Willie Nelson
With well over 200 albums to his credit since the beginning of his country music career in the late 1950s, Willie Nelson (born 1933) has had a long run as one of the stars of the genre. As a songwriter, he penned some of the most familiar modern standards of country and pop music, including "Crazy," recorded by Patsy Cline, "Night Life," and the song that has come to represent his career: "On the Road Again." Beyond his accomplishments in country music, Nelson has become something of an icon of American popular culture, his distinctive dual hair braids and bandanna handkerchief instantly recognizable all over the United States and through much of the world.
Nelson was born in Abbott, Texas, a small farming community located between Waco and the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area. His parents were migrant farmers who had come west from Arkansas. He picked cotton as a child, and later told Texas Monthly that "my desire to escape manual labor started back there in the cotton fields." After he was left with his paternal grandparents, who were voice and piano teachers, he also began spending time on music. Nelson's sister Bobbie would become
an accomplished classical pianist, but his own talents ran immediately toward songwriting. When he was five years old he started writing poetry, and when he was given a guitar a year later he started to fill a songbook to which he had given the title Songs of Willie Nelson.
Various types of music shaped the young songwriter and showed up in his mature style. He learned from not only the country music and western swing dance bands that flourished all over Texas, but also the pop and jazz vocals he heard on the radio and a even less-common influence, the polka music that filled the dance halls in heavily Czech-American central Texas. In fact, it was as a polka musician that Nelson, at age ten, made his professional debut, in Abbott's John Raycheck Band. Nelson's grandparents—strict Methodists whose musical influences surfaced in Nelson's famous gospel song "Family Bible"—tried to steer the boy away from the barrooms, but to no avail. "I was doomed to go to hell by the time I was seven," Nelson told Entertainment Weekly, "because I had been told that if you smoke cigarettes and drink beer you're going to hell. And by seven, I was gone."
As a teenager Nelson played regularly in a band led by his sister's husband, Bud Fletcher. After graduating from high school he actually thought about embarking on a conventional career. He joined the United States Air Force but was discharged after nine months because of the back problems that would plague him his entire life. He then enrolled at Baylor University in Waco, but did not last long there. Back in Abbott in 1952, he married the first of his four wives, Martha Matthews, a woman said by Nelson to be of full-blooded Cherokee descent. He also resumed his musical life.
Sold Encyclopedias
For much of the 1950s, Nelson was torn between family responsibilities and creative inspiration. He tried to split the difference by working as a disc jockey, at first at stations in San Antonio and Fort Worth, Texas, and later in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, where he became one of several country stars—another was Loretta Lynn—who launched their recording careers by promoting self-released singles there. Nelson's debut was called "No Place for Me." After Martha found herself pregnant with the third of Nelson's eventual seven children, the family returned to Texas where Nelson worked selling encyclopedias and then vacuum cleaners.
Soon he was back writing songs and performing with a band that played gigs in the rough honky-tonks throughout the Houston area. What steered Nelson toward a musical career for good was the sale of "Family Bible," one of his earliest compositions, to a Nashville publisher for $50. The song became a hit for vocalist Claude Gray in 1960, and that same year Nelson headed for Nashville himself. There he met veteran songwriter Hank Cochran, who realized the value of the songs flowing from Nelson's pen and steered him toward the Pamper Music publishing house. Nelson's first marriage dissolved after his wife tied him up with a children's jump rope during one dispute, but he moved in with singer Shirley Collie and married her in 1963.
The late 1950s and early 1960s were an especially rich time creatively for Nelson, who wrote songs rapidly, telling a Texas Monthly interviewer that "the air is full of melodies." He penned three of country music's greatest standards, "Crazy," "Ain't It Funny How Time Slips Away," and "Night Life," within a single week. Unschooled in the ways of the music business, he realized little profit from these compositions; for "Night Life," which was recorded by artists ranging from Frank Sinatra to bluesman B.B. King, he received a flat fee of $150. However, he was properly paid for "Hello Walls," opening his mail one day to find a $40,000 royalty check after the song became a smash for vocalist Faron Young. Apart from songwriting, he also earned a regular paycheck as a member of singer Ray Price's Cherokee Cowboys band.
Recounted Rushing into Burning House
Nelson once again made a stab at settling down, this time as a pig farmer. However, he soon returned to the road, "swallowing enough pills," he was quoted as saying in Texas Monthly, "to choke Johnny Cash." By 1969 Nelson's second marriage had dissolved after his wife opened a hospital bill containing charges for the birth of Nelson's child by another woman. Late that year his house in Nashville burned down; Nelson claimed to have rushed into the burning building to rescue a guitar and a stash of marijuana. He later gave up alcohol and other drugs, but became an advocate for marijuana usage.
During the early 1970s Nelson moved back to Texas and started his career afresh. In and around the college town of Austin, he noticed an unusual mingling between youthful rock audiences and traditional country fans, and he reacted by writing new songs carefully crafted to appeal to both groups. In 1972 he founded an annual music festival in Dripping Springs, Texas, playing host to similarly minded Nashville nonconformists such as Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson and sowing the seeds of country music's socalled Outlaw movement. Nelson was signed to the Atlantic label, formerly known mostly for rhythm and blues, and he released the structurally innovative Shotgun Willie album to critical praise.
