Nelson, Willie

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Willie Nelson

Singer, songwriter, guitarist

Probably no country singer has generated more warmth from a more diverse group of fans than Willie Nelson, the “outlaw” superstar from Texas. Nelson’s unusual voice, eclectic musical tastes, down-home personality, and songwriting talents have combined to produce an engaging performer whose “fast living and hard-won wisdom … stirs even the most well-guarded emotions, “wrote an Esquire reviewer. In Superstars of Country Music, Gene Busnar wrote: “Who would ever guess that this gritty-looking … man is one of America’s most important stars. A singer whose records cross all boundaries of audience appeal; an actor with a natural presence who is as comfortable on a movie set as he is on the concert stage; a personality so magnetic that a clothes designer has even started marketing jeans with his name on them…. In an era that favors glitter and glamour, Willie comes across as the kind of guy with whom you could sit down and swap stories rather than some distant pop star who lives in his own world.”

Rolling Stone contributor Stephen Holden feels that it is Nelson’s music, more than his casual rural persona, that attracts listeners. “What makes Nelson contemporary is the way his singing lets in the darkness—fear, loneliness, despair—so that the lyrics emerge as statements of truth rather than as soothing homilies,” Holden maintains. “Willie Nelson has a touch of the preacher in him. He can stand back, look outside himself and turn pop tunes into parables that have a universal as well as a personal meaning.” Frank McConnell speaks even more highly of Nelson in a Commonweal essay. According to McConnell, Nelson, “God help him, seems to have turned himself into a living repository of the tradition of American popular song.”

Nelson himself might be taken aback by the praise heaped upon him. His origins were extremely modest, and he spent many years behind the Nashville scenes as a songwriter for others before America’s taste in music caught up with his innovative style. Nelson was born in tiny Abbott, Texas, on April 30, 1933, the only son of Ira and Myrtle Nelson. When he was only two his parents separated, so he and his sister Bobbie (who still performs with his band) were raised by their grandparents.

Like most youngsters of his era, Nelson enjoyed listening to the radio; he heard broadcasts of the Grand Ole Opry and the pop standards of the Depression era, and these were offset by the live singing he heard in church and out in the cotton fields. Busnar quotes Nelson: “I first heard the blues picking cotton in a field full of black people. One would sing a line at this end of the field, another one at that end. I realized they knew more

For the Record…

Born April 30, 1933, in Abbott, Tex.; son of Ira D. (a pool hall owner) and Myrtle Nelson; married Martha Matthews (a barmaid) c. 1951 (divorced, c. 1960); married Shirley Collie (a singer), c. 1962 (divorced, 1969); married Connie Koepke (a lab technician), 1972; children: (first marriage) Lana, Billy, Susie; (third marriage) Paula Carlene, Amy Lee; (with Ann-Marie D’Angelo) Lucas Nelson. Education: Attended Baylor University. Military service: Served in U.S. Air Force.

Songwriter and performer, 1946—. Worked as door-to-door salesman and radio announcer, c. 1952-59; bass player in Ray Price band, Nashville, Tenn., 1960-62; formed his own band, 1962; regular cast member of Grand Ole Opry, 1964-69.

Actor in motion pictures, including “Electric Horseman,” 1979, “Honeysuckle Rose,” 1980 (also released as “On the Road Again,” 1982),” Thief,” 1981, “Barbarosa, 1982,” Red-Headed Stranger,” 1986, and “Stagecoach” (made-for-TV), 1986; has also appeared in guest roles on television, including “Miami Vice.”

Awards: Named to Nashville Songwriters Association Hall of Fame, 1973; winner of five Grammy Awards, five Country Music Association Awards, and one Academy Award nomination (for best song, 1980, for “On the Road Again”).

Addresses: Residence —Colorado. Business —Mark Rothbaum & Associates, P.O. Box 2689, Danbury, CT 06813. Other— 6600 Baseline Rd., Little Rock AR 72209.

about music, soul, and feeling than I did. Plus they could pick more cotton.”

Nelson got his first guitar at the age of nine, learned some chords from his grandfather, and was soon performing in John Ray’s Polka Band, a favorite of the Polish and Czech immigrants in the area. By his freshman year of high school he had joined a family band led by his father and his sister, Bobbie. This was a standard country/swing band and it soon became popular enough to perform regularly in honky tonks and local radio spots. On the side Nelson wrote songs—both lyrics and music. He wanted to be a career musician, but the obstacles seemed insurmountable to a rural Texas boy.

After a brief stint in the Air Force (he was discharged after a back injury), Nelson married Martha Matthews, a waitress, and took whatever work he could find. He soon had three children to support. For a time he sold encyclopedias and Bibles door-to-door, worked as a janitor, a plumber’s helper, and a disc jockey, while continuing his nightly performing in bars and clubs. Busnar notes that some of Nelson’s performing venues “were so rough that chicken-wire fences were put up to protect the band from bottles and chairs that were thrown around.”

