Willie Nelson

by Joe Nick Patoski

  Nashville’s music community being smaller than a small town, word spread fast of an affair and eventually reached Martha. Shirley and Willie weren’t even trying to pretend anymore. The engaging red-haired singer with the expansive smile and Patsy Cline tough-gal moves had stolen Willie’s heart. She wasn’t just good-looking, she could sing, she could yodel, and she could entertain. She could play bass. She was the first singer to not only grasp his vocal styling but match him note for note, keeping up with his notorious phrasing, singing harmony that fit hand in glove with his leads. They were so in sync, both could switch from lead to harmony at the nod of the head or a wink of an eye. She wrote songs too. She brought out the best in Willie Nelson, the performer.

  Shirley thought he had all the right ingredients to be a star. Everyone else had yet to get the message. The first Willie Nelson single on Liberty, “The Part Where I Cry,” recorded in Nashville, b/w “Mr. Record Man,” recorded in Los Angeles, was released late in 1961 to little fanfare.

  “It did get airplay, which is all I wanted, really, because I knew I wasn’t going to make a bunch of money,” Willie said. “I didn’t know anybody who was making money off of selling records.”

  About the only place the single made a splash was Texas, where it ginned up spins on Texas radio stations and on jukeboxes across the state, mainly for the B-side. Linking heartbreak to record retailers with poetic lines, and putting the words to a Ray Price shuffle was two-stepping dance-floor bliss. Bass, snare, and brushes pushed the beat, and Jim Pierce’s earthy honky-tonk piano licks provided the sad counterpoint.

  Mr. Record Man I’m looking for a song I heard today

  There was someone blue singing ’bout someone who went away

  Just like me his heart was yearning for a love that used to be

  It’s a lonely song about a lonely man like me

  There was something ’bout a love that didn’t treat him right

  And he’d wake from troubled sleep and cry her name at night

  Mr. Record Man get this record for me won’t you please

  It’s a lonely song about a lonely man like me

  I was driving down the highway with the radio turned on

  And a man that I heard singing sound so blue and all alone

  As I listen to his lonely song I wonder could it be

  Could there somewhere be another lonely man like me

  “The first time I heard Willie on the radio singing ‘Mr. Record Man,’ I flipped out,” said his nephew Freddy Fletcher. “‘Wow, that’s Uncle Willie on the radio!’ I couldn’t believe it. When he came and stayed at our house in Fort Worth and he took my bedroom, I thought he really was a big deal, so I went and started charging all the neighborhood kids to come and watch him sleep. When he woke up, he’s got a roomful of kids there, staring at him. We thought this guy is one of the biggest things ever.”

  Despite only four thousand copies sold, the single became Willie’s calling card. “The only way you could make any money was by personal appearances,” he said. “I used the record to get gigs. You had a record, you went to the radio stations, you got them to play it, and you go to a beer joint and say, ‘Hey, I got a record over here, I’ll draw you a crowd,’ and you put it together.”

  The second Willie Nelson single fared considerably better, mainly because Shirley Collie was singing on it. Their duet, “Willingly,” issued as a Willie Nelson record, rose into the country Top 10 when it was released in March 1962 with “Our Chain of Love” on the flip side. Their harmonies were as sweet as the Everly Brothers’, with Willie sticking to an artificially high tenor to blend in with Shirley’s richer voice, which carried the song. Willie’s vocal served mainly as a complementary echo. Whoever was singing the lead didn’t really matter. The formula worked.

  A third single, “Touch Me,” sung without Shirley, was released in May 1962 and broke into the Top 10 country singles chart, rising to number 7. A sad blues done in a slow drag with the rough edges smoothed out by harmony singers and a cool instrumental arrangement, the song earned Willie a place on jukeboxes throughout the United States.

  A second duet with Shirley, “You Dream About Me” b/w “Is This My Destiny?” didn’t do much chartwise. But by then, Willie didn’t much care, nor did Shirley. Their passionate affair was aflame. Her marriage, her home, her TV bookings, her audition for the role of Cousin Pearl Bodine in a new TV comedy called The Beverly Hillbillies—none of that mattered anymore. She left a good-bye note to Biff before sneaking onto Ray Price’s bus while the Cherokee Cowboys headed north to Canada for an extended tour. She was chucking it all for the bass player.

