Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow up to Be Cowboys

Written by Ed Bruce and his wife Patsy in 1975, the song was a decent hit for Bruce that year before Waylon Jennings recorded his own version and decided he wasn’t satisfied with it. He brought it to Willie Nelson, who added his vocals to the existing track. That recording became the lead single from their 1978 album Waylon & Willie, spent four weeks at No. 1 on the country chart, crossed over to No. 42 on the Hot 100, and won the Grammy for Best Country Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal in 1979. Nelson kept returning to it. He cut a solo version for Robert Redford’s The Electric Horseman in 1979, then recorded it with Matchbox Twenty for Stars & Guitars in 2002, and again with Toby Keith in 2017 for a Waylon tribute album. It has since turned up in The Cowboy Way, Space Cowboys, and a 2015 Volkswagen commercial. Jennings, for his part, eventually tired of the outlaw image the song helped build. After the DEA raided his Nashville studio during that era, he wrote “Don’t You Think This Outlaw Bit’s Done Got Out of Hand” about what the whole thing had become.