Willie Nelson

by Joe Nick Patoski

  Seed and steel were no match for the boll weevil either. The infestation of the pernicious insect that feasted on cotton sapped Hill County’s upward spiral. What the weevil didn’t waste, the Great Depression destroyed. Three-quarters of the farmers in the county were working land they did not own, and with the economic downturn, the train didn’t stop in Abbott anymore. Riders had to flag it down.

  By 1929, Abbott was little more than a scattering of three hundred people in houses and barns, churches for Methodists, Baptists, and Disciples of Christ (the Catholic Church for the Czechs moving into town would come later), a Baptist church for the colored folks, a tabernacle for singing conventions and revivals, three cotton gins, and the three transportation routes bisecting town—Highway 81/77, the north-south border-to-border routes connecting Canada and Mexico, the Missouri-Kansas-Texas railroad, aka the Katy, which also ran north-south, and the Interurban trolley, which ran from Waco, twenty-four miles south, to Fort Worth and Dallas, sixty-three and seventy-three miles north, respectively. For those who lived there, Abbott was something to be proud of. As native son Leo Ruzicka pointed out, “Abbott is the first town in Texas, alphabetically.”

  Abbott, 1933

  BOBBIE LEE AND Willie Hugh were the first Nelsons born on Texas soil. She arrived on the first day of 1931. He came two years later a few minutes before midnight, during the last hour of April 29, 1933. Doc Simms, who delivered both Nelson children at his home, recorded the boy’s birth on the first hour of April 30. He was a healthy baby with big brown eyes and flaming red hair. “He had beautiful hair,” his sister, Bobbie, said. “He was like a strawberry blond, kind of like Aunt Rosa’s hair.” Cousin Mildred, who was thirteen years older than Bobbie Lee, named him Willie Hugh—Hugh because that was the middle name of her dear departed little brother, Wallace Hugh, and Willie because she just liked the sound of it. Bobbie called him Hughty and so did his grandmother Nancy Nelson—whom the boy knew as Mamma—when she shouted his name on the back porch at suppertime.

  Three days after Willie was born, his father, Ira, and mother, Myrle, went out to play music with a band, leaving the baby in the care of his grandparents and his cousin. Ira and Myrle had been sixteen when they married—still kids in many respects but old enough to work in the fields and bear children and old enough to know better. Myrle hated Texas. All her people were back in Arkansas or moving west across Oklahoma to the Pacific Northwest. Some folks said that maybe it was Myrle’s Indian blood that made her want to ramble.

  But rather than stick around to fight the inevitable fight or submit to her man, like they taught in church, and continue living with Ira’s parents, and as much as she loved them and her kids, Myrle couldn’t be true to herself if she stayed. She left Abbott six months after giving birth to Willie and went to Oklahoma, then points west, working as a waitress, a dancer, and a card dealer in San Francisco, Oregon, and Washington, where she caught up with her kinfolk. The divorce became final when Willie Hugh was two.

  Ira Nelson remained in Abbott after Myrle left, but for all practical purposes, he left his children to be raised by his parents, Alfred and Nancy. He picked up occasional work farming “on the halves”—splitting the proceeds of a crop with a landowner who provided the dirt and tools to raise a crop—and with a little determination and a lot of patience learned how to fix engines for the living it provided. But mostly he liked picking his guitar, staying out late, and hanging in honky-tonks. There wasn’t much in life more fun than picking and singing. That’s how he had met Myrle. His boy and his girl were like that too. It ran in the family blood.

  “WHEN my father began playing beer joints and started drinking, my grandfather and grandmother gave him holy hell,” Bobbie said. “One night they found a whiskey bottle in his car. That was the beginning of the end of the family thing.”

  Ira remarried and lived for a while in the blacksmith shop with his second wife, Lorraine, and pumped gas. Then he drifted to the oil fields of New Mexico, to Lorraine’s hometown of Covington, in Hill County, and eventually found work up in Fort Worth.

  “Ira didn’t like to work, I don’t think,” said neighbor Leo Ruzicka, who used to play marbles for keeps with Ira. “I never saw him working. Living off his daddy is what it amounted to. He’d rather play music.”

