Willie Nelson

by Joe Nick Patoski

  Faron Young urged Hank and Ben to file a lawsuit on Mrs. Nelson, but they just chalked it up to the price of running with Willie. The hot-headed wife was part of the package. Willie knew Martha had a right to be pissed, putting up with his crap. He was a no-good scoundrel. He drank too much. He chased women who chased him. But he wasn’t about to give up those ways. Whatever his faults, he was finally being recognized and making enough money to provide for his family. Wasn’t that the important thing?

  WILLIE was a star songwriter, at the top of his game, but the urge to perform still burned deep inside. He played briefly behind Bobby Sykes, Marty Robbins’s guitarist, who was being promoted as a solo act with several hit singles, including “A Touch of Loving” and the truckers’ tune “Diesel Smoke and Dangerous Curves.”

  Then Frankie Miller called. Willie’s pal from the Cowtown Hoedown in Fort Worth had relocated to Nashville and was working his single “Blackland Farmer” again after it had been rereleased on Starday. Booking agent Hubert Long had put together a small package show with Frankie and Hal and Ginger Willis to promote Frankie’s 45. Frankie thought Willie might like to come along.

  The “tour”—six people stuffed into a sedan pulling a trailer—got off to a bad start. “The first job we went to was in Bangor, Maine,” Miller said. “I was playing those air bases and army bases. That was our first date. But there was a cop stop on the highway on the way, and they ended up fining everybody in the band, but we didn’t have enough money to pay our fines. I left my D-twenty-eight guitar as collateral, and the justice of the peace let us go. I picked it up on the way back.” Willie saw poetry in the guitar payment. “Frankie’s the only one carrying anything worth something,” he said. “We got to Bangor, Maine, and they were closing the joint up. A sergeant put us up in empty barracks and helped us get some cash with the Mobil credit card I had.”

  Willie switched from guitar to drums and back again on show dates in Syracuse, New York, and suburban New Jersey, while a player whom Willie called Skinflint played steel. “[Willie] wasn’t worth much on drums but he did fine for what we had,” Miller said. For Willie, the run was fulfilling. “I was getting out of town,” he said. “But I don’t know what Frankie was thinking.”

  That brief taste of the road informed Willie’s thinking when Ray Price tracked him down in 1961. “He co-owned Pamper Music and called and asked if I could play bass,” Willie related. “I said, ‘Of course, can’t everybody?’” Price’s bass player, Donny Young, had quit Price’s band and moved to California. Willie signed up for a hitch as a Cherokee Cowboy alongside Darrell McCall, Buddy Spicher, Steve Bess, and Pete Wade for $25 a day. Martha altered the Cherokee Cowboy suit designed by Nudie of Hollywood that had been passed on to Willie, sewing sequined music notes down the side of the slacks. Willie hit the road, riding in style on a real country music star’s bus. On the way to the first gig, Jimmy Day taught him how to play bass.

  Touring with Ray Price was nothing like touring with Frankie Miller or Bobby Sykes. “Anywhere we went, everybody knew Ray,” Willie said.

  Besides owning the publishing house that fronted Willie $50 a week, Ray Price became Willie’s role model as a bandleader. He’d enjoyed a decade-long run as a recording artist and remained a big draw on the road. For two consecutive years, Cash Box magazine had recognized him as the top singer on the jukeboxes. He was a smooth, sophisticated crooner as uptown as Sinatra, while his band worked a beat known as the Ray Price shuffle made for western dancing. Price was discovered while attending North Texas Agriculture College in Arlington. He had been singing at a place in Arlington called Roy’s House Café. “There was a small group of musicians at the barracks where I was staying when I was going to school and I guess they heard me sing, because one guy asked me to sing a couple of songs of his to a music publisher,” Price said. “So I agreed to do it. The publisher [Jim Beck] heard the song and looked at me and said, ‘You can come back tomorrow.’ I came back the next day and there was a guy from Nashville, Tennessee, with a record contract who signed me to the Bullet label.”

  The record went nowhere, but Ray kept singing and landed a spot on the Big D Jamboree alongside Lefty Frizzell, whom he met at Jim Beck’s studio in Dallas.

