Exhibit explores country music’s outlaws, poets and pickers

NASHVILLE – If the term “outlaw country” evokes images of Willie Nelson’s hippie braids or Waylon Jennings’ “Honky Tonk Heroes,” then you’ll want to see a new museum exhibit offering a deeper look at the poets, pickers and characters who revolutionized country music in the 1970s.

“Outlaws & Armadillos: Country’s Roaring ’70s” at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville, Tennessee, runs through 2021. It features never-before-seen photos and interviews with iconic musicians, unique memorabilia, instruments and original artwork and concert posters from the counterculture scene that stretched from Austin to Nashville.

Rodney Crowell, who came to Nashville in the ’70s, said the era was a period of creative freedom from the constraints of Nashville’s traditional recording styles.