Nelson might have lost hope in these lean years if some of his songs hadn’t attracted attention. In 1959 he sold the rights to “Family Bible,” an early effort, for $50—just to feed his family. The next year, Claude Gray recorded the song, and it became a top ten country hit—without earning Nelson another dime. Still, Nelson had earned a name as a songwriter, so he decided to risk his fortune in Nashville. He sold the rights to another tune, “Night Life,” for $150, bought a used car, and moved to Tennessee. Ironically, “Night Life” became a country classic, recorded by more than seventy artists, and selling an estimated 30 million copies. But since Nelson had sold the rights, he did not earn any royalties for it.

Nelson lived a hard-drinking and brawling life in Nashville, but his songwriting and singing careers took off nevertheless. His first wife left him, and the money he earned for his tunes “either went for booze or lawyers,” he said in Busnar’s account. He married a second time, to singer Shirley Collie, and performed his own music at Tootsie’s Bar, a proving ground for young Nashville hopefuls. There he met Ray Price, who had had a major hit with “Night Life.” Price invited Nelson to join his band, and for several years Nelson played bass with the group.

During those years Nelson wrote hits for Patsy Kline (”Crazy”) and Faron Young (”Hello Walls”), and saw one of his pieces, “Funny How Time Slips Away,” recorded more than eighty times. Nelson was still dissatisfied, however. He wanted to sing his own songs, in his own style. Nashville’s conservative producers fought him every step of the way, convinced that his voice needed slick background instrumentation to cover its “defects.” Nelson had one country hit, “Touch Me,” in 1962, and a popular duet with his wife, “Willingly,” but his overproduced albums failed to sell. However, he was invited to join the regular cast of the Grand Ole Opry in 1964, and he appeared regularly there for five years.

A chance house fire proved the final catalyst to a daring career change for Nelson in 1969. When his Nashville home suddenly went up in flames—all he saved was his beloved guitar—he decided to head home for Texas and perform the way he wanted to perform. At that time Austin had become a minor music center and was known as a refuge for disenchanted country-western bands. When Nelson returned to his home state, “he immediately became the center of the Austin scene, and therefore became the focus around which the attempted mating of country and rock would take place,” wrote to Bill C. Malone and Judith McCulloh in The Stars of Country Music.

Nelson and his pals Kris Kristofferson, Leon Russell, and Waylon Jennings became the nucleus of the celebrated “Outlaws” of country music, a group of performers who dared to integrate rock, blues, and pop into their music and their images. The Outlaws were more than mere country/rock singers however—they simply rebelled against Nashville’s well-groomed sound and returned in style and substance to the foot-pounding dance hall music favored by so called “rednecks” and cowboys.

Interestingly enough, the Outlaw sound did indeed appeal to the rural rowdies, many of whom shared Nelson’s disillusionment with glitzy Nashville, but it also found an audience among the urban young of the counterculture. Nelson had finally found his stride as a performer. His 1971 album Shotgun Willie sold more copies than all his previous albums combined, and two subsequent works, Phases and Stages and Red Headed Stranger, did even better. In 1976 Nelson and Jennings recorded Wanted: The Outlaws, an effort that won the Country Music Association’s “album of the year” and “single of the year” awards.

Ironically, as Nelson’s performing career accelerated, his writing career slowed. He turned out less original work and began to record more and more tunes written by other people, especially Kristofferson. This creative slowdown did not diminish Nelson’s significance, however, because he experimented constantly with fresh arrangements of older material. McConnell calls Nelson’s music “a reclamation and rediscovery of songs we thought we had already heard too often. Like Billie Holiday—the one singer to whom he can be seriously compared—Willie brings pristine intelligence to the cliche-ridden lyrics among which we live our lives. And is this not the central act of intelligence altogether?” Intelligent or simply moving, Nelson has not lacked for hits old and new in the years since 1975. He has won Grammies for “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” and “Georgia on My Mind,” two often-recorded classics, and has had top ten hits with “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow up To Be Cowboys,” “On the Road Again,” and “You Were Always on My Mind.” He has been equally at home with roaring country dance tunes and wistful melodies like “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” and has consequently attracted fans of many different tastes.

In a final wry twist, the critics have begun to praise Nelson for the very trait that almost stymied his career—his unusual voice. Holden contends that Nelson “seizes the emotional kernels of songs, wrings out the words in a keening baritone, then shucks off the filler like chaff.” McConnell simply states that Nelson’s is “a voice that may be one of the true marvels of twentieth-century song.”

Whatever the ups and downs of Nelson’s personal life may be—and they are many—he tries to keep in touch with his true fans, the devotees of decades as well as the more sophisticated newcomers. McConnell writes: “Even at this stage of his legend, he will still show up in a packed auditorium redolent of corn dogs and draft beer as readily as in a room smelling of expensive grass and Beefeater martinis.” Nelson most enjoys outdoors concerts such as his now-famous Fourth of July “picnics” and the benefit “Farm Aid” performances. Busnar concludes that the “former country outlaw” has become “a primary reason why country music grew from a regional music form to one that now has devoted followers in all parts of America…. If there is anything aspiring vocalists can learn from him, it would be to absorb as much music as possible and sing it as honestly as one can.”

