Country music owes much of its broad-based appeal to Waylon Jennings. During a remarkable journey that began in the 1950s, he led the way in pulling northerners and southerners, rural folk and city dwellers, college students and blue-collar workers into a deeply-rooted movement that took country to new levels of respect and commercial success. Born in the hardscrabble West Texas town of Littlefield on June 15, 1937, Jennings learned to play guitar and wangled a disc jockey job at a Littlefield station while still a teenager. In the mid-1950s he moved to Lubbock, where he worked as a DJ and met rising star Buddy Holly, with whom he toured and played electric bass in 1959. It was Jennings who gave up his seat to the Big Bopper (J. P. Richardson) on the doomed 1959 plane flight that took the lives of Holly, Richardson, and singer Ritchie Valens.  After Jennings gave up his seat, Holly had jokingly told him that he hoped the tour bus would stall. Jennings replied, with equal jocularity, that he hoped the plane would crash; these words would haunt him for years. The disaster stunned Jennings, and it took him several years to regain his momentum. After several years of inactivity, Jennings began performing again this time in Phoenix, Arizona.  In these years of two and three shows a night, sometimes six nights a week, he developed a unique sound, a devoted following, and a decent living. But his time with Holly had been pivotal: "Mainly what I learned from Buddy," Jennings recalled, "was an attitude. He loved music, and he taught me that it shouldn't have any barriers to it." After working West Texas radio again, Jennings began performing at a bar called J. D.'s in Phoenix, Arizona. There he began to craft a sound that combined his aggressive electric guitar style, his rough-edged vocals, and an eclectic repertoire that often borrowed from rockabilly, rock, and folk. Outside of the music industry, Jennings was also known as the voice of the narrator on the popular television series The Dukes of Hazzard and its predecessor Moonrunners. The theme song "Good Ol' Boys", an original Jennings composition, is one of the most well-known television theme songs in American television history.