Willie Nelson

by Joe Nick Patoski

  Willie followed Charlie’s advice and stuck around for the next few nights. By the end of the week, the club owner took Charlie Brown aside. “Charlie, you’re going to have to fire that guy sitting in,” he told him. “He cain’t sing worth a lick.”

  Willie had heard it all: He couldn’t sing. He couldn’t play. He was hard to follow. He couldn’t keep a beat. He tried not to take it personally. “You know, I always thought I could sing pretty good,” he told writer Michael Bane. “I guess it kind of bothered me that nobody else thought so. I was into a lot of negative thinking back then. I did a lot of bad things, got into fights with people. My head was just pointed in the wrong way.”

  With no income, no respect, and no options, he felt it was time again for a change of scenery. Leaving a pile of bills behind, he dropped off Martha, Lana and Susie, and baby brother, Billy, in Waco with Martha’s mother, promising to send for them once he got settled, and steered his ugly green ’46 Buick east.

  The first stop was Meridian, Mississippi, where Claude Gray, the man who was making him famous with “Family Bible,” was a DJ on the radio. Maybe Claude could help him find work. “Willie moved out to where I was and we palled around for six weeks, going to the honky-tonks and the dives,” Claude said. “But I never could get a good job for Willie at the station. We were a small radio station.”

  Willie decided he might as well go for all the marbles.

  He aimed the Buick, four payments behind, north. “Family Bible” was a hit. Word had spread in the business that Willie was the one who wrote it, even if his name wasn’t on the single. It was time to show his face to the powers that be in Nashville, Tennessee.

  Nashville, 1960

  THE SHINING CITY on the bluff above the Cumberland River looked like the promised land to the hungry Texan who rolled into town, running on fumes. The home of the Grand Ole Opry and Music Row was where country music’s stars shined brightest and where the hits were made.

  But Nashville was much more than that. The state capital and the commercial hub of Middle Tennessee was built on agriculture, insurance, and religious publishing. It was also a bedrock southern city of faith. Since being established in 1772 by “42 able-bodied men and 200 souls,” it had grown into a metropolis of almost a half million residents, most of whom declared their faith in Jesus Christ by attending one of 671 churches. Thomas Nelson published more Bibles than any printer in the United States, and more religious literature was printed in Nashville than anywhere on God’s earth.

  Nashville’s reputation as a music center was initially fostered by its sizable African American community. Five years after Fisk University opened its doors in 1866 as the first institution in the south to offer a liberal arts education to students of color, the Fisk Jubilee Singers introduced slave songs to the world. They were hailed for preserving the American tradition of Negro spirituals, touring Europe for the first time in 1873.

  Compared with other cities in the still-segregated southern United States, Nashville was fairly enlightened, having desegregated public parks and recreational facilities in 1956. When Willie hit town in 1960, civil rights activists were staging lunch counter sit-ins to desegregate restaurants in the city. Freedom Riders would soon be passing through on their way to Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, where segregationists maintained an iron grip on the political system.

  Nashville’s ties to country music went back to 1925, five years after the birth of radio in the United States, when the National Life and Accident Insurance Company built WSM radio (the call letters stood for “We Shield Millions”) with the goal of selling insurance policies. Instead, the station known as the Air Castle of the South became famous for selling country music. WSM’s program director, George D. Hay, decided to start a weekly barn dance show, presenting a variety of music that could be broadcast on the radio, much as he did at the radio station where he was previously employed, WLS in Chicago, home of the National Barn Dance.

  The first WSM Barn Dance aired on November 28, 1925, and featured championship fiddler Uncle Jimmy Thompson, who bragged he could “fiddle the taters off the vine.” The show, staged in a five-hundred-seat auditorium designed for radio broadcast, found immediate acceptance, thanks to WSM’s 50,000-watt clear-channel signal, which carried the program to ears throughout most of the United States and into Canada. Within two years, the show had moved to a larger venue and was renamed the Grand Ole Opry. In 1939, the NBC radio network began carrying a portion of the Saturday night show. Two locations later, in 1943, the program settled at the Ryman Auditorium in downtown Nashville, which became known as the Mother Church of Country Music. Roy Acuff was the Opry’s first and by then biggest singing star. Acuff was soon joined by Minnie Pearl and Ernest Tubb.