  She rented a car, using Biff’s American Express card, and ran around with Willie for weeks, leaving Biff with a $2,000 bill. When Willie got a booking opening for Roy Orbison along with comedian Allen Kaye at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta, where the poster for the September 19, 1962, concert hyped Willie with the endorsement “Elvis Presley says he is the Greatest Singer of All Time,” he and Shirley spent three days in the Georgia city, acting like kids. “We’d run around the streets and look in the windows and laugh and go back to the motel and eat pizza or Chinese food and tell each other what we wanted to do,” she said.

  Ray Price auditioned Shirley as a singer, but she had other ideas. She wanted to work with Willie, and as far as she was concerned, he had the potential to be bigger than Price. She was aware of Willie’s reputation in Nashville as someone who didn’t keep appointments and seemed to be in a daze most of the time. She wanted to straighten him out, get him a driver’s license, and file his taxes, so they could write songs and play and tour together. She went back to L.A. to get a divorce, only to discover Biff was going to try to commit her to a hospital.

  Willie was in love. “He came to Mom and told her that he met a woman and he loved her and that she was going to die,” Lana, Willie’s oldest daughter, said. “She had a life-threatening illness and she didn’t have long to live. He was only repeating what he was told. Martha took boyfriends when Willie took girlfriends, partly because she was lonely, partly to get back at him. I was old enough to know. They were fighting so much, I used to pray that they would get a divorce. I thought they’d be happier because they wouldn’t be fighting and screaming all the time. But that made Mom real depressed. She had a nervous breakdown. She became alcoholic. And Shirley’s still got her life-threatening illness.

  “She just wanted to be together and be happy and not struggle,” Lana said of Martha. “Being a musician, he was struggling a lot.” When success came, the marriage fell apart. “He took lovers. She took a boyfriend,” Lana said. “He always had lovers. He’d come home and she’d beat the hell out of him, he’d beat the hell out of her. It was fire and water. I don’t know who was right and wrong. The mother’s trying to raise three kids. The husband’s a good person and really sweet and will give you the shirt off his back, although maybe he’s not being as faithful as he could be, and maybe not bringing home the money, although he’s really trying, he’s really always trying. We always had to move when the rent came due. They were always turning the lights off.”

  Martha had a tough hide, but she could no longer conceal her hurt. “You know how people are strong on the outside but really fragile? That was her,” Lana said. “She had an ‘I’ll knock you in the head’ personality, but she would cry at the drop of a hat.”

  Martha tried to make the marriage work, but she was no match for a high-falutin’ lady singer. She finally threw in the towel. She took the kids and moved to Las Vegas to get a divorce. And Shirley stayed on the road with Willie.

  When they came to Las Vegas to play a gig, Willie called to get together with the kids. “We were living in a tiny apartment and we hadn’t seen him in a long, long time,” Lana said. “But he didn’t come to get us. He sent Shirley to pick us up. Now, why anybody thought that was going to work, I don’t know. But it didn’t.”

  Shirley knocked on the door of Martha’s apartment. When Martha opened it, Shirley told
her sweetly, “I’ve come to pick up the kids.” Martha looked back at Lana and in a flat voice said, “Go get me a butcher knife.” Lana wouldn’t do it, but Susie did. Knife in hand, Martha chased Shirley off the porch, screaming, “Don’t ever come back, and you tell that fuckin’ Willie Nelson he’ll never see his kids again! If he wants his kids, he better be man enough to come and get them himself and don’t send his fuckin’ whore next time!”

  Martha would soon marry Chuck Andrews, a man who worked construction for the company that was installing elevators in the new Caesar’s Palace. They moved to Los Angeles, then to Albuquerque, where Martha passed off Lana’s dark complexion as Italian blood. “I’m not going to have you treated like no damn Indian,” she informed her daughter. Being Cherokee in the Land of the Hopi was asking for trouble.

  Martha’s marriage to Chuck was brief, and she took up with a man named Mickey whom she had dated in Waco before she met Willie. Mickey had gone into the army, and when he found out Martha had married Willie, he went AWOL. After he was caught, he spent two years in prison.

