Willie Nelson

by Joe Nick Patoski

  He was Gene Autry, a movie cowboy on the radio, living out his boyhood fantasy formed by the shoot-’em-ups at the Saturday picture show. His timing was perfect. The singing cowboys from the movies were migrating to television; the two most-watched weekly series on TV in America were the westerns Gunsmoke and Wells Fargo. In a matter of months, Willie moved into the ten a.m. to two p.m. midday shift and bragged that he was so popular, he had more listeners than any other radio personality in Portland/Vancouver, including Arthur Godfrey, who was broadcasting from New York on the CBS radio network. His competitiveness didn’t end in the sound booth. In 1957, he entered a celebrity stock car race against eighteen other local disc jockeys and radio people and won the race.

  Disc jockeying, performing music, and Martha waiting tables brought in enough money for Willie, Martha, Lana, and her new sister, Susie, born during a snowstorm on January 20, 1957, to move. They rented a Mexican adobe home with a barn on farmland out Burton Road on the eastern edge of Vancouver. Martha’s mother and father moved up from Waco to live with them and look after the girls. The family got a dog named Duke and Willie rode his palomino as often as he could around his spread.

  He befriended Max Hall, a pump jockey at the gas station near the KVAN studios, which were located in a red-brick building above a furniture store at the corner of 7th and Main streets. Max was friendly and game enough to step into the role of a surrogate Zeke Varnon. Willie would advise Max to come visit him at the radio station when he got off work. “I’ve got a bottle we can share,” he’d tell him. While Max watched Willie spin 45s and entertain listeners, they’d get loaded and make plans to go hear music, chase skirts, and carry on at the end of his shift. One night while hanging with Max at the gas station, Willie spied a shiny new motorcycle parked by the pumps and, wanting to try it out, hopped on, revved the engine, and sped off, promptly hitting a brand-new Plymouth.

  The accident did not detract from Max’s high opinion of Willie. “He was the top DJ,” he said. He also recognized his wild streak. “He was a loose cannon. He was always looking for adventure.” The combination brought him a lot of attention. “The ladies really liked Willie,” Max said. It was no surprise, then, that his celebrity caused trouble at home, especially with that “Indian lady,” as Max referred to Martha, who had quite a temper. “She was a fiery little thing,” he said.

  Meanwhile, Willie was performing live, picking up work with several area bands and as a solo act. “I was playing the same songs I played in Waco, and people liked them,” he said. Pat Mason, the KVAN disc jockey who ran the Wagon Wheel Park dance hall outside Camas, Washington, hired Willie to play. So did Heck Harper, host of Heck Harper’s Bar 27 Corral western show on KPTV, Channel 27, “Portland’s Pioneer Station,” following American Bandstand every weekday afternoon.

  Harper was one of Portland’s first local TV stars. He played cowboy songs for the young ranch hands at home, told stories, and introduced fifteen-minute segments of cowboy movies. Willie sometimes appeared as Heck’s guest, singing a cowboy song to the kiddos, and also performed on Heck’s weekly country music television show, sponsored by Hollywood Ford (Heck also DJed on KGW radio, the biggest station in Portland). On weekends, Willie played dances with Heck. For one six-month stretch, he and Heck and Cactus Ken DuBord from KVAN joined Roger Crandall and his Barn Dance Boys, a Western Swing big band from Kelso, Washington, who had an extended residency at Tiny Dumont’s Dancehall.

  Playing music was more rewarding than being on the radio. Besides the Wagon Wheel, Tiny Dumont’s, and Heck Harper’s show, Willie worked Watkins Park, the Wishing Well Restaurant in St. John’s, and the Dollars Corner Barn Dance. He was a featured attraction at events such as the Clark County Fair and the Rose Festival Western Jamboree and No-Cash Auto Auction staged at Bud Meadows’s Pontiac, Sandy Boulevard at Lucky 13th in Portland. Texas Willie Nelson was part of an undercard with the Powder River Boys, Shorty the Hired Hand, and square dance exhibitions from Mel’s Bells and Beaus, Rafferty’s Rhythm Rustlers, and Faye Gerber’s Barn Owls. All of them performed on a flatbed trailer at the car dealership to warm up the crowd for headliner Jimmy Wakely, “America’s foremost Western tune wrangler, In Person Direct from Hollywood.”