  The Grand Ole Opry that Willie Nelson witnessed when he arrived in Nashville was a friendly, folksy, and family-oriented showcase of all styles of southern, western, and mountain music, in a tightly regimented format tailored for radio broadcast on WSM and the NBC radio network and for television. Half-hour segments featured two or three Opry stars and maybe one new act, interspersed with commercials for Martha White Flour, GooGoo Clusters, RC Cola, and Prince Albert tobacco. Cast members included traditionalists Marion Worth, Ernie Ashworth, the Browns, and Dottie West, bluegrass pickers such as the Osborne Brothers, and stars like Acuff. Several performers took on hillbilly personas, including Grandpa Jones, String Bean, and Lonzo and Oscar.

  Around the corner from the Ryman Auditorium on Broadway, the Ernest Tubb Record Shop hosted another live show on WSM after the Opry. WSM also aired the Friday Night Frolics, another live music show broadcast from the National Life studios of WSM on 7th and Union.

  Nashville was proud of its reputation as “second in the record cutting industry,” behind New York. The process of making records in Nashville was an easy-to-follow system. Songwriters were the basic building block. Song pluggers representing songwriters and song publishers pitched songs to producers, artists, and A&R (artist and repertoire) representatives at the record labels. Producers had the last say on song selection, chose the musicians for recording sessions, and, in the case of high-profile acts, ordered up arrangers, backing vocalists such as the Jordanaires and the Anita Kerr Singers, and strings and other instrumental embellishments to sweeten an artist’s sound and (theoretically) broaden his or her appeal. The labels packaged and released the finished product as singles and sometimes albums, accompanied by marketing campaigns, radio promotion, and advertising to widely varying degrees. Radio played the records and, ideally, listeners rushed out and bought the records they heard, making money for everyone in the system.

  Nashville’s reputation as a recording center hinged largely on two recording facilities—Bradley studios, consisting of Bradley Film and Recording on 16th Avenue South and the Quonset Hut in back, assembled piece by piece by Owen Bradley, the former musical director for WSM radio, which Columbia would buy in 1962; and Studio B at RCA, Nashville’s state-of-the-art facility for Nashville’s state-of-the-art label, managed by guitarist Chet Atkins, the virtuoso Tennessee picker.

  Nashville cemented its reputation as a songwriting center when Acuff-Rose, the city’s first music publishing house, established in 1942, had its first hit in 1950 with “Tennessee Waltz,” a tune so popular it ultimately became the official state song. Two other major publishing houses, Cedarwood Publishing and Tree International, opened their doors in the mid-1950s, followed by a slew of smaller publishers.

  Following the signing of Elvis Presley to RCA in 1956 and his subsequent sessions at Studio B, Owen Bradley and Chet Atkins led efforts to smooth out country’s rough edges with an “easy listening” touch by overdubbing vocal groups and strings and horns onto basic tracks. This “countrypolitan” sound, called the Nashville Sound, was tailor-made for smooth vocalists such as Eddy Arnold, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Jim Reeves, and Ray Price, whose appeal transcended hillbilly music.

  But the Nashville Sound was just one slice of the country music pie. When Will
ie hit town, Texas honky-tonker Lefty Frizzell topped the charts compiled by the major music trade magazines (Billboard, Cash Box, and Music Vendor, later renamed Record World) with “What You Gonna Do, Leroy?” sharing the thin air with Texan Ray Price’s smooth “One More Time,” Louisiana’s Webb Pierce’s “Drifting Texas Sand,” Texan Ernest Tubb’s swinging “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool” and “White Silver Sands,” Oklahoman Johnny Bond’s rockabillyesque “Hot Rod Lincoln,” East Texan Johnny Horton’s “North to Alaska,” which was the theme of a John Wayne movie, San Antonio’s Red River Dave’s topical novelty “Ballad of Francis Powers,” about the crash of a U-2 spy plane over Russia, and “Didn’t Work Out, Did It?” a fatalistic country blues by a young singer named Shirley Collie, the wife of Texas and Los Angeles disc jockey Biff Collie, making her debut as a Liberty recording artist with three subsequent songs that channeled Julie London and Peggy Lee via Nashville, “I’d Rather Hear Lies,” “Sad Song,” and “Slow Rider.”