  Price followed Lefty to a little town near Beaumont called Voth, where Neva Starnes, the wife of Jack Starnes, who started Starday Records with Pappy Daily in Houston, was booking bands. “We was playing dance halls, playing in Louisiana a lot, playing in Texas, anywhere she could book us. I tried to get on the Louisiana Hayride, but they didn’t want me.”

  A Nashville publisher named Troy Martin got Ray signed to Columbia in March 1951, where he covered Lefty Frizzell’s “If You’re Ever Lonely” as his first single. Later that year, Martin introduced Ray to Hank Williams. Hank took him on the road and cowrote a song for Price to record, taking full credit for the song, “Weary Blues (from Waiting),” which Ray recorded with Hank’s Drifting Cowboys in 1952.

  They roomed together the last year of Hank Williams’s life. “I learned from Hank you have to be yourself,” Ray said. “When you figure that out, you got it whipped.”

  After Hank died on the road in Oak Hill, West Virginia, on New Year’s Day of 1953 at the age of twenty-nine, Ray hired Hank’s band, the Drifting Cowboys, eventually renaming them the Cherokee Cowboys. He developed the Ray Price shuffle on May 1, 1956. “It just came out at the end of a session one night,” he said. “I heard it in my head, I got to talking to the musicians, got them to listen and get it down, then we recorded ‘Crazy Arms.’” The rhythm became the standard for country music you could dance to.

  Ray Price consistently topped the charts with “beer-drinking songs” that were cleaned up and polished by his whiskey-smooth vocals accompanied by strings, not fiddles, which rendered the music “prettier and sweeter,” as Ray liked to put it.

  Price had the good sense to start up Pamper Music during country’s growth spurt fueled by radio. Publishing was the one safe place where it was hard to get screwed, as long as you held on to your rights and didn’t sell your song for $50. Price was known for hiring some of the writers at the publishing house as Cherokee Cowboys to go out on the road as his backing band, including Willie Nelson.

  “I’d heard his songs,” Price said. “We knew what Willie was like. Willie had the desire. He was willing to work for it. He had the best song pitcher in the world on his side, Hank Cochran. We knew good songs. Harlan Howard out in California, I found him. Those were the songwriters we were looking for. I did quite a few of Willie’s songs.

  “Willie knew he had it,” Ray said. “He worked at it all kinds of different ways. He was raised in the honky-tonks, just like I was. They were the only places you could get a crowd to play to in Texas. Texas, California, New Mexico, Arizona, the west—they were all honky-tonk places. Honky-tonk people are a hard crowd,” Ray said. “They’re drinking and dancing, they’re not thinking about the music too much. They’re busy polishing their belt buckles.”

  Willie became an important Cherokee Cowboy. He was a competent musician and fun to run with after the show. His generosity, fueled by publishing checks when they arrived, was unlike any other sideman’s. He bought Ray Price’s ’59 Cadillac. He booked the nicest suites and would treat the other Cherokee Cowboys to booze and cigarettes. He rented a nice house for Martha, Lana, Susie, and Billy in Goodlettsville near Pamper Music. “Daddy got me a nanny,” Lana recalled sweetly. “She was a woman known as Suckin’ Sue who used to hang at Tootsie’s. She was trying to go straight. She was nice to me.”

  He recruited Paul Buskirk from Houston to play with Price for a spell while trying to get his old friend Johnny Bush, from San Antonio, hired as drummer. He was being paid to write songs, but playing behind Price was a bigger thrill. Faron Young introduced Willie to friends as the composer of “Hello Walls.” One night at Tootsie’s, Faron cornered Willie. “Why don’t you just stay here and write songs for me?” Willie said thanks but no thanks. “It won’t be too many more
years on the road until I’m hotter than you are,” he told Faron with a wink. Faron shot back that Willie was an acquired taste like Floyd Tillman because he was so different. “Willie, you gotta make up your mind whether you’re going to sing or talk,” he ribbed.

  As Ray Price’s front man, Willie got to sing a song or three to warm up the crowd before the star of the show took the stage each night. But he wanted to be Ray Price, not just his sideman or his songwriter.

  OFF the road, Willie and Roger Miller, another sometimes Cherokee Cowboy, were among the few songwriters who hung with the pickers as much as with other songwriters or the recording artists who could move their careers. “We’d have these jam sessions when we’d get off the road,” said Darrell McCall. They were all about Ray Charles, Miles Davis, or some other jazz cat. “That’s where the licks came from for Buddy [Emmons] and Jimmy [Day] both. Go back in the old Hank Williams stuff. Sammy Pruett and Don Helms, they were playing jazz. You’d have three or four steel players, two or three bass players, four guitar pickers, feeding off each other. One steel player would play till he got tired and he’d go sit down for a while, drink a beer. This would go on for days at a time.”