Selected discography

And Then I Wrote, Liberty, 1962.

Here’s Willie Nelson, Liberty, 1963.

Country Willie—His Own Songs, RCA, 1965.

Country Favorites—Willie Nelson Style, RCA, 1966.

Hello Walls, Sunset, 1966.

Country Music Concert—Willie Nelson, RCA, 1966.

Make Way for Willie Nelson, RCA, 1967.

The Party’s Over, RCA, 1967.

Texas in My Soul, RCA, 1968.

Good Ol’ Country Singin’, CAL, 1968.

Good Times, RCA, 1968.

My Own Peculiar Way, RCA, 1969.

Both Sides Now, RCA, 1970.

Laying My Burdens Down, RCA, 1970.

Columbus Stockade Blues, Camden, 1970.

Willie Nelson and Family, RCA, 1971.

Yesterday’s Wine, RCA, 1971.

The Words Don’t Fit the Pictures, RCA, 1972.

The Willie Way, RCA, 1972.

The Best of Willie Nelson, United Artists, 1973.

Country Winners by Willie, Camden, 1973.

Shotgun Willie, Atlantic, 1973.

Spotlight on Willie Nelson, Camden, 1974.

Phases and Stages, Atlantic, 1974.

Red-Headed Stranger, Columbia, 1975.

Willie Nelson and His Friends, Plantation, 1975.

What Can You Do to Me, RCA, 1975.

Country Willie, United Artists, 1975.

Famous Country, RCA, 1975.

The Sound in Your Mind, Columbia, 1976.

The Troublemaker, Columbia, 1976.

(With Waylon Jennings)Wanted: The Outlaws, RCA, 1976.

Columbus Stockade Blues and Other Country Favorites, Camden, 1976.

Willie Nelson Live, RCA, 1976.

Texas Country, United Artists, 1976.

Willie Before His Time, RCA, 1977.

To Lefty from Willie, Columbia, 1977.

Willie Nelson—1961, Shotgun, 1977.

(With Jennings)Waylon and Willie, RCA, 1978.

Stardust, Columbia, 1978.

Face of a Fighter, Lonestar, 1978.

There’ll Be No Teardrops Tonight, United Artists, 1978.

Willie and Family Live, Columbia, 1978.

(With Leon Russell) Pretty Paper, CBS, 1979.

Help Me Make It Through the Night, Columbia, 1979.

Sweet Memories, RCA, 1979.

(With Russell)One for the Road, Columbia, 1979.

Willie Nelson Sings Kristofferson, Columbia, 1979.

The Electric Horseman, Columbia, 1979.

(With Ray Price)San Antonio Rose, Columbia, 1980.

(With the Nashville Brass)Danny Davis and Willie Nelson, RCA, 1980.

Honeysuckle Rose, Columbia, 1980.

(With Davis, Price, and the Nashville Brass)Family Bible, Songbird, 1980.

Minstrel Man, RCA, 1981.

Somewhere over the Rainbow, Columbia, 1981.

Greatest Hits and Some That Be, Columbia, 1981.

Always on My Mind, Columbia, 1982.

The Best of Willie, RCA, 1982.

(With Jennings)W.W. II, RCA, 1982.

(With Kris Kristofferson, Dolly Parton, and Brenda Lee)Kris, Willie, Dolly and Brenda: The Winning Hand, Monument, 1982.

(With Merle Haggard)Poncho and Lefty, Columbia, 1983.

Tougher than Leather, Columbia, 1983.

Without a Song, CBS, 1983.

(With Jennings)Take It to the Limit, Columbia, 1983.

Portrait in Music, Columbia, 1984.

City of New Orleans, Columbia, 1984.

(With Jackie King)Angel Eyes, Columbia, 1985.

Collector’s Series, Columbia, 1985.

Partners, Columbia, 1986.

The Promiseland, Columbia, 1986.

Island in the Sea, Columbia, 1987.

Also recorded City of Dreams, Columbia;Don’t You Ever Get Tired of Hurting Me, RCA;My Own Way, RCA; (with Hank Snow)Brand on My Heart; and (with Faron Young)Funny How Time Slips Away.

Compositions

Composer of numerous songs, including “Night Life,” “Crazy,” “Hello Walls,” “Funny How Time Slips Away,” “Family Bible,” “I Just Can’t Let You Say Goodbye,” “One Day at a Time,” “The Party’s Over,” “Touch Me,” “Pretty Paper,” “Half a Man,” “What Can You Do to Me Now,” “Shotgun Willie,” “So Much To Do,” “I Still Can’t Believe You’re Gone,” (with Waylon Jennings) “Good Hearted Woman,” “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground,” “On the Road Again,” and “Forgiving You Was Easy.”