Country music singers Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Bobby Bare, Billy Joe Shaver, and Kris Kristofferson came to prominence in the 1970s, branded as Outlaws. The Outlaw phenomenon greatly enlarged country music's audience in the 1970s. Led by pacesetters such as Nelson, Jennings, Kristofferson, Shaver, and Bare, recording artists in Nashville and Austin demanded the creative freedom to make their own country music, strikingly different from the pop-oriented country sounds that prevailed at the time.
Lavishly illustrated with more than 400 rarely seen photographs, this book was published as a companion to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum's exhibition Outlaws & Armadillos: Country's Roaring '70s, and it examines the 1970s cultures of Nashville and fiercely independent Austin, and the complicated, surprising relationships between the two. In addition to highlighting the artists, other music industry figureheads, and local music venues that played key roles in the Outlaw movement, the book contains an extensive look at the colorful concert posters of the era and other rare images.

Single-page vignettes of the era's key figures appear throughout the book, and are excerpts of interviews from the documentary series They Called Us Outlaws, directed and produced by Eric Geadelmann, presented in association with the Country Music Hall of Fame (R) and Museum.