A newly surfaced Waylon Jennings recording featuring guitar work from the late Glen Campbell has officially been released, uniting two Country Music Hall of Fame legends on a track that sat unreleased for nearly five decades.
The song, titled “Diamonds,” was originally recorded on December 28, 1978, but never made it to the public during Jennings’ lifetime. Its release comes as part of a broader archival project spearheaded by Waylon’s son, Shooter Jennings, who announced the effort on what would have been Waylon’s 88th birthday — June 15, 2025. The track will anchor an upcoming album, also called Diamonds, set to arrive on November 13, with a full streaming release to follow on December 11.
A Discovery That Changed Everything
Shooter has described the moment he began digging through his father’s personal recording archives in 2024 as transformative. “Back in 2024 when I opened my dad’s personal recording archives, I found a treasure trove of unheard recordings,” he said. “It was a life-altering event and immediately ignited a feeling of urgency to get these recordings out there to our family of fans who had so loyally kept him alive by listening to and singing his music.”
“Diamonds” proved particularly elusive. Shooter noted that the track surfaced across three separate sessions in the archive, and the unusual guitar sound initially left him puzzled before he determined Campbell was behind it — a detail that lends the recording a rare historical weight.
Preserving the Man Behind the Myth
For Shooter, the project carries a purpose beyond simply releasing music. Speaking to CBS Sunday Morning, he explained the stakes of allowing his father’s legacy to speak for itself: “When somebody is gone, there tends to be … the public remembrance of them can be distorted. People can remember the outlaw part of this or fantasize what he was like, but he’s not here to represent himself. But what I felt was so important was you saw how much he loved music.… He connected with those songs. All he cared about was music — it wasn’t about image, it wasn’t about money, or anything beyond wanting to be great at music and play music.”
To complete the newly discovered recordings, Shooter brought in four original members of The Waylors alongside musicians Ashley Monroe and Elizabeth Cook. This work builds on the earlier archival release Songbird, which came out on October 3, 2025, as the first of three planned albums drawn from Waylon’s personal archives.
With the Diamonds album still weeks away from its full release, fans of Waylon Jennings have a clear reason to watch this unfolding archival series closely — more previously unheard music from one of country’s most enduring figures is still on the way.