  “Our grandfather didn’t want us to visit either Mother or Daddy,” Bobbie Nelson said. “They had to come see us. My grandfather totally looked out for me and Willie.” Myrle came back when she could, riding the bus or catching the train, but she never stayed long. Once, she came back to tell the kids she was dying of cancer and wanted them to learn a song to remember her by, the Rex Griffin composition “The Last Letter” (“I’ll be gone when you read this last letter from me”).

  “I remember one time she hitchhiked to come see us,” Bobbie said. “It cost money to ride the bus or train. She took the bus back. We did not want her to be hitchhiking. My mother was very independent.” Myrle liked moving around, and so did her boy. Willie developed a tendency to wander early on, most often heading to Jimmy Bruce’s house next door. Nancy Nelson quickly figured out if she didn’t want to spend all afternoon searching for a lost child, she’d have to keep Willie tethered close to home, so she put a leash on him and staked it to a post, like she did with the family cow. It didn’t keep Willie from getting loose—Bobbie kept untying the leash—but it slowed him down enough for Mamma Nelson to keep an eye on him.

  When they first moved to Abbott, Nancy and Alfred did farm labor for a lady until Alfred went to work for John Rejcek, a blacksmith with the biggest family in Abbott, who also led a polka band in his spare time. Alfred eventually opened his own shop, doing his smithing with a motor, a fire, an anvil, and a hammer. The kids in Abbott gravitated to his shop, where he let them help turn the forge, play marbles and dominoes, and hang out. Occasionally, he would gather them around the potbellied stove and treat them to real-life stories with a parable at the end.

  Religion played a major part in the Nelson family’s life, the same way it did for most other families throughout the South, where church was the all-purpose community center. Shortly after they arrived in Texas, the Nelsons joined the Abbott Methodist Church, a simple white clapboard building with a burnt-orange composite-shingle roof topped by a humble steeple that had been raised in 1899. Alfred became the church’s music director, and both Alfred and Nancy taught Sunday school.

  Mamma Nelson used a Methodist hymnal to teach her granddaughter to read music and play piano. “It made sense to me right away,” Bobbie Lee said. The first song she played on the upright piano after her grandparents traded away a pump organ was “Jesus, Lover of My Soul.”

  The church was one of the most important institutions in the community, perhaps the most important institution. But church wasn’t all there was to life in Abbott. And church wasn’t the only place for making music.

  HILLSBORO, the county seat, was a larger version of Abbott, its eight thousand residents mostly white folks and mostly Methodist and Baptist, with some colored folks who lived on the edge of town. Hillsboro was where you went to sell your eggs on the courthouse square on Saturdays and sing at singing conventions inside the gingerbread county courthouse on Sundays. If you had money, you could buy essentials at Buie Hardware, Hillsboro Dry Goods, Martin-McDonald, or Laura’s Bargain Store, watch a picture show at the Ritz or the Texas, or sit in a booth and eat fried chicken at Jiggs, the Kai Kai Coffee Shop, or the Kre-Mee Cafe. If you didn’t have money, you could at least stare at the new Philco radios in the window of Goodman Company or wish for a piano at Walter Piano.

  “The Crossroads of Texas” had its own airport, called the Bryant Sky Ranch, several car dealerships, the Hotel Newcomb, alternately identified as “Hillsboro’s Modern Fireproof Hotel” and “Hillsboro’s Only Steam-Heated Hotel,” a radio station, KHBR, which broadcast at 1560 kilohertz on the radio dial from sunrise to sunset, three grocery stores, four tourist courts, a dominoes parlor, a junior college, and pretty much everythin
g you couldn’t get in Abbott.

  West was different. It wasn’t much bigger than Abbott, but it was nothing like it. West was where the Czechs lived. They were largely Catholic, they enjoyed their music differently, and they drank alcohol, a pastime made easier when Prohibition was repealed a little more than eight months after Willie Hugh was born. In those Central Texas counties that went “wet,” Czech families typically gathered at the SPJST Hall to socialize, sing, dance, and drink their beers. SPJST, or the Slavonic Benevolent Order of the State of Texas, was a Czech organization that sold insurance, ran a rest home, and harbored social clubs; its motto was “Texans for Texans.” The Czechs enjoyed their beer, but good Baptists and Methodists in Abbott and adjacent dry counties had to sneak around to indulge in such activities, which is why several beer joints were clustered across the county line on the highway to West. True Baptists, rooted in the Primitive Church and able to quote Scripture at the drop of the good book, believed dancing was sinful and pagan, nothing more than a vertical substitute for copulation.