  Texas Willie developed enough of a following to attract two talented young musicians named Bobby Gibson and Buddy Fite, who showed up at the radio station and wherever he was gigging so they could sit in with him for a few songs. Willie liked the young fellows all right, although he allowed that Buddy “was a real weird guy. He would sleep with jazz music in his ear and wake up playing all kind of shit.” As much as the kids loved hanging out and playing with Willie, they were too young to appreciate the side benefit of music stardom when a friend dropped off Willie at the home of a woman who was not his wife. “We didn’t know that was going on,” Bobby Gibson admitted.

  Being on the radio and playing dances gave Willie a taste of what it was like to be the center of attention. Now he needed a record to promote his existence to the world. He used a studio at the radio station to record two songs, bringing in Buddy Fite to add his steel guitar to the magic sound of Willie Nelson. The setup was “as basic as it sounded,” Willie said. The vocal, guitar, and steel were drenched in echo, about as close to a sound effect as could be coaxed out of the primitive technology.

  “No Place for Me” was a sad, almost prophetic Willie original, given his residence in the Pacific Northwest. Leon Payne’s “Lumberjack” was the easier local sell, opening and closing the song with the sound of a timber saw, while Payne’s lyrics were loaded with logger references and the Saturday-night promise of going to Eugene. “Lumberjack” was not among Payne’s finest pieces, but it reflected Willie’s sense of place as much as the other song did.

  Audiotapes of the recordings were mailed to Starday Records, the country label in Houston run by H. W. “Pappy” Daily and Jack Starnes, which pressed five hundred 45 rpm records. As part of their custom-record-pressing contract, Starday reserved the right to release the record on the Starday label or act as publisher of any songs, but Willie’s single did not move the label to exercise either option.

  It was a straight-up cash deal. Willie bought the records and sold them on the air and any other way he could. Issued in February 1957 on the Willie Nelson label, the little record with the big hole was offered to KVAN listeners for the low price of $1 with a free autographed 8 x 10 glossy photo of twenty-four-year-old Willie Nelson, country disc jockey and singing star and movie star–handsome with dark, wavy hair, soulful puppy-dog eyes, and pursed Sal Mineo lips, suitable for framing. Three thousand copies of the 45 sold.

  Not everyone who ordered a record received a copy, though. As one musician who worked with Willie delicately put it, “Times were tight and sometimes you had to do things just to make ends meet.” Willie had already written checks that bounced to steel player Wes Bakken and to Merle Tofte, the guitarist for the Powder River Ramblers for playing gigs with him.

  WILLIE Nelson might have found contentment in the Northwest if Mae Boren Axton hadn’t dropped by KVAN. Axton was helping publicize a Hank Snow tour on behalf of Snow’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, even though the Colonel was in the process of dropping Snow to focus full-time on his new act, Elvis Presley. Elvis’s career, oddly enough, had been boosted by Mae Boren Axton, who’d cowritten a song called “Heartbreak Hotel” that Elvis released in January of 1956.

  Willie cornered Axton on her meet-and-greet tour and tried to pick her brain in the most polite way he knew how. He put her on the air and interviewed her. She sized him up: “Very shy, very clean shaven, very clean overalls, although his outfit was pretty worn and patched.” And very up to speed on Mae Boren Axton’s talents, telling her, “I play every record of yours that comes to the station and I read every magazine I can find with stories that you’ve written.”

  He was an aspiring songwriter himself, he told her, and had some songs published, but he didn’t know if he had the right stuff to be a top songwriter. He’d
sure like her to listen to his songs.

  Mae looked in his eyes and saw a young man poor from hunger but exuding sweetness. She could tell he was shy but she could also tell he was looking right at her.

  “Son, I’ll take the time,” she said, cracking a smile.

  He brought out his small Japanese reel-to-reel tape recorder and turned on the machine. Axton was sold four bars into the first song. When it ended, he turned off the machine.

  “You have any more?” she asked.

  He played her a song he was working on called “Family Bible,” telling her at the end of the song, he’d been inspired by his grandmother and how she used to sing “Rock of Ages” and read from the Bible after supper.

