Shannon McNally Releases 'Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys'

Shannon McNally, the voice and brains behind THE WAYLON SESSIONS, a record of classic Waylon Jennings songs, has released another track from the forthcoming album, "Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys." McNally debuted the track via Austin American Statesman, of which Peter Blackstock wrote about her delivery and the song's history:

"Shannon McNally isn't an Austinite, but the singer-songwriter who currently calls Nashville home has ties to the Live Music Capital. She's spent much of the past few years singing Texas songwriter Terry Allen's band alongside prominent Austin musicians such as Lloyd Maines and Charlie Sexton. And South Austin venue Sam's Town Point has became a local home base of sorts for McNally, a place for her to work out new material with her band in an intimate setting. Lukas's father, Austin icon Willie Nelson, gets a tip of the hat, too, via McNally's rendition of "Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys." Written in the mid-1970s by Ed Bruce and Patsy Bruce, it topped the charts in 1987 when Nelson and Jennings recorded it for their "Willie & Waylon" album."

McNally shared her why for recording this song with the Statesman:

"I've always heard 'Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys' as women's lament. The original version, which was a gigantic era-defining hit for Willie and Waylon, was generally perceived as a rowdy cowboy call to arms, but I don't hear it that way. To me it feels achy and lonely for the man you love, the same way it must feel being in love with a musician who is drawn to the road. It makes everyone miserable eventually. And boy, does it all double down when you start adding babies to the mix. "When I stood up to the mic to record the song in the studio, I was a little surprised that it immediately brought tears to my eyes and a lump to my throat. All the missing that I've done and all the loving that I've ever left suddenly merged into one lonely super feeling. I missed my mom and was sad thinking about all the rambling I'd done when she was alive, and how sad and proud it made her. "My own daughter is just now hitting the ground and coming into herself, and it sends shivers down my spine thinking how soon she's going to leave me on her own wanderlust mission, and what a tough little show-no-pain wildly independent cowboy she is already at 12. I raised her that way, like my mother raised me. I'm sure I'm as proud of my daughter as my mother was of me, but it sure is hard when they start to ride away."

Fans can pre-order or pre-save THE WAYLON SESSIONS ahead of its May 28th release date at this link.

About the project: With THE WAYLON SESSIONS, McNally set out to revisit the songs and spirit of Waylon Jennings, a legend with whom she's always had an ongoing fascination. Over and over again, she manages to locate a smoldering intensity, a searing hurt buried deep within the music's deceptively simple poetry, and she hones in on it with surgical precision on this new album, which features special guests like Jessi Colter, Buddy Miller, Rodney Crowell, and Lukas Nelson. McNally knew that assembling the right band would be essential to capturing Jennings' mix of laid back charm and swaggering bravado, so she called AMA-winning guitarist Kenny Vaughan (Marty Stuart, Lucinda Williams) to help her assemble a team that included drummer Derek Mixon (Chris Stapleton), pedal steel legend and longtime Jennings bandmate Fred Newell, Texas keyboard mainstay Bukka Allen (Robert Earl Keen, Jerry Jeff Walker), and bassist Chris Scruggs (Marty Stuart, Charlie Louvin). Working live and raw, they tracked sixteen songs in just five days, relying on instinct and intuition to guide their decisions at every turn.

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