At Christmas in 2001, Waylon Jennings asked Jessi Colter to sit at the piano and sing the hymns she’d grown up playing in church. Diabetes had taken much of his strength. He wanted to hear those old songs. Jessi, the daughter of a Pentecostal preacher in Phoenix, had been playing piano in her mother’s church since she was eleven. Waylon had grown up hearing fire-and-brimstone sermons in Texas and walked away from religion as a young man. For most of their 32 years of marriage, faith was something Jessi had largely kept to herself. A month before Christmas, on Thanksgiving Day, she sat beside his hospital bed and asked if he was ready to accept the Lord. Waylon grinned. He knew she was going to ask, he told her. Then he said yes. Jessi later wrote that she wept. That Christmas, she played and he listened. Jessi remembered a quiet assurance in him by then. She felt he’d made his peace. Waylon died at home in Chandler, Arizona, on February 13, 2002. He was 64. Four years later, Jessi released *Out of the Ashes*, her first new solo album since 1984. Waylon’s voice appears on “Out of the Rain,” a Tony Joe White song the three of them had recorded together years before. The album opens with “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.” Jessi had sung it to warm up, and producer Don Was decided to keep the take. It was a hymn both Waylon and her mother had loved.
admin At Christmas 2001, with the family gathered in Arizona and diabetes wearing his body down, Waylon Jennings asked his wife, Jessi Colter, to sit at the piano and sing the…