With the Highwaymen you got four great larger than life personalities and four great and unique voices in Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson. It’s such a shame only Willie and Kris are still alive.

The four super talents were brought together in the studio with what one suspects would have been a selection of Nashville’s best musicians for the session. Of the ten tracks here, the four lead vocalists got to sing as a quartet on half of them while Cash and Nelson did three duets together. On their version of Against The Wind, it is Kristofferson who is left out and on Deportee Nelson and Cash sing with Latin country singer Johnny Rodriguez.

The title track which I was surprised to find was written by Jim Webb, begins the album and while Webb is not a songwriter whose work I usually enjoy, it is a very good song. It has a real ‘out in the desert’ sound about it.

The Last Cowboy Song is a bit of an old sing around the campfire type thing. The story is stronger than the melody, but the voices kind of make up for that too.

Jim, I Wore A Tie Today is a song about two guys remembering an old mate at his funeral. It’s a very clever little lyric based upon the old comrades’ gold mining days. This one is sung by Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson and it’s quite a sad song.

Big River is one of two Johnny Cash compositions on the album and it is a country swing with all the boys getting a chance to sing. Once again there is a good story going on here and this song is one of the standouts on the disc for me.

The second Johnny Cash composition is Committed To Parkview which was a kind of Betty Ford clinic for anyone with addiction problems. It is sung by Johnny and Willie and I don’t know if Cash was ever in there or not, but his description of life in there sounds a little as if he might have been. The Man in Black was certainly a very good storyteller.

Desperados Waiting For A Train is a fabulous story within a song too. It appears to be about a young guy remembering all the times he spent with an older guy who might have been his mentor. It was written by Guy Clark and it is so beautifully written you can just see the characters referred to in the lyrics.

Deportee was written by Woody Guthrie and it is all about a plane wreck and with his magic way with words, Woody painted a vivid picture of how some of the passengers would be viewed as less important than others.

Welfare Line is a country rocker which is also a great social commentary about how sometimes governments aren’t as caring about their people as they should be.

I particularly like the version of Bob Seger’s Against The Wind which has had the te4mpo altered slightly and the vocal lines are so much bluesier and more passionately delivered than the original.

The album closes with a John Prine song, The Twentieth Century Is Almost Over on which Cash and Nelson duet. It sounds a little out of place on this album, and I’m not entirely sure why. The lyrics aren’t bad, but the melody is a bit like a nursery rhyme.

Recommended: Yes