  Among the rising stars was Billy Walker, the one Nashville resident sold on Willie’s potential. After quitting the Ozark Jubilee, Billy had gone back to Fort Worth, then to Nashville, where he was invited to join the Grand Ole Opry.

  Billy was at the Clarkston Hotel coffee shop one afternoon in the summer of 1960, chitchatting after finishing Noontime Neighbors, a midday show on WSM radio, whose studios were next door to the Clarkston, when Willie Nelson walked in.

  “Lord, what are you doing over here?” Billy asked him.

  “Ain’t nobody buying no songs in Texas,” Willie deadpanned. “I came to see what I can do here.”

  Billy and his wife, Bettie, took Willie in and put him up at their house for ninety days. “I helped him get his first job, selling encyclopedias here in Nashville,” Billy said. “I waited in the car while he knocked on a door, and there was this big ol’ dog come around the corner about that time, and Willie took off back to the car with this ol’dog nipping at his rear end. He jumped in the car and said, ‘Man, I ain’t ever going to sell no encyclopedias anymore. The guitar is my bag!’ ”

  But in order to get a break, he knew he would have to sell himself. Trying to hawk encyclopedias was one way to warm up. “You have to promote yourself—the biggest salesman for yourself has got to be you,” Willie explained. “Whenever you are selling things, that’s the first thing they tell you—you have to sell yourself first. After that, whatever you are selling is easier.”

  Other salesmen had mentored him in the art of the sell. When he sold Encyclopedia Americanas in Fort Worth, he was taken under wing by sales manager Bill Kelly, who had a girlfriend who worked for the phone company. “Every week there was a list of people who had just got a phone, just moved to town,” Willie said. “Ninety-nine percent were young couples, seminary students, or college students, prime targets for a set of books. So when this list would come out every week, the girl would drop the list in the trash outside and Bill Kelly would go by there and get that list, and Monday morning we would start calling all of these new people who had just gotten a phone. The first thing they wanted to know was ‘How the fuck did you get my phone number?’ ” After hawking encyclopedias, Singer sewing machines, Bibles, and Kirby vacuum cleaners—all good products that required little persuasion—selling himself as a songwriter in Nashville was no big deal.

  Billy drove him around to a bunch of record and publishing companies and talked Don Pierce at Starday Records into recording a demo of Willie. But Pierce told Billy he wasn’t impressed. “I knew Willie was a talented writer,” Billy said. “I knew that sooner or later he would get something going with his songs, but, boy, it seems like every door was closed at that particular time.” Willie tried to sell Billy “Funny How Time Slips Away,” “Slow Down Old World,” and four other songs for $500, but Billy’s pockets were empty. “Just hang on a little while longer, something’s bound to click,” he encouraged him.

  Billy and Bettie talked Willie into bringing up Martha and the kids, so three kids and one crying mother fretting about leaving her kinfolk rode the Greyhound to Tennessee to join Willie chasing his dreams. Willie scrounged enough to rent a trailer home for $25 a week plus heating oil. Martha hired on to waitress at the Hitching Post, the Wagon Wheel, and several other bars downtown. Willie got busy meeting folks, including Webb Pierce and Faron Young, big-name stars who liked hanging with the musicians as much as the musicians liked to hang with the stars.

  Willie’s reputation preceded him. “Word got around that I had written ‘Family Bible,’ ” he said. “I spread the word myself.”

  He finally got his foot in the door when Billy took him to Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, the home away from home of a circle of Nashville’s songwriters. Tootsie’s looked and felt like a honky-tonk and was strategically located across the alley from the Ryman Auditorium and the Grand Ole Opry and across Broadway from Ernest Tubb’s record shop.

  “I knew it had to be the right place,” Willie said. Tootsie Bess greeted them at the door and showed Willie around. “She didn’t know me from Adam, but I was the new boy in town, and she was that kind of gal,” he said. “She showed me where all the stars wrote their names on the wall, everything. She told me, ‘You know, when I took this place over, it was nothing but a goddamned dump.’ It still looked pretty much like a goddamned dump to me, but it was a better dump. It was where everybody gathered, and it was the place where Opry stars would come between songs or sets. You got to meet a whole lot of people.”