  Czechs in general were considered sinful and then some for those reasons. The Ruzickas, the first Czech family to move into Abbott in 1925, were treated like dirt when they came to town, even though Leo and Jerry Frank’s daddy ran one of the three cotton gins in Abbott, a position of considerable importance.

  “We were treated as outcasts,” Leo Ruzicka said. “Real bad, worse than Spanish people, as bad as black. I couldn’t look at a white girl.” Fran Pope faced similar prejudice. “They called us Bohemians at school to make fun of us, I guess because we could speak Czech,” she said. “We were always laughed at. I’d call them ‘biscuit eaters.’ We didn’t have to eat biscuits. We had homemade bread.”

  “Spanish” was polite reference to the handful of Mexican immigrant families who’d wandered up from across the Rio Grande and settled on the edge of town, pretty much keeping to themselves except when it came to working in the fields. The Spanish were treated as foreigners and second-class citizens, evidenced by the lower pay offered for the same labor and the “No dogs or Mexicans” signs posted in front of more than one café. However low they were regarded by the whites in town, “meskins” didn’t have it as bad as African Americans—“niggers”—the descendants of slaves brought into Texas to work the fields and do the menial labor no one else would do.

  Black and Mexican children were not allowed to go to the white school. Colored children attended classes in the one-room school at the Negro church. Black and Mexican adults were not allowed to use public toilets or water fountains, or to ride in the train cars reserved for whites. If they were lucky, they could ride in the back of the train, sit in the balcony of the movie theater, and eat around the back in a café. Those who ignored the rules or, worse, intentionally violated them, such as a black man even talking to a white woman, faced harsh punishment. But the young Booger Red didn’t think the Czechs or the Mexicans or the Negroes were any different from his people. The Nelsons lived across the street from two Mexican families. More than once, Willie and Bobbie walked over by the colored church near the highway to listen to what the congregation was singing. Once a year, the good folks at Abbott Methodist attended services there. Those experiences led Bobbie Lee to question segregation. “I was always asking, ‘Why can’t I invite these people home? What’s wrong with me inviting our Mexican friends and our black friends or someone who is raggedy-looking?’”

  SINGING was an important element of worship for Abbott’s Christians, and it took the lead role when meetings were held at the local tabernacle, a kind of all-purpose social center for true believers. In the summer, the Baptists held revivals for two weeks, followed by the Methodists and the Disciples of Christ, with singing conventions staged throughout the warm months.

  Along with instilling a love of God and Christ, the elder Nelsons infused their grandchildren with a love of music, gathering around the dining table and writing music or studying the lessons for their correspondence courses by lamplight.

  Alfred Nelson could see Bobbie had a natural talent. “I built the first piano I ever had out of cardboard,” she said. “We played with cardboard under the peach tree, Willie and I. We created a piano with Crayolas on a cardboard box while Mamma Nelson was doing the laundry. It was not near satisfying enough. No matter how hard I pushed on this cardboard, it didn’t make a sound.”

  Once she learned to play a real keyboard, Bobbie said, “My grandfather got tired of ‘Chopsticks’ and all the things I was trying to create on my own. He told my grandmother, ‘It’s time for her to learn to read music, Nancy.’ My grandfather wanted my grandmother to teach me to read music, and not just shape notes. We had gospel singing books, hymnals, the Stamps-Baxter songbook—the Brown Book—that was where I learned to read music.” When Mamma Nelson gave Bobbie piano lessons, her little brother would sit on the piano stool and try to learn the chords his sister was learning.

  “I was so into this piano,” Bobbie said. “From that moment on, I didn’t have to pick as much cotton or do anything. Everyone was amazed because I was a little kid and learned really fast, as big as my fingers would go. My grandfather encouraged me. He told me, ‘You know, you need to learn, you need to stay with this piano. It could really make you a living one of these days.’

  “I learned to play the first song the first day. I don’t know how I learned to play it that quickly that young, but I did. My grandmother and grandfather would sing this song and I’d play it. Then they would have me play something in church.” When she learned a song out of the songbook, Mamma Nelson would reward her by putting a gold star on the page.

