to the place and got the songs done. It’s just right there.
“And The Crusaders, from Houston’s Fourth Ward, wanted to write some songs for B.B. King and we did that and wound up with about two and a half albums. Then they asked me to write lyrics with Joe Sample for ‘Street Life.’ When Steve Winwood was looking for someone to write with, he had such a wonderful voice, and we worked on two or three albums.
More recently with Emmylou Harris, he co-wrote “Six White Cadillacs,” “Good Night Old World,” and “New Orleans New Orleans” for her Hard Bargain album.
He pays no attention to genre.
“I can’t characterize myself. It’s just what I love, I get into it,” he said.
Most often, Jennings provides lyrics for music.
“Joe Samples gave me, on his keyboard, this bomp, bomp, bomp, da bomp, and you can feel that rhythm so it really gets you. And there was ‘Street Life,’ and then you tell the story. You walk through who you think you are in the song.”
In “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic, for example, the “you” Jennings wrote about was a 101-year-old woman he met a couple of years before writing the love song.
“I had met this very vibrant woman who was about 101 years old when I met her,” he told an interviewer. “That was two years before. And she came into my mind. And I realized she could have been on the Titanic. So I wrote everything from the point of view of a person of a great age looking back so many years. And it was the love story that made the film, of course. It was magnificently done with special effects, the actors were good. But the love story was what it was.”
Jennings won’t pick a favorite among his own songs because, as he’s said in the past, “every song is the first song” in some way.
“All of them are different,” he said. “I must say that I am a really lucky SOB. I worked hard, we had some grim years at the beginning and for three or four years in Nashville. Life’s been so good to me; I don’t analyze. I just get it going, and, if I’m not in the mood, I don’t.”
He’s glad to have the rewards because that leads to more songwriting opportunities, but it’s not something he dwells on at all.
When informed that the Celine Dion hit “My Heart Will Go On” is said to be the most-played ever on radio, he laughed and said, “I didn’t know that. That’s wonderful.”
As for what’s ahead for Jennings, who is now 68 years old, he quotes a Clark Gable line from an old movie.
“Clark Gable is in the mountains above Reno where he’s got a screwed up life, he’s divorced and missing his kids, and he and his partner are trying to round up some wild horses to sell, and he’s trying to get this cabin built — and Marilyn Monroe arrives in the moonlight, and she asks him, ‘What do you do up here?’ Gable says, ‘I get up, make some coffee, go outside, and see what kinda day it’s going to be.’
“That’s what I do. I just try to stay out of trouble, as far as one can. I have some very nice friends, artists, here, who like music of all sorts. They have more concerts for the size of the town than I’ve ever heard of. In the past 10 years, I’ve heard almost every great orchestra on Earth. It’s a gas.”
UPDATE: Will Jennings passed away in at the age of 80 on September 6, 2024, in Tyler, Texas.