Waylon Jennings came through Buddy Holly University, playing bass in his band until Holly’s fatal plane dive. Starting his country career soon afterward, he had Holly’s tremulous voice in his head, but he also had a wild hair, and Nashville Rebel is the first box set to make sense of a four-decade career that produced loads of good music. Starting with a 1958 swamp-pop single, it proceeds through imaginative late-’60s Chet Atkins productions (there are even Pet Sounds touches) and Jennings’s glorious early-’70s period, when he was overseeing his own records, singing about his badness in an adenoidal baritone. This became an affectation — “Outlaw” was the marketing term — but Jennings copped to it with humor, gracefully eulogizing himself in his final years with the same old-man’s croon he had in place at 30.

Download: “Jole Blon,” “Only Daddy That’ll Walk the Line,” “Lonesome On’ry and Mean”