Waylon Jennings – A Long Time Ago

“A Long Time Ago” is a song recorded by Waylon Jennings that appears as a track on his 1978 album I’ve Always Been Crazy. Credited to Waylon Jennings with Shel Silverstein as a co-writer, the piece sits among a set of songs on the record that mix personal reflection with the tougher, world-weary perspective Jennings had come to embody by the late 1970s. The track is presented as an album cut rather than a chart single and is representative of the more intimate moments on the LP.

The song’s authorship—Jennings alongside Shel Silverstein—links two distinctive creative voices: Jennings’s road-tested, autobiographical bent and Silverstein’s economical, image-focused lyricism. The collaboration produces a short, concentrated piece that reads less like a crafted narrative and more like a snapshot memory. In that respect the song functions as a compact character study, offering listeners a few telling details that imply a longer life story without spelling everything out.

Lyrically, “A Long Time Ago” is restrained and conversational. The narrator looks back at choices made and experiences lived—love affairs, time on the road, brushes with danger—and delivers lines that suggest both acceptance and the lingering traces of regret. One memorable image in the lyric alludes to a famous early rock-and-roll plane tragedy in passing, using that reference as a way to signal the narrator’s proximity to notable events rather than to recount them in detail. The effect is to place the speaker within a larger cultural memory while keeping the focus on personal perspective.

Musically, the recording is spare and direct. The arrangement favors acoustic and electric guitar textures with a steady rhythmic underpinning and minimal studio adornment, which helps keep Jennings’s vocal and the lyric at the center. The production choices on the track align with the overall sonic approach of the album: band-centered, immediate, and geared toward performance credibility rather than studio polish or ornamentation.

“A Long Time Ago” also appeared in Jennings’s live repertoire during the era and can be found on several archival concert recordings and later compilations that collect his work from the late 1970s. Its concise running time and plainspoken lyric make it easy to include in a setlist as a reflective interlude between more driving numbers, and live performances often emphasize the candid, almost conversational delivery that the studio version suggests.

Although the song was not promoted as a major single, it is frequently noted by listeners and commentators as one of the more revealing album cuts on I’ve Always Been Crazy. The album itself was a commercial success and is often discussed as part of Jennings’s late-1970s output, and “A Long Time Ago” contributes to the record’s balance of defiant anthems and quieter personal statements.

Today the track appears on reissues and streaming collections that document Waylon Jennings’s catalog. It is typically regarded as a compact example of his mid-to-late-career voice: economical in lyric, authoritative in delivery, and reflective in tone. For listeners exploring Jennings’s work, “A Long Time Ago” offers a brief, candid moment that complements the more declarative outlaw anthems for which he is widely known.