“Willie’s God! Willie’s God! We Love Willie!”

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by Michael Hall

May 2008

Photograph by Platon

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So much has been written about him in the past 75 years (a good chunk of it in Texas Monthly) that we wondered if there was anything left to say. Which is why we called the people who know him best: the friends and admirers and collaborators who’ve been with him through every phase and stage of his life. Taken together, their stories amount to the very best biography of Willie Nelson you could ask for—a loving, funny, insightful portrait of the most important musician ever to come from Texas.

GROWING UP IN ABBOTT

Bobbie Nelson, 77, is Willie’s older sister. She lives in Spicewood. We went to a very small Methodist church. My grandmother was there every time the doors opened. Willie and I were practically born in that church. The first music we learned was from the hymnbooks. Willie had such a beautiful voice. I’d play piano, and he would sing. Then he learned to play guitar, and my grandmother taught us to play together, showing Willie the chords on the guitar and me on the piano and telling us when to change chords. That’s the way we learned to play together. “Great Speckled Bird” was the first one she ever taught us. We also played in schools. We were the sole entertainers in our town.

Jack Clements, 75, was a childhood friend of Willie’s. He lives in West. He was just an ordinary kid growing up. He was a good student. Back then, it probably wasn’t more than one hundred students in high school, so all the boys played all the sports: basketball, baseball, football, track. Willie was a good basketball player. He was really kind of quiet, not very talkative. I lived on a farm and had horses, so when we were at my house, we’d ride and talk and play. At night he would make up songs, and he would sing about horses. The only one I really remember is “The Great White Stallion.”

Morris Russell, 77, was a childhood friend of Willie’s. He lives in Abbott. Willie and I would go to town on Saturday and see some of them shoot-’em-ups, you know? Roy Rogers and all of that. He always liked cowboy movies. We used to go to a swimming hole, and we did a lot of hunting and fishing. We did a lot of mischievous things too. We used to play the pocketbook trick. There was an old corn cellar on the main highway, and we used to put a purse out there close to the road. When the cars stopped, we’d pull it back in. And we used to fight bumblebees on Sundays. The farmers would have a bumblebee’s nest they would want out of there, so a bunch of us kids would go and fight the bumblebees. Willie got stung a few times. It was hilarious when about four or five of those bumblebees would get after one person. We’d laugh at him, but when they got after me, I wouldn’t laugh.

Faye Dell Brown Clements, 75, was Willie’s first girlfriend. She is married to Jack Clements. Willie was just a supernice teenage boy. We had a crush on each other, and we dated some. He had a great personality, and he and I sang together when we went out. It was a lot of pop music back then. I really liked him, but my mother didn’t like for me to date him because my daddy was a musician and she knew that if I fell in love with him, I would have a hard life. So about that same time, I started dating Jack. We fell in love and graduated from high school in ’50 and got married in 1951.

HONKY-TONKIN’ IN TEXAS

Bobbie Nelson We played together in Bud Fletcher’s band when he was fourteen and I was sixteen and had just married Bud. Our first job was a club in Waco, and one of our schoolteachers played trombone. We played a lot of the same things that we’re playing right now. “Beer Barrel Polka,” Eddy Arnold, Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell.

Johnny Bush 73, wrote “Whiskey River” and played drums for Willie from 1954 to 1968. He lives in San Antonio. I met Willie in late 1953, when I was working with the Mission City Playboys, in San Antonio. We worked a Sunday matinee, and it was customary to ask musicians who passed through to sit in. We had been looking for a fiddle player, and this fiddle player named Cosett Holland and a little redheaded guitar player sat in one afternoon. The group wanted to hire Cosett, but he and Willie had come down from Waco as a pair. So they hired them both. Willie was married to Martha [Matthews] then, and [their daughter] Lana was about eighteen months old. He and I became fast friends. They lived in a rent house over off Labor Street, with the steel player and the fiddle player. We worked six nights a week and made five or six dollars a night in tips. His singing wasn’t bad, but he hadn’t found it then. We used to sit around and say, “To make it in this business, you have to find your own style—you can’t sound like anybody else.” I happened to make the remark that I liked his guitar playing better than his singing. Well, for some reason, he never forgot that, and he’s never let me live it down.

Paul English, 75, first began playing drums for Willie in 1956. He lives in Fort Worth. The way Willie plays, he was hard to work with. He told me one time, “Don’t worry about the song—don’t count it, just feel it.” That told me a lot of what I needed to know.

Lana Nelson, 54, is Willie’s oldest daughter. She runs willienelson.com and lives in Spicewood. My earliest memory of my father is him trying to teach me how to whistle in the baby bed. Music was always a big part of our life.

Bobbie Nelson I moved to Fort Worth in the mid-fifties, and I went to work for Hammond Organ. I was real emotional at that time. My marriage had broken up, I had to take care of my three small children, and I didn’t think I could play music anymore. Willie came to Fort Worth to be with me while I was having those problems. Then he went to Houston and worked as a guitar teacher and played in clubs. That’s when he wrote “Crazy,” “Nightlife,” and all those beautiful things.

THE SONGS

Billy Joe Shaver, 68, is a singer, songwriter, and actor. He lives in Waco. He’s probably the best songwriter that ever lived. “Crazy” is about the best song ever written. I can’t imagine a better song. You know, I don’t care how low or what part of the world you come from, you understand that song. Everybody’s been that way.

Johnny Bush He said all those songs are out there. They are being transmitted from somewhere, like a radio signal. All you’ve got to do is tune your mind and let those thoughts come in. They are being transmitted, and you’re a receiver. That’s what he believes.

Merle Haggard, 71, is a singer and songwriter. He lives near Redding, California. There’s not anything in Willie’s life, I’m sure, that’s as important as writing a song. He plays golf and he plays poker and he plays pool and he does them good, but his mind’s not on them. His mind is on songs. Even when he’s not playing, he’s thinking about the guitar, and everything else is bullshit.

Ray Benson, 57, is a singer, songwriter, guitarist, and founder of the band Asleep at the Wheel. He lives in Austin. What’s so amazing about his songs is that they’re so different, yet they all have that common thread of his incredibly twisted little point of view. Do you know what “Pretty Paper” is about? It’s about a guy Willie saw once who had no legs and was nailed to a board with roller skates, scooting along the ground selling pencils. It was a huge hit for Roy Orbison. It’s a very pretty Christmas song, but it’s not: It’s this incredibly weird, wonderful perspective of a crippled guy nailed to a board.

Norah Jones, 29, is a singer, songwriter, and actress. She lives in New York City. Lately I’ve been getting into some of the old demos that he did. Some of the songs are kind of sick, like “Permanently Lonely” and “Opportunity to Cry.” They’re dark and twisted, yet there’s a little bit of humor in them. And musically, the chords are supercomplex. I love some of his more popular songs too. On “Funny How Time Slips Away,” I love the twist of the knife at the end: “In time you’re going to pay.”

Kinky Friedman, 63, is a singer, songwriter, and author. He lives near Medina. To write those lyrics, which are poetry with great music, it requires real tragedy. You can’t sit in a room and do it. Even if you worked 24 hours a day with a committee of men, you couldn’t do it. As a country singer, he’s never happy. That’s not the goal of being a country singer. If you’re not miserable, you’re not going to be very good.

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