  But family was the farthest thing from Willie Nelson’s mind. He was determined to be a country star. If that cost him his marriage and his family, that was the price he would pay. After a lifetime of preparation, the first Willie Nelson album,...And Then I Wrote, consisting of tracks Willie had recorded in Nashville and Los Angeles over the previous year, was released in 1962 in mono and stereo versions. Charlie Williams, a disc jockey on KFOX radio in Los Angeles, whom Willie had replaced at KCNC in Fort Worth eight years earlier, wrote the liner notes, comparing Willie’s songwriting-vocalist talents to pop songwriters Johnny Mercer and Hoagy Carmichael.

  The songs were all Willie’s, except for Hank Cochran’s “Undo the Right,” including his big three—“Crazy,” “Hello Walls,” and “Funny How Time Slips Away”—as well as “Three Days,” which had already been covered by Faron Young as a follow-up to “Hello Walls,” reaching number 7 for Faron on the Billboard country singles chart. Despite the success of his songs as covered by others, the public was not responding the same way to the songwriter as performer. Still, being a Liberty Records artist got him road dates on his own.

  WILLIE convinced his old bandmate Johnny Bush to join him as drummer with the idea of grooming Johnny to be a solo act. The bass chair belonged to Shirley, who could yodel and sing as well as keep the rhythm. “[The other musicians] respected me,” the only woman in the band said. “I had been traveling for a long time, and they respected me and looked after me.” When Shirley didn’t travel, Pete Wade from the Cherokee Cowboys or Wade Ray filled in. Sometimes Wade and Willie worked as a duo with pickup bands when money was tight. When Willie could afford him, Jimmy Day came along.

  Johnny Bush thought Willie was going to be bigger than Dean Martin someday, which was saying a lot, since Martin was cranking out number one pop hits like “Everybody Loves Somebody.” Johnny shared that opinion with Willie on a night after a not-so-good gig when a mic stand had been left behind.

  “I want to let you know I’m doing the best job that I can and tonight I really fucked up,” Johnny told him. He tried to improvise a mic stand from a drum stand and duct tape, but the mic kept falling off. “I know I should have brought our mic stand, and if you don’t have a mic stand, you’re up the creek. If you want to eat my ass out, go ahead,” Johnny said.

  “Are you through?” Willie asked. “Let’s have a drink. I ain’t gonna eat your ass out. You already did a pretty good job of that yourself.” Willie wasn’t going to give Johnny shit. He liked his voice and he liked his person too much for that. He wanted to help him, not fire him.

  Paul English, the brother of Oliver English, who’d played with Willie on the radio in Fort Worth, and steel guitarist Charlie Owens were working in the house band at Ray Chaney’s place in Fort Worth a few nights later when Willie, Johnny, Jimmy Day, and Shirley Collie walked in to play. Paul rekindled his friendship with Willie and renewed his appreciation for Willie’s talent. “You realized he really could sing,” he said. “Shirley was a great bass player. She’d just smile. She had this charisma. She could really yodel too. We liked them all because they were musicians.”

  Paul was clearly in awe of his friend, a real genuine Nashville recording artist. Paul took Willie’s Liberty album to a Fort Worth radio station to copy it onto a four-track tape cartridge. That way, Paul would have something to listen to on the new tape player he had installed in his car to keep him company on drives to Waco and to Houston, where Paul had call girls. He listened over and over, enough to figure out Willie was doing more than writing catchy country tunes. “I was amazed, because this guy could write,” Paul said. “I’d have people over to my house and ask them, ‘What do you think he’s writing about here?’ It was deep.”

  Willie made other hires for his band whenever a tour was put together. For one run, he hired fiddler Ray Odem to complement Jimmy Day’s pedal steel and brought in his music mentor from Fort Worth and Houston, Paul Buskirk, to add his custom-designed double-neck half mandolin and half guitar to the sound, leaving Willie to strum and sing.

  The group rehearsed in Roswell, New Mexico, then gigged in Albuquerque, where they picked up a second guitarist, Dave Kirby, a Brady, Texas, native who was Big Bill Lister’s nephew and a onetime Cherokee Cowboy. They worked their way to Las Vegas for an extended run at the Golden Nugget, one of the first Vegas spots to book country acts, doing six forty-minute shows between eight p.m. and two a.m. They managed to work the schedule with the help of pills, including Placidyls, aka “green meanies,” the kind of downers that inspired an abuser “to run yourself to pieces,” Shirley explained.