  Road work scratched Willie’s girl itch. Fidelity was not among Ray Price’s rules and regulations. Women showed up at gigs and clustered around their favorite Cherokee Cowboy, not just the star. Martha, no dummy, got wise to Willie’s ways. “He was always messing around with somebody and come home and tell me he hadn’t done doodly shit,” she said. “He’d have lipstick smeared from one end to the other.” Willie always had a good excuse, but Martha knew better. She was so determined to catch him in the act that she hid in the car trunk once to spy on him. She caught him red-handed by following Ray Price and His Cherokee Cowboys to a show in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Drinking herself into a rage, she barged into his motel room and caught him fooling around with a backdoor woman. Without a second thought, she coldcocked Willie over the head with the whiskey bottle she had emptied, unleashing a torrent of epithets. She was so enraged and so drunk that when the police showed up, she went to jail. Her husband bailed her out.

  Something had to give.

  Los Angeles, 1961

  LOS ANGELES, THE third-largest city in the United States, wasn’t in Willie Nelson’s plans when he set out to be a hit songwriter. But L.A. pulled him in anyway in the summer of 1961, when he signed a recording contract with Liberty Records. The label was based in Los Angeles, the new center of the recording industry, where the California sound, celebrating cars, blonde girls, surfing, and teenage hedonism, was beginning to take shape. Liberty Records had started a country division, aiming to challenge Capitol Records as the dominant country record label on the West Coast.

  Ken Nelson, the head of Capitol’s country division, had developed a warm, close-to-the-microphone sound for country singers signed to the label, effectively smoothing out the Bakersfield Sound popularized by Buck Owens and Merle Haggard. Ken Nelson’s recording of Ferlin Husky’s “Gone” in Nashville in 1956 was said to be the inspiration for the Nashville Sound.

  Liberty’s country division chief, Joe Allison, was determined to follow in Ken Nelson’s footsteps. A good ol’ boy from Texas with an ear for hits, Allison was one of Hank Cochran’s favorite people to pitch songs to. Hank was on the verge of wrangling a recording contract of his own, when he played Willie’s demos to Allison. Allison flipped. Signing Willie would give Liberty the inside track to one of Nashville’s best writers. But as great as his songs were, Allison thought Willie’s singing style was almost as intriguing, beginning with his sophisticated sense of phrasing. Joe Allison understood Willie from the get-go.

  Liberty’s roster was nothing if not eclectic, ranging from the Ventures, the kings of instrumental surf music, surf music vocal duo Jan and Dean, balladeer Timi Yuro, the sexy and sultry “Fever” gal, Julie London, composer and singer Jackie DeShannon, to the Johnny Mann Singers, Si Zentner, “Quiet Village” composer Martin Denny, Nancy Ames, Texas-Mexican singing star Vikki Carr, the novelty act the Chipmunks, and pop vocalists Gene McDaniels and Bobby Vee. Among the country acts already on the label were Bob Wills, California swing leader Tex Williams, whose “Smoke, Smoke, Smoke (That Cigarette)” was Capitol Records’ first million-seller, Little Joe Carson, Tommy Allsup, Walter Brennan, and the Crickets. Twenty-two Liberty songs reached the Top 10 on pop charts in 1961, and they had put the personnel in place to do the same with country records.

  Willie’s first recording session for Liberty was in Nashville on August 22, 1961, in the Quonset Hut studio built by Owen and Harold Bradley. Four guitarists were booked for the recording, including Ray Edenton, who doubled on fiddle and worked many of Chet Atkins’s sessions, Texas Playboy Kelso Herston, session leader Grady Martin, the dean of session pickers, and Harold Bradley. Pig Robbins played piano, Buddy Harman drummed, Joe Zinkan played bass, and the Anita Kerr Singers sweetened up the proceedings with soothing choruses emulating the Nashville Sound.

  Tracks for two Willie originals, “The Part Where I Cry” and “Touch Me,” were finished.