In 1975 Nelson was signed to the country division of the giant Columbia label. Newly confident about his creative vision, he insisted on complete creative control over his recordings. When he approached the label with the finished masters of his Red Headed Stranger album, Columbia personnel were dismayed by its stripped-down sound and unusual "concept" structure; the album's songs, for the first time in country-music history, collectively told a story. Powerful executive Billy Sherrill even left the room as the music was playing. Despite Columbia's concerns, Nelson was vindicated when Red Headed Stranger hit the number-one spot on the country charts and had healthy sales among pop and rock audiences as well. In the late 1970s Nelson dominated the country charts, both as a solo artist and as part of a duet with Waylon Jennings. The two spearheaded the well-marketed Outlaw brand of country music that contributed to the country genre's sales boom during those years.
Nelson confounded label expectations again in 1978 with another shift in direction: he recorded an album of pop standards titled Stardust. For Nelson it was not an extreme creative stretch; he had admired jazz-influenced pop singers such as Frank Sinatra since he was young. His quiet, conversational baritone proved an ideal match for songs like Irving Berlin's "Blue Skies," and the album became a runaway success, remaining in print continuously for the next quarter century. Meditative, jazzy phrasing also provided the framework for 1982's "Always on My Mind," a song originally recorded by Elvis Presley that became one of Nelson's biggest hits.
Another blockbuster came in connection with Nelson's modest but favorably received film career: "On the Road Again," which was hurriedly written for inclusion on the soundtrack of the 1980 film Honeysuckle Rose, became his signature song on tour. Asked by a Fortune contributor whether he ever got tired of playing it, Nelson replied, "Not at all. It just takes me out of one town and into the next. It keeps me movin'." True to his touring barroom-band origins, Nelson remained an inexhaustible road performer through times thick and thin. In 1985 he founded an annual concert, Farm Aid, that was designed to focus attention on the financial problems of American farmers.
Ran Afoul of IRS
Nelson topped the country charts in 1984 in a duet with pop singer Julio Iglesias, "To All the Girls I've Loved Before," and the following year with "Highwayman" as part of a quartet with fellow Outlaws Jennings as well as Johnny Cash, and Kris Kristofferson. The new influence that band-oriented rock sounds exerted on country music in the 1980s and 1990s knocked Nelson from the very top reaches of the country charts, but he had by now amassed a huge following that continued to show interest in his music. His fans also stuck with him through several much-publicized difficulties, including a $16.7 million bill from the Internal Revenue Service for unpaid taxes. Nelson paid off the debt, partly with the proceeds from a solo-vocal-and-guitar double album, Who'll Buy My Memories, that was marketed through a toll-free telephone number in 1991 and remains one of the more elusive items in the Nelson catalogue. Nelson also struggled after the suicide of his son Billy in 1991 and the subsequent breakup of his third marriage. But he married his fourth wife, makeup artist Ann-Marie D'Angelo, that same year and fathered two more children with her.
The singer remained popular partly because he never rested on his laurels. Even well into the senior citizen age range, he continued to experiment with new sounds. Another hard find for Nelson collectors was a 1984 LP of straight jazz, Angel Eyes, and Nelson continued to show an interest in jazz, releasing several albums of standards and original jazz compositions in the 1990s. He also recorded such innovative projects as the rock-oriented 1993 album Across the Borderline and 1998's Teatro, the latter produced by Daniel Lanois, a frequent collaborator with Irish rock band U2. In 2000 he recorded a blues CD, Milk Cow Blues, and he mused to the writer in Fortune that "Maybe I ought to hook up with some of those rap guys." In 2002 Nelson returned to the top of the country charts in a duet with country singer Toby Keith called "Beer for My Horses."
Despite his tumultuous personal life, during the 1990s Nelson seemed to find a sense of inner peace that cemented his status as an elder statesman of American music. Asked by Time whether he feared a backlash from conservative "red state" country fans over his antiwar song titled "Whatever Happened to Peace on Earth" in light of strong emotions regarding America's involvement in the War in Iraq, Nelson replied, "I sure hope so. I don't care if people say, 'Who the hell does he think he is?' I know who I am." That year also saw Nelson touring minor-league baseball stadiums with folk-rock great Bob Dylan. He continued to make music prolifically, installing a studio near his home "so I can cut records all day and night," he told Fortune.
Books
Contemporary Musicians, Volume 11, Gale, 1994.
Country: The Music and the Musicians, Abbeville Press, 1988.
Kingsbury, Paul, editor, The Encyclopedia of Country Music, Oxford University Press, 1998.
Periodicals
Entertainment Weekly, July 21, 1995; September 18, 1998.
Fortune, October 2, 2000.
People, August 28, 1995.
Texas Monthly, April 1998; December 1999; August 2004.
Time, January 12, 2004.
Online
"Willie Nelson," All Music Guide Online, http://www.allmusic.com/ (January 5, 2005).
