Waylon Jennings – Brown-Eyed Handsome Man

“Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” is a song originally written and recorded by Chuck Berry in 1956, but it was later recorded by Waylon Jennings as part of his exploration of rock-and-roll and roots material. Jennings included the song on his 1970 album Waylon, released by RCA Victor. This period marked a transitional stage in Jennings’s career, as he was increasingly asserting his personal taste and broad musical influences while still working within the Nashville recording system.

By the late 1960s, Waylon Jennings had already shown a strong interest in rock and early rhythm-and-blues, having started his career as a radio disc jockey and rockabilly performer. Recording “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” allowed him to pay direct tribute to Chuck Berry, whose songwriting and rhythmic style had influenced multiple generations of American musicians. Jennings’s decision to record the song also reflected his comfort moving between country and rock idioms.

Musically, Jennings’s version retains the song’s driving rhythm and upbeat structure while filtering it through a country-rock arrangement. Electric guitar and steady rhythm dominate the track, with less emphasis on Berry’s original piano-driven feel. The tempo remains lively, but the production is cleaner and more controlled, aligning the song with late-1960s country-rock rather than mid-1950s rock and roll.

Lyrically, “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” is built around a series of celebratory verses that highlight confidence, success, and charisma. The song references sports, courtroom drama, and popular culture, using the recurring title phrase as a symbol of admiration and appeal. Jennings delivers the lyric straightforwardly, without irony or reinterpretation, allowing the original celebratory tone of Berry’s writing to remain intact.

Waylon Jennings’s vocal performance is relaxed and assured. Rather than imitating Chuck Berry’s phrasing, he approaches the song with his own conversational style, grounding the lyric in his deeper, more measured delivery. This contrast gives the song a different character, blending Berry’s energetic writing with Jennings’s emerging outlaw-era vocal identity.

Although Jennings’s recording of “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” was not released as a major single and did not chart independently, it contributed to the stylistic range of the Waylon album. The record itself performed modestly on the country charts and helped set the stage for Jennings’s creative breakthrough in the early 1970s, when he would gain greater artistic freedom.

In retrospect, “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” stands as an illustrative cover in Waylon Jennings’s catalog. It highlights his deep respect for early rock-and-roll pioneers and his willingness to incorporate non-country material into his recordings. While overshadowed by his later outlaw-era hits, the track remains a revealing example of how Jennings blended rock, country, and personal taste into a distinctive musical identity.