  Not satisfied with the results, Allison took Willie to Radio Recorders in West Los Angeles, near the Liberty headquarters, for a second session a month later. This time Willie joined three other stellar guitarists—session leader Billy Strange, Roy Nichols from the Maddox Brothers, and Johnny Western, who had worked with Johnny Cash and sang the “Paladin” theme to Have Gun—Will Travel, one of the most popular western series on television. Jim Pierce played piano, and Red Wootten and Ray Pohlman split bass duties. Roy Harte, a jazz player who founded Pacific Jazz Records and worked with hillbilly Cliffie Stone on his weekly Hometown Jamboree, handled drums. B. J. Baker led the vocal chorus that attempted to replicate the Anita Kerr Singers. The singers got lost trying to follow Willie’s lead vocals until Joe Allison put up baffles between Willie and the singers so they couldn’t hear one another. To stay on the beat, the singers followed Johnny Western’s direction. A session player who went by the name of Russell Bridges (real name: Leon Russell) added some piano while another guitarist, named Glen Campbell, threw in some riffs.

  Fourteen tracks were finished in two days: “Mr. Record Man,” “Go Away,” “The Waiting Time,” “Three Days,” “Darkness on the Face of the Earth,” “Undo the Right,” “Where My House Lives,” “Country Willie,” “How Long Is Forever,” “One Step Beyond,” “Funny How Time Slips Away,” “Wake Me When It’s Over,” “Hello Walls,” and “Night Life”—more than enough to make an album, several singles, and B-sides.

  A third session was scheduled for Nashville in November. Liberty was still trying to figure out where Willie Nelson fit as a performer. Joe Allison gathered fiddler and guitarist Ray Edenton, pianist Pig Robbins, and drummer Buddy Harman from the earlier sessions, along with bassist Bob Moore and steel guitarist Jimmy Day at Bradley’s Barn. Jimmy Day and Willie had become drinking and picking buddies as Cherokee Cowboys long enough for Willie to develop a great deal of respect for Jimmy’s music and his talents on pedal steel and rhythm guitar. His ability to bend chords to cry and weep was to the pedal steel what John Coltrane’s styling was to the saxophone. His steel was the hook on Ray Price’s breakthrough “Crazy Arms,” which prompted folks like Webb Pierce, Red Sovine, Hank Williams, Jim Reeves, Lefty Frizzell, Elvis Presley, Ray Price, Ernest Tubb, Ferlin Husky, and George Jones to seek him out for their recordings. On this recording, though, Jimmy Day’s primary task was instructing the Anita Kerr Singers how to sing the steel parts so they could define the up-and-coming singer-songwriter sound as Liberty’s sweeter version of the Nashville Sound.

  Joe Allison also brought in a young singer from the West Coast named Shirley Collie, who was recording for Liberty, to see how she and Willie would match up. Willie already knew about Shirley and supposedly offered Joe a piece of a song if Joe would get her on his record. One thing was clear: He’d never sung with a woman with a voice like hers before, or with someone quite as pretty. Shirley was a star in he
r own right, a featured regular on the television shows Country America and CBS’s Town Hall Party, which were taped in Los Angeles, and she’d appeared on Divorce Court and The Groucho Marx Show.

  Shirley and Willie first met through Hank Cochran, who was pitching Shirley some of Willie’s demos over lunch and brought her over to Radio Recorders when he was recording “Mr. Record Man.” Ever the hustler, Willie told her, “I’ve got a song you should record.” As their eyes locked, Shirley didn’t hear a word. It was instant love. “I saw things in him that even give me goose bumps now,” she later recalled. She also heard quite a songwriter.

  Shirley and her husband, Biff, went to see Ray Price and the Cherokee Cowboys at the Harmony Park Ballroom and invited Willie over to dinner at their house the following night, an off night for the band. While there, Biff enticed Willie to record some promotional spots for KFOX in Biff’s home studio. Willie liked Biff and Biff liked Willie. They were fellow Texans with plenty in common. Before Biff married Shirley, he’d been married to the ex-wife of Floyd Tillman, one of Willie’s heroes.

  The two couples socialized in Nashville whenever Biff came to town. But on one visit, Shirley stayed after Biff returned to the coast. Not coincidentally, Willie didn’t come home for two days. He had taken a motel room at the Downtowner Motor Inn next to Shirley’s room, right under Martha’s nose.