Credits: Far Out / Sony Music UK / The Traveling Wilburys)
Mon 10 November 2025 20:30, UK
When pitting bands against each other, it can be easy to pick up on the very slight weaknesses of inexperience or youth. You can’t exactly do that with The Highwaymen and The Traveling Wilburys.
After all, they don’t call them supergroups without a good reason. When you have a combination of the likes of Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, and George Harrison all in the mix, there is no point in saying that one was more successful, or prolific, or powerful than the other, because it would be a facade that would simply fall flat on its face. They were two supergroups of unfathomable commercial and critical calibre, so the only sensible thing to do was to let them exist without comparing them.
But equally, we just really cannot help ourselves sometimes, can’t we? While it still remains the case that the two bands are just as seismic as the other, the only way you can split the difference between the two is to take the cold-hearted route and study the hard figures. After all, you may hold some of the biggest music stars of your respective genres within your walls, but that boils down to very little significance if you don’t pull through with the sales figures to prove that this romp with your mates was really all worth it.
In this single sense, The Traveling Wilburys are the true winners – and by no small margin, either. In fairness, they did have an element of youth and greater maintained commercial appeal on their side to help with this, but with the former’s total album sales in excess of 6.4 million, and the latter’s clocking in at 1.2 million, it’s clear that the band of five rock giants far outweighed the quartet of country crooners.
What were The Highwaymen and The Traveling Wilburys’ best-selling albums?
Within this, the success of The Highwaymen was captured under the guise of a very finite lens of short-lived acclaim, despite them producing three albums over the course of their tenure together, compared to The Traveling Wilburys’ two. But nevertheless, their self-titled debut album, released in 1985, went on to become their greatest badge of honour, hitting number one and shifting more than a million copies within the United States alone.
Put this in contention with The Traveling Wilburys, however, even though they had an album less to their name, and it was a whole different story. Their similarly self-titled debut from 1988 blew The Highwaymen out of the water by selling more than four million copies in the US, while a further 700,000 were shifted over on the other side of the Atlantic between that and their 1990 follow-up of Vol 3.
Of course, the legacy of both groups and the members within them can never be disputed within their own rights, but the statistics simply prove that in the landscape of the mid to late 1980s, it was rock and roll that ultimately ruled supreme over country music.
Maybe if The Highwaymen had come together in a time and a place better suited to the prime of their careers, things might have been different – but it’s not as if one vague comparison on sales figures was ever going to diminish their status as bona fide country legends.
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