  “Son, I’ve got a plane to catch,” Mae Axton said. “But I have to tell you two things. Number one, if I could write half as well as you, I would be the happiest woman in the world. And two, I don’t know a thing about you or your situation, but I suggest you quit and either come to Nashville or go home to Texas if you want to make it as a songwriter. Write me. I don’t have a lot of money, but I can always raise a couple hundred dollars.”

  A few weeks later, KVAN switched formats, abandoning hillbilly music for rock and roll, the sound Elvis and Mae Boren Axton helped make famous. Shorty the Hired Hand and Cactus Ken DuBord moved over to KKEY, the “Number One Town and Country Western Station” and the only western music station serving the Greater Portland/Vancouver area. And Willie went east.

  As he was getting ready to leave town, he sought out Max Hall, the gas station attendant across the street from the station, to sell his horse to Max’s uncle. Max thought Willie was leaving because he was splitting up with Martha, much as they fought with each other. But it wasn’t about chasing skirts. It was about finding a bigger pond. It was time to expand his horizons.

  Fort Worth Again, 1958

  HIS EYES WERE on Nashville as the Northwest grew smaller in the rearview mirror. He stopped in Denver and worked a club called Hearts’ Corner for six weeks before moving on to Springfield, Missouri, where he looked up Billy Walker. He knew the smooth tenor from back when Walker was a disc jockey on KWTX in Waco and a member of Hank Thompson’s band and he played the Hadacol Caravan radio shows with Hank Williams. Billy had cut records for Capitol and Columbia under his own name up in Dallas at Jim Beck’s, where Lefty Frizzell and Ray Price were also making records. Willie kept in touch as Billy bounced between the Big D Jamboree, the Ozark Jubilee, and the Louisiana Hayride while achieving fame for playing on the bill of Elvis Presley’s first show in Memphis and Hank Williams’s last show anywhere.

  Springfield was vaguely familiar territory, ninety miles north of Searcy County, where Willie’s parents and grandparents hailed from. But even as he tried to stay put by taking a job washing dishes while Martha waited tables, it didn’t take long to determine Springfield wasn’t his kind of place. Willie auditioned for Sy Simon, the manager of the Ozark Jubilee, but Simon passed on hiring Willie. Billy Walker was still a believer. A little more than a year later, he would become the first recording artist to cover a Willie Nelson composition, “The Storm Within My Heart,” during a recording session for Columbia Records on April 28, 1959. This reworked version of “The Storm Has Just Begun,” which Willie wrote as a child, was released as a single and generated some radio airplay in Texas.

  Unfazed by rejection, Willie hightailed it back to Fort Worth and plugged back into his family, friends, and a few dependable gigs between Cowtown and Waco. Nashville could wait.

  Family life was as stable as it could be for a husband and wife bent on out-drinking, out-partying, and out-hell-raising each other. In 1958, Martha gave birth to their first son, Willie Hugh Nelson Jr., better known as Billy, in Fort Worth.

  Like Willie, his sister, Bobbie Lee, was playing music for a living, using the gift their grandparents gave them. She was still raising her sons by teaching and playing the Hammond electric organ, learning and utilizing the rich-sounding instrument with rhythm and bass pedals.

  Her life too was beginning to settle down. She married a gas station owner named Paul Tracy. Nancy Nelson, Mamma Nelson, was helping raise her great-grandchildren.

  If the chips were down for Willie, Martha and the kids could stay with Willie’s father, Ira, and his wife, Lorraine, or with Aunt Rosa and Uncle Ernest, or with Bobbie and Paul and Mamma Nelson. Willie wanted to give his wife and children a good home, but it all depended on where he could play, what he was writing, and the luck of being discovered.

  He gravitated back to the honky-tonks, beer joints, and roadhouses around Fort Worth. One reliable touch for a booking was Inez Mortenson, a tough, sometimes mean barkeep, whose clubs, including Inez’s 50/50 on the Jacksboro Highway out by Robert’s Cutoff, seemed to relocate as often as Inez took a new husband (she had eleven in all). Husband number two, Bill Jenkins, a local underworld character, taught her the bar business in the 1940s and put the club’s beer license in her name. After divorcing him, Inez figured there was more money in beer joints than in burger joints and stuck with what she’d learned, earning a reputation for running reputable operations, as she related to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram forty years later: “First, you serve full drinks and you give honest change every time. Second, you greet your customers and make them feel at home and you get to know their names. You thank them for coming by and you make them want to come back and see you. And you keep control of the place so that you run it and it doesn’t run you.”

