Waylon Jennings – Trouble Man

“Trouble Man” is a song recorded by Waylon Jennings and released in 1988 as a single from his studio album Full Circle. The track was issued during Jennings’s final year with MCA Records and appears near the start of an album that Jennings co-produced with Jimmy Bowen. Written in collaboration with Tony Joe White, “Trouble Man” was part of a late-1980s collection intended to blend Jennings’s established outlaw-country persona with a more contemporary studio approach.

The songwriting credit for “Trouble Man” lists Waylon Jennings alongside Tony Joe White, reflecting a co-writing partnership that emphasizes roots-tinged rock and blues influences. Tony Joe White was also involved in the album sessions and contributed stylistic touches associated with his swamp-rock background; the collaboration gave the song a grittier, blues-leaning edge compared with some of Jennings’s earlier, more purely country material.

Musically, the recorded arrangement is midtempo and band-centered, with guitar-driven accompaniment and a rhythmic foundation that supports Jennings’s vocal narrative. The track leans on plainspoken phrasing and a compact structure: verses that establish character and circumstance lead into a strong, repeating hook. Instrumental touches—harmonica and electric-guitar riffs among them—lend the song a rough-hewn texture that complements its lyrical subject matter.

Lyrically, “Trouble Man” presents a compact, semi-autobiographical sketch of a trouble-prone narrator. The words employ direct, image-driven lines to outline a life marked by restlessness and hard-won experience; the title functions as a label the singer both accepts and describes. Rather than elaborate metaphor, the lyric uses brief, concrete details and a recurring refrain to create an impression of hard living and personal resilience.

Released as a single in 1988, “Trouble Man” registered modestly on country radio. It charted on the Billboard country listings and is documented as one of several minor hits from the Full Circle album. The single did not reach the Top 10, but its presence on the charts contributed to the album’s visibility and to Jennings’s continued profile as an active recording artist into the late 1980s.

The song also became part of Jennings’s live repertoire in subsequent years and appears on several live and compilation releases. Jennings performed the tune in concert settings throughout the late 1980s and into the 1990s, and it was occasionally included in collaborative sets with fellow outlaw-country figures. These live versions underline the song’s function as a showpiece in which the performer’s personality and the tune’s compact, declarative lyric combine to produce a direct audience connection.

In retrospective terms, “Trouble Man” is typically regarded as a late-career entry that balances Waylon Jennings’s rough-edged image with contemporary production values of the 1980s. It is remembered less as a breakout single than as a recognizable example of Jennings partnering with outside writers and players to renew his sound. The track remains available on reissues and streaming editions of Full Circle and on various anthologies that document Jennings’s recording activity through the end of the decade.