Songfacts®:

• Written by Sharon Vaughn, "My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys" was originally recorded by Waylon Jennings for the 1976 compilation Wanted! The Outlaws but wasn't released as a single. When Willie Nelson cut it for the 1979 movie The Electric Horseman, starring Robert Redford and Jane Fonda, it went to #1 on the Country chart the following year.
• In the song, Nelson recalls his childhood dream of becoming a cowboy, a high-ridin' hero who answers to no one but himself, and his adult realization that it's a miserable way to live. "Cowboys are special with their own brand of misery," he sings, "from being alone too long."
• When Vaughn's then-boyfriend, Bill Rice, asked her to write a cowboy song for a Bobby Bare album he was working on, she came up with this tune. Bare didn't like it, but Waylon Jennings did. A few years after he recorded it for The Outlaws, he suggested his pal Willie use it as theme song for The Electric Horseman.
  
  The film's director, Sydney Pollack, produced the record himself with an arrangement that featured French horns, muted trumpets, and harp - a pretty unusual mix for a country song.
  
  "He did have some good ideas," Nelson conceded in The Billboard Book Of Number One Country Hits. "Also David Grusin, the musical director - I'm not sure exactly how it happened, but David is a very good musician, and I'm sure that if he heard this horn or that horn in there, he'd go ahead and put it in, regardless of whether it was a country song or not. David heard all these things and said they should go in there. Sydney was smart enough to leave 'em in."
• Released on December 21, 1979, The Electric Horseman also marked Nelson's debut acting performance. He plays Wendell Hickson, a crusty cowboy who doles out advice to Redford, a former rodeo star. The soundtrack also features Nelson's hits "Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys" and "Midnight Rider" (an Allman Brothers cover).
• As a singer, Vaughn had a Top 40 Country hit in 1974 with "Until The End Of Time," a duet with Narvel Felts. "My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys" was her first major songwriting success, which she followed up with "Y'all Come Back Saloon," a Top 5 hit for The Oak Ridge Boys in 1977.
• Waylon Jennings' version was used on the TV series The Wire in the 2003 episode "Ebb Tide."