HANK WILLIAMS JR. TOOK WAYLON’S VERSE. GEORGE JONES TOOK JOHNNY’S.

On November 10, 2003, the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville held more than a concert. It held a public goodbye to Johnny Cash, a room full of memories, and a song that seemed to arrive with extra weight that night. The tribute ran for hours, with family members, friends, and fellow artists stepping forward to honor a man whose voice had shaped country music for decades.

A Song Built for Four Voices

“Highwayman,” written by Jimmy Webb, was always designed as a four-part story. It belonged to The Highwaymen: Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson. Each verse carried a different life, a different body, a different kind of American wandering. By November 2003, that structure had become painfully symbolic. Waylon Jennings had died in February 2002. Johnny Cash had died only 59 days before the tribute.

That meant two of the original voices were gone, and two remained to stand in the old song’s place. When Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson joined Hank Williams Jr. and George Jones onstage for the tribute performance, the moment carried a kind of history that could not be manufactured. Hank Williams Jr. took Waylon’s verse. George Jones took Johnny’s. Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson sang their own.

The Room Felt the Weight of It

Earlier in the evening, Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, and George Jones had already performed “Big River.” Rosanne Cash sang “I Still Miss Someone.” Sheryl Crow delivered a stark version of “Hurt.” The entire night moved with the quiet intensity of people who knew they were not simply performing songs; they were carrying a legacy from one generation to the next.

The Ryman itself seemed made for that kind of night. Its worn wood, steep history, and churchlike hush gave the tribute a feeling of witness. The audience was not only listening to music. It was watching memory become performance.

The Version Many Home Viewers Never Saw

According to contemporary reviews, the in-person response to “Highwayman” may have been the biggest of the evening. And yet, when CMT aired a two-hour edited version five days later, the song was left out. What stayed in the room that night did not fully make it to the television audience.

That omission gives the performance an even stranger afterlife. The people inside the Ryman watched four men finish a song whose original four voices could no longer all be there. The people at home saw a curated tribute, but not that particular surge of feeling.

Why It Still Matters

The power of that night was not only in loss. It was in continuity. Johnny Cash’s friends did not freeze him into a memorial frame. They kept singing the songs, even the ones that hurt to sing, and they did it in a room that understood the difference between entertainment and remembrance.

In the end, “Highwayman” worked because it was always bigger than its parts. On November 10, 2003, it became something else too: a final shared chapter for a song that had outlived the men who first made it famous, and a reminder that some performances survive long after the cameras move on.