WAYNE & DARRELL SCOTT - WAYNE'S PAIN - JUNE 15, 2025

 

Wayne Scott didn’t release his debut album, This Weary Way, until 2005, when he was already 71. It was a revelation. Here was a man who had almost never performed his own songs in public and was now unveiled as a major talent as both a songwriter and singer. He stuck closely to the sound and subject matter of his heroes—Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell and Johnny Cash—but he had fashioned something strikingly original from those materials.

 

His second album, Wayne's Pain, wouldn’t emerge till 2025, fourteen years after his death in a 2011 car accident. It too is a revelation. This time he does more than demonstrate the mastery of his chosen genre. As the title implies, he now reveals how deep he could dig into the mines of loneliness and alcohol and return with frighteningly honest, musical gems.

 

Neither album would exist if not for Darrell Scott, the third of Wayne’s five sons. Darrell, who got his first musical education as a multi-instrumentalist in Wayne’s bar band and as a co-writer with his father on a handful of songs, has repaid that debt by producing both albums and getting them released. As a songwriter for the Dixie Chicks, Garth Brooks and Travis Tritt and as a picker for Robert Plant, Steve Earle and Joan Baez, Darrell had acquired enough industry clout to make his father's records happen. 

 

We the listeners are the beneficiaries. One needn’t claim Wayne is the equal of Hank or Johnny—who is?—to recognize him as a worthy heir, a gifted artist whose two albums are a valuable asset that nearly didn’t happen at all. 

 

“I think there’s a world of talent out there that doesn’t get recognized,” Darrell suggests. “All of us—performers, companies, media—act as if hit songs just fall out of the sky, when that’s not true. Fame is as much about the promotion and the opportunities lining up as it is about the talent. At the Grammy Awards, I always thought the promo team should get up there and thank the artists. What my dad's records show is that a lot of great talent doesn’t get heard or seen or felt for the lack of a business strategy.”

 

Wayne’s backstory is fascinating—and we’ll get to that in a bit—but these songs would be compelling even if he had been signed to MCA Records as a young man in the most conventional manner possible. A track like “If the Bottle Don’t Kill You,” for example, would be memorable no matter what the circumstances. 

 

Wayne is too perceptive a songwriter to believe that drinking is the real problem. The underlying cause is a feeling of disconnect from the world. “If the bottle don’t kill me,” he confesses in his best honky-tonk baritone, “the loneliness will.” He looks around at his surroundings—the empty stools, the moaning jukebox, the neon sign in the mirror—he sees tangible reflections of his isolation, much as Willie Nelson does in “Hello Walls.” 

 

Wayne employs a similar tactic on “I’m Here Alone,” where the narrator spots symptoms of his despair in the smoke in the ceiling, the exit sign above the door and the waitress he once dated. On this second album, Wayne examines that loneliness from many angles, on the two above tracks plus “I Know What It’s Like To Be Alone,” “I Wanna Be Ready,” “The Country Boy” and “I’m Gonna Be Gone for a While.” These aren’t the songs of a cuddly grandpa or eccentric uncle; these are the songs of a man staring down his own demons.

 

“That's the dark side,” Darrell acknowledges, “the scary stuff. With drinking, you eventually sober up, but the loneliness never goes away. I know that’s how he felt; he wasn’t getting poetic for the sake of the song. It came with the territory, because that's the way he lived. What he didn’t know how to do was how to cover it up. With his writing he gets in there, no matter what the cost. It was almost as if he were given a license that he could say whatever he wanted in a song. He took that license to the moon and back.”

 

The album begins with an anomaly, a bouncy, comic song about a “Doctor,” who tells the narrator “to cut down on your drinking” and other bad habits. In the final verse, though, it’s the medicine man who drops dead while the narrator is still enjoying the hillbilly life. 

 

The mood quickly shifts on the second song, “I Know What It’s Like To Be Alone,” which sounds like Cash singing a Kris Kristofferson song. The narrator knows what it's like to keep going when love is gone, how to control his mind and muscles when he gets stoned. It’s bitter knowledge, but Wayne’s vocal bears it stoically, accompanied by nothing more than his son's acoustic guitar and harmony. Even more solitary is “I’m Here Alone,” which finds Wayne’s vocal and guitar part unsupported by anything else. 

 

On ““I’m Gonna Be Gone for a While,” Wayne is joined by a chapel’s worth of musicians: four of his sons plus four top Nashville musicians. This congregational approach is appropriate for this piano-anchored country-gospel hymn. But the lyrics present a man warning his friends that he’s about to go off on a bender in the wake of a romantic disaster. He sings this sadly, apologetically, as if it’s beyond his control.

