Miranda Lambert on Willie Nelson and the Enduring Primacy of the Pickin’ Party

Miranda Lambert on Willie Nelson and the Enduring Primacy of the Pickin’ Party

Miranda Lambert can’t remember a time when she didn’t know the song “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.” The Willie and Waylon duet, a Grammy-winning, number one country hit in 1978, was already an outlaw anthem well before Lambert was even born. But when she was a little girl growing up in tiny Lindale, money was tight and life precarious. Listening to country music—and playing and singing great country songs with friends and n…