On Willie’s Road
Willie Nelson will headline at the Oil Palace in Tyler on February 18 with David Allan Coe. Everybody’s got an opinion about Willie, one of a handful of artists and entertainers who can be identified by their first names, but how many really know his story — what makes Willie “Willie,” and how he became, through his own stubborn independence, an American icon. Here are a few examples.
By Tom Geddie
Willie Nelson has heard the train’s whistle, the sound of wheels on the road since he was a child in Abbott, Texas.
Born to Myrle and Ira Nelson on April 30, 1933, he grew up dirt poor during the Great Depression, showing off and picking fights. His mom, Myrle, was 19; his dad probably was off playing music somewhere at 1:40 in the morning when Willie was born.
His parents soon divorced, and his grandparents raised Willie and his sister, Bobbie, three years older.
His granddad used to hold him on his lap and sing him to sleep. Songs like “Show Me the Way to Go Home,” “She’ll be Comin’ Around the Mountain” and “Where Have You Gone Billy Boy.”
The music icon heard gospel music at church, the blues in the cotton fields, and country music everywhere else.
Willie was destined for music, it seems.
While his sister learned Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, and a little boogie-woogie on the piano, he got his first toy mandolin at age two and learned “Polly Wolly Doodle All the Day.” He began writing songs when he was five, and soon learned the D, A, and G chords on an old Stella guitar from Sears.
After his grandfather, Daddy Nelson, died, he and Bobbie and Mama Nelson moved into a shack where he could see bare earth through the floor planks. All three worked in the cotton fields because they needed whatever money they could earn; he mopped cafeteria floors at school for a free lunch, and, with Bobbie, held on to a variety of odd jobs around town.
“By the time I reached the first grade I was a confirmed believer in the customs of Abbott boyhood, codes as definite as those of Ivanhoe’s knights,” he said. “You showed respect to women and were halfway afraid of girls. If any boy insulted your sister or stood in your way in a challenging fashion, it was your duty to kick his (tail). If you didn’t, he would definitely kick yours.
“When I was seven or eight, I saw the bigger boys who could pick more (cotton) than me were getting higher pay. I knew that, eventually, I would have to outpick them, fight them, or outwit them. But mostly I just wanted to get out of those fields,” he said.
Willie would play guitar until his fingers bled.
On summer nights and early mornings in Abbott, he could look up and see the Milky Way.
“Somehow you knew that the starlight reached you from glory, that you drew all your strength from the starlight, that eternity was immense and your knowledge was small,” he said.
Willie could hear the trains whistling in the distance, and as a teenager he and a buddy would sometimes stand by the tracks and hop the first train that came along — whichever direction it was going.
From those beginnings, the icon was born and forged.
Since then, Willie’s been a door-to-door bible salesman, traveling vacuum cleaner salesman, plumber’s assistant, disc jockey, actor, songwriter, gospel singer, outlaw, activist, and a golfer.
“Hard work is nothing I have shied away from. But my desire to escape manual labor can’t be overstated,” he said.
Willie financed and sold his first recorded song, “No Place for Me,” when he was 23 and working as a deejay in Portland, Oregon. He made $100 off the first song he sold to somebody else, “Family Bible.”
The next year, he sold “Night Life” to some Texas businessmen and drove to Nashville in 1960 to seek his fortune. The car, a 1941 Buick convertible with five overdue payments, died in downtown Nashville and he moved into the same trailer park where Roger Miller used to live. “Crazy,” recorded by Patsy Cline, and Faron Young’s version of “Hello Walls” quickly climbed the charts, and Willie’s reputation as a writer was established.
For 10 years, he wrote for three different labels and wanted to record his own songs, but never really got the opportunity. Oh, sure, the labels let him record 14 albums to keep him happy, but never spent the money to promote them.
“My demos were always better, I thought, than the records that came out,” he said. “After all the voices and the strings had been put onto the record, it wasn’t anything that I could reproduce live onstage anywhere. It sounded beautiful, but it wasn’t me. I wasn’t comfortable doing it, and it didn’t sell.”
When his house burned, he packed up what was left of his belongings and moved back to Texas in his search for freedom, for the sound of the train’s whistle and the sound of wheels on the road.
“Austin was a real paradise, an oasis, the best-kept secret in America in 1971,” Willie said. “Rednecks and hippies who had thought they were natural enemies began mixing at the Armadillo World Headquarters without too much bloodshed. They had discovered they both liked good music.
“Being a natural leader, I saw which direction this movement was going and threw myself in front of it.”
Willie’s first show at Austin’s Armadillo World Headquarters was August 12, 1972. Within the year, he’d recorded Shotgun Willie and Phases and Stages, proving the corporate business executives wrong.
In 1975, he recorded “Red Headed Stranger” in three days in Dallas, an album that the executives thought he intended as a demo because it was so sparse. Again, Willie the artist was right and the business executives were wrong.
Willie’s hits have spanned five decades now. He’s recorded some unlikely songs — such as the recent reggae album — and with some unlikely people. He’s done it, as Frank Sinatra, one of his influences, would say, his way. Bob Wills, Hank Williams, Floyd Tillman, Lefty Frizell, Ernest Tubb, Hoagy Carmichael, and George and Ira Gershwin were among his early influences.
Willie never was really an outlaw; he’s just independent.
Before he went to Nashville, he performed and deejayed in Houston and Fort Worth, and even taught Sunday school in Fort Worth until the preacher, pressured by a handful of church members, forced him to choose between the church and the honky-tonks.
Always a spiritual man, Willie went looking for answers.
“I was disillusioned with religions that condemned people like me, but deep inside I had a powerful spiritual urge,” he said. “I went to the Fort Worth Public Library and began reading every book on religion I could find.”
He found enough he believed in to satisfy him and give him a lot to think about.
The “outlaw country” label was a marketing gimmick.
When Willie recorded Stardust, based on American standards and produced by Booker T. Jones, critics said the string-heavy album would ruin his career. Once again, the establishment was wrong; it was one of his most successful albums ever.
The train whistle, the sound of the tires on the road, and the sense of eternity in stardust strengthened Willie.
Nelson’s privacy is important; his circle of friends is tight because he’s such a generous man who’s too easy to take advantage of. His band – sister Bobbie, Paul English, Mickey Raphael, Bee Spears, Jody Payne, and long-time entourage — spend as many as 200 days a year touring North America in the Honeysuckle Rose II, followed by a caravan of equipment.
The road life, combined with Willie’s personality, make fidelity difficult. Willie’s marriages are well known; he’s got four daughters — Susie, Paula, Lana, and Amy — and two sons —Lukas and Micah. His oldest son, Billy, died in 1990.
It’s not true, he said, that one of his ex-wives sewed him up in a bedsheet and beat him with a broom.
“The truth is she tied me up with the kids’ jumping ropes before she beat the hell out of me. She cried and cussed while she did it, and the kids were waiting outside in the getaway car,” he said.
Willie gets along with all of his ex-wives better now than when they were married.
“There’s really no such thing as ex-wives, only additional wives,” he said. “I’ve had five, and don’t have time to tell you everything I did to them.”
Today, Willie Nelson is at peace.
“On the road, we have a convoy, five buses of people and two semi-trucks of equipment. In the early mornings, I can hear the tires humming on the highway and feel Honeysuckle Rose singing with energy.
“It makes me feel good to gaze out the windows of the bus at the towns and signs and landscape going past. It’s like the other side of the feeling I got when I was a little kid and heard a railroad train whistling and rumbling into the distance in the middle of the night. This is what might have happened if you had every really caught that mysterious midnight train.”
