Shooter Jennings Unearths Lost Waylon Gem Featuring Glen Campbell

When Shooter Jennings was digging through his late father’s archive, he stumbled across something that initially confused him—a recording with guitar work so distinctive he couldn’t immediately place it. That mystery track turned out to be a late-night session from December 1978 that would become the centerpiece of his father’s upcoming album.

The song is called Diamonds, and it features Glen Campbell on guitar. Shooter announced the album during a Father’s Day appearance on CBS Sunday Morning, marking the continuation of a project to bring previously unheard Waylon Jennings recordings to light. This isn’t Shooter simply warehousing his dad’s old tapes—it’s a deliberate reframing of who Waylon really was.“When somebody is gone, there tends to be…the public remembrance of them can be distorted,”Shooter told CBS Sunday Morning.“People can remember the outlaw part of this or fantasize what he was like, but he’s not here to represent himself. But what I felt was so important was you saw how much he loved music…He connected with those songs. All he cared about was music—it wasn’t about image, it wasn’t about money, or anything beyond wanting to be great at music and play music.”

The Diamonds title track was a revelation. According to Shooter’s account, he kept finding references to it across three different studio sessions while combing through his father’s work. Once he heard the full recording and recognized Campbell’s unmistakable guitar tone, everything clicked.“It quickly became one of my favorite recordings that my dad ever made and I knew I had to have a whole album centered around it,”Shooter explained. The remaining members of the Waylors helped piece together the story of that December night.

Diamonds arrives via Son of Jessi/Thirty Tigers on November 13 in physical and download formats, with streaming arriving in December. It follows 2025’s Songbird, the first in what Shooter has positioned as an ongoing series of posthumous Waylon projects. This year, Shooter won a Grammy for producing Robert Randolph’s Preacher Kids, cementing his reputation as a serious custodian of his father’s legacy—and his own talent.

Beyond the music, Shooter’s been fielding some unexpected opportunities. He recently discussed on Nashville Now, Rolling Stone’s weekly country music podcast, that he’s been approached about opening a Waylon Jennings bar in Nashville. He was initially hesitant because his father didn’t drink, but he’s warmed to the idea if it’s done right.“There was a while where I would not do it because he didn’t drink, and I thought it was a weird thing,”Shooter said.“But now I’d totally do it if it was the right thing. And there have been talks about it.”It’s a sign of just how much the appetite for Waylon—both the man and the music—remains undiminished.