Rodney Crowell called on part of his youth in the composing of “I Ain’t Living Long Like This.” Raised in Houston, Texas, he mentions “Wayside Drive” in the song, a street at the end of a fifty-mile channel that stretches from Galveston. It was there that Crowell spent a good deal of his childhood tagging along with his grandfather, a night watchman at the ship channel where the old sailors and merchant marines would get off the boat. He remembers many a day sitting in an old bar down there watching his grandad playing shuffleboard with those old sailors with a patch over their eye.
Crowell wrote “I Ain’t Living Long Like This” in Hermosa Beach, California in 1976. Rodney had disobeyed the city’s leash laws with his dog Banjo and in the middle of writing the song, the authorities incarcerated him briefly for nonpayment of the fines. When he returned to the song, he felt even closer to the jailhouse imagery in the lyrics.
“I Ain’t Living Long Like This” was Crowell’s second #1 single, coming just three weeks after his first, “Leaving Louisiana In The Broad Daylight” by the Oak Ridge Boys. Jennings was still riding high after logging his two mega-hits: “Luckenbach, Texas (Back To The Basics Of Love)” in ’77 and “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys” the following year, so he had no trouble cruising into the #1 position with “I Ain’t Living Long Like This” on March 1, 1980, marking the eleventh of his sixteen career chart-toppers.