  On January 12, 1963, at the end of the Vegas engagement, Willie and Shirley married at the Chapel of Love. Jimmy Day was best man. Johnny Bush was flower girl. Inside the wedding ring Willie placed on Shirley’s finger was the inscription “I promise you love forever and after forever, your Willie.”

  His divorce from Martha Matthews wouldn’t become final for several months, but that was a mere technicality. “She couldn’t handle the way I was living,” Willie said about Martha with regret. Going down the highway, he explained, “is just the nature of what I do.”

  Willie and Shirley worked the road, although they kept a mailing address in Fort Worth and stayed with his sister Bobbie and her husband, Paul Tracy, when they weren’t playing bars somewhere or recording.

  Paul Buskirk had gone back to Houston and Ray Odem stayed in Fort Worth, so Johnny Bush recruited Charlie Harris, a guitar player from Corpus Christi; Eddie Sweatt briefly; then Pete Burke Jr. to play bass. Burke had road experience behind Hank Thompson. The new band picked up dates on touring package shows headlined by Slim Whitman, Little Jimmy Dickens, the Wilburn Brothers, Orville Couch, Frankie Miller, and Ray Price. Ray Price told Willie that Willie’s band was the worst he’d ever heard. But within a year, most of the same players were backing up Ray as the new Cherokee Cowboys. The back-handed compliment validated his determination to make it on his own.

  Dallas gossip columnist Tony Zoppi noted Willie’s recording artist credentials when he touted Willie’s 1963 Valentine’s Day engagement at the Chalet. Four months later he was headlining the Big D Jamboree, appearing alongside Sonny James and Alex Houston. On September 2, he starred on a one-hour special live from the studios of Channel 11 in Fort Worth, along with Shirley Collie, Red Foley, Uncle Syp Brassfield, and Billy Gray. They were promoting a new barn dance in Fort Worth, the Cowtown Jamboree, staged at a recently opened venue in Fort Worth called Panther Hall.

  Willie and Shirley gravitated from Fort Worth back to Los Angeles, where Willie hustled appearances with his guitar-picking pal Phil Baugh on car dealer Cal Worthington’s television show. He contemplated opening a West Coast office for Pamper Music and starting a booking agency with Tommy Allsup. With friends like Roger Miller, Gordon Terry, and Bob Wills living nearby, Southern California was almost like back home, only sunnier.

  “We all ran around to
gether and had a lot of fun,” Tommy said. “We had a lot going on.” Willie cobbled together a circuit working the Palomino in the San Fernando Valley, Phoenix, Fresno, and Northern California. Playing clubs provided plenty of opportunities to drink, smoke, and chase women, but the volatile combination could be dangerous. After a gig at J.D.’s in Phoenix one night, a jealous husband, pissed to see his wife flirting with Willie between sets, split Willie’s head open with a car jack in the parking lot after the show. “Put him in the hospital, almost killed him,” Tommy deadpanned. It was the price you paid when you worked the night life.

  “Me and him had a booking agency, Willie Nelson Talent,” Tommy said. “Liberty gave him an office where the studio was. We put on some shows out in a ballroom in Pomona with Bob Wills, Roger Miller, Glen Campbell, and Ernest Tubb. Bob loved Willie’s style. Bob loved him because he was different. He’d let Willie sit in and he’d let Gordon Terry sit in. He’d hand his fiddle to Gordon and he didn’t do that for anyone.”

  Tommy and Willie got along fine. “He’d let his hair down at times,” Tommy said. “We liked to go deep-sea fishing out of Santa Monica for bonito, yellowtail, and redfish. We’d take a sackful of brownies that Shirley baked with ‘that wacky ’baccy.’ We had a good time.”

  The main reason Willie was hanging with Tommy Allsup was to record more sessions at United Studios on Sunset Boulevard. When Joe Allison left Liberty after failing to deliver hits for the label, Tommy took over as Willie’s producer.

  The Oklahoma guitarist had played Western Swing with Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys and rock and roll with Buddy Holly, giving up his airplane seat on the flight that killed Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper in the winter of 1959. Liberty hired Allsup to produce and make records as leader of Tommy Allsup and the Raiders, who did an all-instrumental album Twistin’ the Country Classics for Liberty after being recruited by Snuff Garrett to play on a recording session for Buddy Knox, another West Texas rocker who had a number one hit, “Party Doll.”