 

Something else distinguishes the second album from the first, and that's the presence of three generations of Scotts. Darrell wasn’t the only son who became a musician like Wayne. All five sons—from oldest to youngest: Denny (guitar), Dale (drums), Darrell, Don (bass) and David (piano)—have been musicians all their lives, either as bar-band members, musical ministers at their churches and/or professional players. If their first names sound similar, that's because Wayne dreamed of fronting a group called “Wayne Scott & the Two Ds” (or three or four, as things evolved).

 

“He thought that was a catchy name,” Darrell says. “He saw us as his future bandmates, absolutely. I wrestled with that. What if I don’t want to do this? But fortunately I did. I was bred to do it, but that’s OK.”

 

Darrell had wanted to include his brothers on the first album, but the logistics proved daunting. When he was assembling the second recording, he arranged a session in Las Vegas (closer to his brothers’ current residences in Nevada and Southern California) to add their vocals and instruments to the tracks recorded at the same time as those on This Weary Way. He even added his own son Abraham (who’s cited for engineering and “chains” in the credits), so there would be three generations involved. 

 

The five brothers are featured on the uptempo number, “I Wanna Be Ready,” a boogie number about getting ready for Saturday night. But there's a twist in the lyrics, which declare, “I wanna be ready when the night comes…. I wanna be ready to be ready to be real lonesome.” As if to console their forlorn father, the five sons offer a thickened, rising chord of “ahs” after each chorus. 

 

Three hymns—the traditional “Wayfaring Pilgrim” plus Hank Williams’ “When God Comes To Gather His Jewels” and “A Picture from Life’s Other Side,” all built around the backbone of Danny Thompson's muscular bass lines—seem to bring the album to a fitting close. But then there’s a surprise: a song that not performed by Wayne but performed for him. It’s a version of Cash’s “I Still Miss Someone” sung a cappella by the five brothers. One can hear just how much they miss him in the aching harmonies.

 

“The last thing I did on the Vegas session was ‘I Still Miss Someone,’ Darrell says. “That was a huge song in my family. When my grandfather Green Scott was in the hospital, he would ask my dad to sing it for him. For us, it wasn’t just a Johnny Cash song but a folk song. I put it on a live record of mine [Live in NC] 20 years ago. We had to do it. We each sang lead on one verse. It’s that kind of song, generations deep.”

 

Wayne grew up in East Kentucky in Scott Holler, home to generations of Scotts. His father was a tobacco farmer, and the only options for a young man there seemed to be tobacco or coal.

 

“Dad worked us six days a week,” Wayne told the Fresh Air radio show in 2006. “I didn’t leave in anger, but I wanted to spread my wings. I took one look in a coal mine, and I knew if I ever dug coal, it wouldn’t be in this world. If you lived in East Kentucky and you didn’t want to dig coal, you went North or West. I went North.”

 

That meant Michigan at first, then after Darrell was born during a brief return to Kentucky, the family moved to northern Indiana for nine years, followed by brief stays in Kentucky and Tennessee before settling in Bloomington, California, for Darrell’s junior high and high school years. It was in Indiana, when Darrell was eight, that his parents divorced. They remarried two years later, moved to California and then divorced again. David, the youngest son, lived with his mother, Evelyn, who always lived nearby. The four older boys lived with Wayne.

 

“We were 80-90 miles to the east of LA,” Darrell remembers. “It might as well have been 800-900 miles away. My dad distrusted cities. Outside it was California, but at home, it was Kentucky. The food we ate, the music we listened to, the church we went to, all felt like Kentucky.

 

“As an eight year old, perhaps because I admired my dad, I listened to music intensely. We’re listening to country radio and there’s ‘D-I-V-O-R-C-E.’ Guess what we were going through in 1968? So I understood that country music was telling the story of hillbilly families. As I got older, I took in a different direction toward singer-songwriter music like Jackson Browne and Leonard Cohen, but it was the same idea of telling the truth.”

 

Much of the music at home was Wayne singing old-school country songs. Wayne assumed they were all by Williams, Cash and Merle Haggard; it was only later that he realized some of them were written by his father. 

 

“I thought ‘This Weary Way’ was a Hank Williams song until I was in my 20s,” Darrell admits. “That song is very lonely, but it’s not as forlorn as those on the second album. His drinking songs are absolute drinking songs, with all the shame and Christian guilt. I’m very proud of the way he just lays it out there in his writing. I took that as the goal, to show the emotional stuff even if it makes you look fumbling and weak. Anyone who spells it out the way he did has my respect.”