  Unlike some families in Abbott, Daddy Nelson and Mamma Nelson encouraged music outside the church, too, harkening back to their Arkansas roots. “My grandfather would take me to the singing conventions they used to have in the big courtroom in the Hill County Courthouse in Hillsboro one Sunday afternoon a month,” Bobbie Nelson said. “That’s what got me hooked. There was a woman there playing gospel music on piano. I can still see her in my mind. She had long fingers, like my mother. Her hands were much bigger than mine. But this woman could play. I was hooked on her. And Daddy loved to sing.”

  Bobbie’s first performance was at a singing convention in the courthouse, the same year her brother first recited a poem in front of an audience. “There was a full house, a thousand people in that courthouse on a Sunday afternoon,” she said. “At the singing convention, everyone had a chance to choose a number out of the Stamps-Baxter hymn book. My grandfather always led one or two songs at the singing convention and he had me lead a song. They lifted me up on this bench, a big pew. They taught me how to conduct. I was conducting these people, singing lead on ‘I’ll Fly Away.’

  “I don’t remember being nervous,” Bobbie Lee said. “My grandfather told me, ‘You need to practice because you could play the piano for them and sing like Miss Martha, the preacher’s wife, does.’ I was anxious to do that.”

  When Alfred saved up enough money to buy the family a Philco radio, the box of wire and tubes brought music from far outside the church into their house.

  The Philco was placed atop the marble washstand that had been brought from Arkansas. Booger Red was exposed to recordings of songs performed by Jimmie Rodgers, the Blue Yodeler from Mississippi and the biggest record star of his time; by the Carter Family, whose harmonies provided the foundations of what would be called country music; and by Roy Acuff, Minnie Pearl, and all the entertainers on the Grand Ole Opry from Nashville. Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys filled their living room courtesy of KVOO, a powerful 50,000-watt station broadcasting from Tulsa, where Wills held forth at Cain’s Academy. Ernest Tubb and his warm Texan friendliness came in every weekday from KGKO 570 in Fort Worth and held a special place in the young Nelson boy’s heart. “He was my first singing hero,” he said. “He was the first guy that I had a songbook of. ‘Jimmie Dale,’ which was about his son that died, was one of the saddest songs I ever heard.” Hank Thompson had a show just down t
he road in Waco on WACO and later on KWTX. But it was hardly just country coming out of the radio. Boogie-woogie piano man Freddie Slack was no farther than a twist of the dial. And jazz from New Orleans drifted in late at night, thanks to the 50,000-watt clear-channel signal of WWL.

  If not for the radio, the boy almost certainly would never have contemplated the superior vocal skills of a skinny young Italian crooner from Hoboken, New Jersey, named Frank Sinatra or discovered Hank Williams’s spiritual alter ego, Luke the Drifter, who intoned about the wisdom of seeing things “From Life’s Other Side.” Neither jukeboxes nor churches considered Luke the Drifter particularly significant. The radio took Willie farther than an automobile, a bus, or the Interurban ever could.

  After supper, Willie and Bobbie would mimic Cousin Mildred—“Meemee”—and Daddy and Mamma Nelson when they sat down and composed song lyrics together. Watching them made him want to write lyrics too. “You can study music always and never learn it all,” Mamma Nelson liked to say.

  FROM the outside looking in, the Nelsons lived in poverty. “They were pretty poor,” one neighbor said. “They were hardworking people. His grandma gave piano lessons. His grandpa was always sharpening plows, designing and building machinery for tractors and hay balers, doing something.” The truth was, everyone was poor back in those days. The Nelsons were just a whole lot poorer.

  “If we didn’t grow it, we didn’t eat it,” Bobbie remembered. “Ol’ Reddy, our first cow, was part of the family. We kept one of her calves. We had another cow and hogs. Those were my grandfather’s. I saw him butcher a hog one time and that just ended it for me. I wasn’t going to help with that sort of thing. My grandmother and grandfather, they had to be their own butchers. That’s one reason we didn’t eat any of our chickens. Our chickens had names. We raised them from eggs. We ate the eggs and sold the eggs for money to buy our groceries. That’s the way we survived.”