Merle Haggard

Country music icons Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard and Kris Kristofferson are working on a new supertrio project for 2011 after meeting up at the Kennedy Center Honors in Washington, D.C. earlier this month (Dec10).

Haggard, who was being honoured by his two old pals at the prestigious event, admits he and Nelson were already planning a collaborative album and they wanted Kristofferson to be a part of it – but now the trio has decided to hit the studio together and form a new group.

The Okie From Muskogee singer tells RollingStone.com, “We talked about the three of us doing it.  I’m sure if we’re healthy and live to do it, we’ll do it. We thought about the title: the Musketeers… because there’s the three of us.

“We’ll come up with some little way of describing ourselves, I guess, and put it together into a show.”

If the supergroup gets together, it won’t be Nelson’s first – he formed The Outlaws with Jessi Colter and Waylon Jennings in the mid-1970s. The band’s self-titled debut became the first country album to go platinum with more than one million sales.