 

The first time Wayne tried to record his own songs was in 1967 at a television-repair shop in Indiana. Wayne sang and played acoustic guitar, while Darrell played bass, his brother Denny played electric guitar and their brother Dale played snare drum. Wayne took a few 45s home, and that was that. A few years later with his bar band at the Branding Iron in San Bernadino, California, he experimented by singing his own songs instead of the radio hits everyone was expecting. The crowd and the bar owner were so unhappy that he never tried that again.

 

“Those songs mostly sounded like Hank Williams, Johnny Cash and Carl Smith,” Darrell remembers. “The writing was lighter, like he was trying for radio. The dark stuff developed in his writing as life went on, divorces went on, drinking went on, kids leaving went on. At a certain point, he gave up on the radio. No one was watching; no one was listening, so he could write what he wanted.”

 

When Darrell was 16, he began to realize that his father had written some of the better songs he sang around the house. The teenager wanted to get in on that, so he and Wayne drove out to a friend’s cabin at Big Bear Lake in the San Bernadino Mountains for a songwriting weekend. Darrell had started a song called “You’re Everything I Wanted Love To Be,” and his father helped him finish it. Wayne had started a song called “Country Boy,” and his son helped finish that. The first song eventually appeared on Darrell’s Long Ride Home album in 2012. The second finally appears on Wayne’s Pain in 2025. 

 

“They were pretty good songs for what they were,” Darrell says now. “The reason it worked is we were equals in an odd way. I didn’t have the usual 16-year-old attitude of hating my parents, I was getting into Gordon Lightfoot and other things, but that didn’t erase my love of country music and my dad. I don’t know why we didn’t do more of it.”

 

Eventually, Darrell left his dad’s band in California to pursue an English major at Tufts University near Boston. He applied his studies in modern poetry to his songwriting and gradually built a reputation in Nashville. As one century turned into another, Darrell had a #2 country hit with Travis Tritt's version of “It's a Great Day to Be Alive” in 2000 and another with the Dixie Chicks’ version of “Long Time Gone.” Suddenly he had the money and clout to turn some dreams into reality, and near the top of the list was making an album with his father.

 

“He fought me on it,” Darrell remembers. “‘I’m an old man,’ he said. ‘Why do you want to do it?’ But I was determined, and as soon as he got into the studio with all those great Nashville musicians, he had a ball. That’s how I got my dad to agree to do the sessions. He really liked Guy Clark and was thrilled to sing a duet with him.”

 

The only time this writer encountered Wayne in person was just before Halloween in 2005, at a showcase during the International Bluegrass Music Association conference at the Nashville Convention Center. In a sterile, convention center room, he sat on a barstool, looking like a blue-collar Waylon Jennings in a black cowboy hat and a black leather vest. Darrell, also playing acoustic guitar, stood nearby in a tan-and-black shirt and a bushy, salt-and-pepper beard. Flanking them were mandolinist Tim O’Brien, fiddler Casey Driessen, bassist Dennis Crouch and dobroist Dan Dugmore, all of them players on the This Weary Way album. 

 

It took three songs for Wayne’s baritone to open up, but it sounded warm and personal on the folk-like ballad, “Sunday with My Son” and the original gospel number, “Since Jesus Came into My Heart.” On the album's title track, Wayne captured both the weariness of a long life and the determination to continue on his way. 

 

He sang two duets in the set: one with Darrell on their co-write, “I Wouldn’t Live in Harlan County” and one with Guy Clark on “The Whiskey Eased the Pain.” On the latter, as on the record, Wayne took the first two verses and Clark the third. But they joined voices on the second and third choruses, Clark taking the high harmony and Wayne the low, as they sang, “It ain’t love; it ain’t money; it's whiskey that eases the pain.” By the time they repeated the line on the tag, Clark was grinning, but Wayne was beaming. Here was proof of what he’d suspected all along: he was good enough to hold his own with the big names. 

 

“I think he knew how good he was,” Darrell says today. “He loved songs so much that he would be comparing his songs to Hank to Merle, not that he quite got there, but he knew the good stuff, and he knew his stuff was good. When he played songs-in-progress for me and got to the part where he was most vulnerable, there would be a tremble in his voice. He was trying to express something, and he couldn’t help but be affected by it. He wasn’t trying to be clever; he was working with vulnerable material. He had his shortcomings, but when it came to his art, he brought home the goods.”