  Inez had movie-star good looks but was unafraid to fight like a man. She had a big heart, yet she didn’t back down from anybody, though she almost met her match in the smiling young man from Abbott. She did not hesitate telling Willie what she thought of his music. “Dammit, Willie, quit singing all those tear-jerking songs and play something that will get these people on the dance floor,” she advised more than once. “Make them work up a thirst.” As for his own thirst, Inez knew Willie drank too much whenever he could run a tab. Whenever he got drunk, Inez would 86 him. “Go on down the road and play somewhere else,” she’d holler, kicking him out the door. And he would, only to come back again that night or some other night. All was forgiven until the next time.

  Margie Lundy at the Nite Owl on the county line between Abbott and West booked him because she had loved Willie since he was a boy and would do anything to boost his career. He picked up work twenty miles south of the Nite Owl on Highway 81 at a new venue in Waco called the Terrace Club, a cinder-block building at 1509 Old Dallas Highway with all the essential ingredients—a stage, a bar, and a dance floor.

  Johnny Gimble, the Western Swing fiddler who’d returned to his hometown of Waco after an extended run with the Texas Playboys, discovered him there. “I’d never heard of Willie, but I needed a bass player for the Saturday Night Dance up near Clifton at Lake Whitney,” Johnny said. “I called ol’ Bill Mounce, the drummer who used to book a lot of bands and knew every musician in the country. He called me back and said all the bass men were busy but there’s a kid up in Abbott who plays guitar and is a songwriter. Willie came and played the TV show [the Bluebonnet Barn Dance on KCEN-TV, starring Clyde “Barefoot” Chesser] and the dance that night.” Gimble could tell the redheaded guitarist knew his music, and what Johnny wanted was neither dense nor complicated. “I just told him to bear down on the rhythm because you’re replacing the bass,” he said. Willie made a fan out of the fiddler, beginning a long musical and personal friendship.

  While physics engineer Jack Kilby was inventing the integrated circuit at Texas Instruments in Richardson, near Dallas, Willie was doing his own research, developing a distinctive Texas sound with his voice and instruments by playing live wherever and whenever he could, which often meant seven days a week.

  Billy Todd, a booking agent for Bob Wills, and a musician, hired Willie to play for a few weeks in 1958 at his bar, Todd’s Western Lounge, on Exchange Avenue just off North Main near the Fort Worth Stockyards, which catered to real cowboys. Todd’s was a rough place, prone t
o fights and violence, but it wasn’t anything Willie Hugh hadn’t seen before.

  “After the Nite Owl, there wasn’t anything too much more exciting than that,” Willie explained. “I expected it all. It wasn’t a big deal when somebody got into a fight. When there was a fight, you played louder. Some people came in looking for trouble. Some people came in and found trouble. Some people drank too much. Some people danced too close to somebody’s girlfriend. That shit was always going on. Usually, dancing had a lot to do with the problems. We’d play from eight to twelve and take a couple breaks along the way. You could make a living if you were making fifteen bucks a night for five or six nights a week.”

  Todd’s turned into a reliable booking, and Willie hustled up players to work with him as the house band. One musician he shared the stage with at Todd’s was a bright, young songwriter signed to a Nashville publishing house, named Roger Miller. Miller was in and out of Fort Worth, visiting his mother, and found plenty of common ground with Willie. They were both hillbillies and wrote songs and liked to play music. They drank too much, smoked too many cigarettes, and popped too many pills, as was the custom for musicians of their kind. Willie brought Roger over to sister Bobbie’s home. Their impromptu appearances left Willie’s nephews wide-eyed and amazed that grown people could be so crazy.

  Bobbie’s son Freddy Fletcher said, “They were kind of a mess. It was really my first time going, wow, these are some wild folks, these people are nuts, but I liked it. They were having fun, they were making music, and somehow making it work. I thought that was cool as hell.”

  Playing bars had its advantages; win over that wild bunch and you’re on your way. The bad part about it was, there wasn’t much money to be made. In a matter of weeks after returning to Fort Worth from Vancouver, Washington, Willie traded in the red Cadillac for cheaper transportation and some running change.