By P.A. Geddie
The East Texas Symphony Orchestra and singer-songwriter Rodney Crowell are joining forces to pay tribute to lyricist and East Texas native Will Jennings in a concert at 7:30 p.m. June 22, at Rogers Palmer Performing Arts Center on the Tyler Junior College (TJC) campus in Tyler, Texas. The Grammy and Oscar-winning Jennings has cowritten numerous hits, including “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic, “Up Where We Belong” from An Officer and a Gentleman, “Tears in Heaven,” “Higher Love,” and numerous collaborations with Crowell, to name just a few. The concert also features a special appearance by TJC alumna Julianne Casey.
Jennings is often referred to as the greatest American lyricist of the late 20th century. He’s written for a variety of artists besides Crowell, including Steve Winwood, Whitney Houston, Eric Clapton, B.B. King, Joe Sample, Mariah Carey, Jimmy Buffett, Barry Manilow, and Roy Orbison.
Billboard announced a few months ago the closing of a deal where All Clear Music and Fuji Music Group jointly acquired Jennings’ extensive catalog. While the terms of the deal were not revealed, Billboard said the “catalog carried a valuation in the range of $60 to $70 million.”
Born in Kilgore, Texas, on June 27, 1944, Jennings attended Chapel Hill schools near Tyler and graduated from Tyler Junior College. In 1967, he earned a degree from Stephen F. Austin State University (SFA) in Nacogdoches.
He spent his youth fishing at lakes from Gun Barrel City and east to the Louisiana border, and believes the freedom from those days contributed to his songwriting success he told County Line Magazine in 2013.
“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?”
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.
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.”
Then 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 provided 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.”
Jennings returned to live in East Texas a few years ago where, as he states above, life is dominated by what kind of day it’s going to be.
It’s a consistent theme from his childhood that he mentioned even a decade ago as he quoted 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,” Jennings said. “I just try to stay out of trouble, as far as one can.”
Jennings was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2013 and the Texas Heritage Songwriter’s Hall of Fame in 2016.
“Usually, when Will worked with artists, he wrote the words and the other guy wrote the melodies,” Crowell said during Jennings’ Texas Songwriters Hall of Fame induction, “but when Will and I worked together, it was the other way around. I used his melodies. As far as I know, I’m the only one who’s ever gotten to do that, and that’s perfectly fine with me.”
One of those collaborations was “What Kind of Love,” which he and Jennings wrote from a recording of a melody Roy Orbison had written just before his death.
“You never knew when Will would just call you out of the blue with some brilliant idea,” Crowell said, explaining how the Orbison tune came about. “One day, he said, ‘Man, I need you to come over in a hurry. This is really important and we’ve got to do a really good job on this one.”
Crowell met Jennings when they were students at SFA. Besides “What Kind of Love,” the two collaborated on the hits “Many a Long and Lonesome Highway,” and “Please Remember Me,” a number one country hit for Tim McGraw.
Crowell is set to share songs and stories from his many years working with Jennings during the concert while Julianne Casey performs more of Jenning’s Oscar-winning works including “Up Where We Belong” from An Officer and a Gentleman, as well as “Hymn to the Sea” from Titanic.
“It is a true honor to be invited to sing in this great musical celebration honoring Will Jennings,” Casey said. “I grew up listening to so many of the songs he wrote which were sung by many of my favorite artists such as Celine Dion, Whitney Houston, Eric Clapton, Randy Crawford, and Steve Winwood.
“His lyrics truly feel like a soundtrack to my childhood, and I find it so incredible that this brilliantly talented artist was a student of Tyler Junior College. His influence is deeply inspiring to not only the music students of TJC, but he also serves as a great inspiration to the literature and creative writing students of our TJC community.”
Over the years, Jennings and his wife Carole, who met when they were students at TJC, have maintained their connection to TJC.
At the opening of TJC’s Rogers Palmer Performing Arts Center in 2021, the center’s Carole and Will Jennings Lobby was named in their honor. The Will and Carole Jennings Lobby will also house a rotating exhibit of Jennings’ memorabilia and awards from his songwriting career, including two Oscars, two Golden Globes, three Grammys, and many others.
The East Texas Symphony Orchestra is led by conductor Richard Lee. The concert promises exclusive new arrangements of many of Jenning’s works. For ticket information visit etso.org.
Sources: East Texas Helped Jennings Make It, by Tom Geddie, County Line Magazine, January, 2013; TJC News Reports
UPDATE: Will Jennings passed away it the age of 80 on September 6, 2024, in Tyler, Texas.