  Willie already knew one Tootsie’s regular, Buddy Emmons, the pedal steel guitarist he’d met in Houston when Buddy played with Ernest Tubb, and Willie was playing a pickup gig with Smilin’ Jerry Jericho. Buddy introduced Willie around, and he quickly fell in with the crew of songwriters and entertainers, most of whom liked to drink, smoke cigarettes, pop pills, bullshit, and create music. Among them were Mel Tillis, Roger Miller, Don Rollins, Ray Pennington, Harlan Howard, and Hank Cochran, who’d hit Nashville a year earlier.

  After being introduced, Willie told Hank he’d come to Nashville to see what was happening.

  “You’re looking at it, I guess,” Hank said, laughing.

  Harlan Howard may have been the most successful of the bunch, but Willie identified with Hank. They both had grown up poor, rural, and Southern. Both had been recognized as children for having a gift for poetry, and both had put that gift to good use, writing music, adding melody to the words.

  Hank was raised in Isola, Mississippi, in the gut of the Mississippi River Delta, barefoot and often without pants. He had done a fair amount of wandering, leaving home at age twelve and by age fifteen finding his way to sunny Los Angeles, where he worked in the catalog room at Sears, Roebuck on Pico Boulevard. Playing his guitar and singing a Carl Smith song and a Hank Snow song won him a watch on the “Amateur Show” portion of Squeakin’ Deacon’s country music radio program featuring touring Nashville stars live from the Santa Monica Ballroom. That led to his forming the Cochran Brothers with another teenager, named Eddie Cochran (no relation). By the time Hank was eighteen, the Cochran Brothers were opening shows for Lefty Frizzell in Honolulu and making records, which led them to make a pilgrimage to Memphis in search of Elvis Presley.

  “He [Elvis] only had one record out and he couldn’t believe what was happening to him,” Hank recalled. “We said we just wanted to see what the hell was going on.”

  “I hear y’all are pretty good, the Cochran Brothers,” Elvis told Hank and Eddie.

  “Well, we think we are, but we ain’t doin’ nothing like you’re doin’,” Hank said. “In fact, we’re thinking about goin’ back to California where we’re from and trying to get [rock and roll] started out there.”

  “That’s a hell of an idear,” Elvis reckoned.

  The Cochrans returned to California but soon split up. Eddie Cochran went solo and recorded “Summertime Blues,” one of the first genuine rock and roll hits in the wake of Elvis. Hank rejoined the California Hayride, starring Cottonseed Clark and Eddie Kirk, working
as a solo country act. He teamed up with songwriter Harlan Howard and followed him to Nashville in 1959, where he was hired to write songs for Pamper Music, with a $50 weekly advance. Hank’s engaging over-the-top personality and his ability to engage bigwigs as well as plain folks paid off in his other skill, song plugging, pitching tunes to artists and producers. He knew great songs even if they weren’t his.

  Hank’s buddy Darrell McCall, who played bass in Patsy Cline’s road band, introduced him to Patsy, who took a shine to Hank and, after much resistance, recorded a song of Hank’s called “I Fall to Pieces,” which reached number 1 on country and pop charts.

  HANK and Willie really got to know each other at a “guitar pulling” (song swap) at Tootsie’s, where songwriters showed their peers their best stuff. Willie was hardly intimidated. “I figured mine were as good as theirs,” he said.

  After several go-rounds, Hank asked Willie a question: “Who wrote them songs?”

  “I did,” Willie replied.

  “Who plays them?” Hank asked.

  “Nobody,” Willie said, grinning. “Nobody wants ’em.”

  “Can you get out to my office at Pamper Music out in Goodlettsville tomorrow?” Hank asked, knowing full well what Willie’s answer would be.

  Willie drove twenty miles north of Nashville to Goodlettsville the next day in his puke-green Buick. “I thought I’d had some bad-looking cars, but that one beat it all,” Hank marveled. Willie sang the songs to Hank that he’d sung the night before and sang a few more. “What do you have to have?” Hank asked Willie. “Not what do you need, but what do you have to have?” Hank was making $50 a week and he had a wife and three kids, just like Willie did. “Fifty bucks,” Willie said.

  Hank went in to talk to Hal Smith, Ray Price’s business partner, who was running the publishing house. “If we give him the fifty dollars, then we can’t give you that raise,” Hal protested.