George Strait – “Waymore’s Blues”: A Tribute in Motion, Echoing Across Salt Lake City’s Summer Night
When George Strait stepped onto the stage at Rice-Eccles Stadium in Salt Lake City on a warm June night in 2024, no one expected that song — and perhaps that’s why its arrival felt like a quiet lightning bolt. “Waymore’s Blues,” a signature piece of Waylon Jennings’ outlaw spirit, is not a staple of Strait’s setlists. Yet that evening, beneath the vast Utah sky and before a stadium trembling with anticipation, he chose to honor one of country music’s most untamed voices with a performance that felt as intimate as a conversation after midnight.
Strait didn’t announce it with theatrics. He simply nodded to the band, stepped into the soft glow of the spotlight, and let the first loose, rolling lines of that unmistakable riff spill into the air. Immediately, the crowd understood. This was a moment.
“Waymore’s Blues” is a song built on movement — a drifter’s shrug, a wanderer’s grin, a rhythm that never settles. Waylon sang it like a man who’d lived ten thousand miles of the story. Strait approached it differently that night: with stillness, with respect, and with a kind of measured ease that allowed the song’s wild edges to breathe through his own steady phrasing.
His voice didn’t try to imitate Waylon’s growl. Instead, he offered something else — a clear, controlled honesty, shaped by decades of storytelling and the quiet confidence of a man who knows what it means to carry a tradition without copying it. The contrast was striking: Waylon’s outlaw grit meeting Strait’s ranch-born steadiness. It worked beautifully.
What made the moment unforgettable wasn’t just the song choice — it was the atmosphere it created. The stadium, moments earlier roaring with summer-night energy, fell into a rhythmic sway. The crowd didn’t shout lyrics; they absorbed them. You could feel 50,000 people listening, not performing — honoring a lineage, a memory, a sound that helped build the road Strait himself walks.
The band leaned into the groove with just the right looseness — fiddle sliding like warm wind, steel guitar bending around the melody, drums keeping that easy, shuffling heartbeat that makes the song wander forward. It wasn’t a recreation. It was a reinterpretation, filtered through the lens of a man whose entire career has been a testament to tradition without imitation.
In that moment, Strait wasn’t just covering Waylon.
He was speaking to him.
He was nodding across time, across Texas, across everything the outlaw era meant to the men who came after.
There was something deeply human in the way he ended the song — no dramatic pause, no grand gesture. Just a soft smile, a small tilt of the hat, and a look that said he understood the weight of what he had just sung. Fans felt it too. It was not nostalgia. It was acknowledgment.
For those in Salt Lake City that night, “Waymore’s Blues” wasn’t just a surprise addition to the setlist. It became a quietly monumental moment — a reminder that country music’s greats are connected by more than history. They share a language of honesty, grit, humor, wandering hearts, and stories told from the saddle.
And when George Strait let that final note drift into the warm June air, it felt as if Waylon himself smiled somewhere, hearing one old friend tip his hat to another — in the simplest, most respectful way George Strait knows how: through song.