Willie Nelson

by Joe Nick Patoski

  “The previous album wasn’t that big of a hit,” Tommy said, so Willie and Tommy met at arranger Ernie Freeman’s house with Jimmy Day to strategize for the second go-round. “Willie sang Ernie some of the songs he recorded on the first session that had strings on the recording. We was trying to feel our way around. Disc jockeys loved him but he wasn’t selling any records.”

  United was the hit factory where Bobby Vee and Johnny Burnette were cutting singles and where Tommy Allsup produced Bob Wills Sings and Plays. The studio players at United, paid a scale of $50 to $55 a session, were masters of the recording art. Drummer Earl Palmer knew rhythm. He was a jazz player raised in New Orleans with recording credentials including Fats Domino, Frank Sinatra, B. B. King, Barney Kessel, Professor Longhair, and Lou Rawls. Bassist Red Callender turned down offers from Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong to pursue a free-lance career that earned him session work with Armstrong, Lester Young, Billie Holiday, Dexter Gordon, Oliver Nelson, Mel Tormé, Erroll Garner, Nat King Cole, Art Tatum, Charles Mingus, and Charlie Parker, among others. Fiddler-violinist Bobby Bruce played with Henry Mancini and Lawrence Welk, as well as with Luke Wills, Bob’s brother, and with Leon McAuliffe, Bob’s steel man. Guitarists Glen Campbell, John Gray, and Bobby Gibbons and pianist Gene Garf augmented by Gentleman Jim Pierce and an uncredited Leon Russell were all known studio entities. Jimmy Day was Jimmy Day.

  Tommy knew the best singers were the ones with distinctive voices who stuck out on any jukebox, like Hank, Sinatra, Dylan, Cash, Tubb, Odetta, Jimmie Rodgers, and Bob Wills. But “we had an agreement,” Tommy said. “Willie said, ‘If I don’t tell you how to produce this, you won’t tell me how to sing.’” Like Joe Allison, Tommy appreciated Willie’s unorthodox delivery. “He sang behind the beat, but he was always in meter,” he said. “That’s the way jazz singers sing. If you recorded with Willie, I don’t care if you knew the song backwards, you better write you out a chord chart, and read that sumbitch. He’s going to be away from the lead line. That’s what we’d do. If you start listening to him while he’s playing, you’re going to break time.”

  Kenny Rivercomb, Liberty’s West Coast promo man, thought Willie was more of a jazz singer than a country singer and pushed Tommy to have him record the standard “Am I Blue?” Eddie Brackett, the engineer of Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night” and sessions with Barbra Streisand and Sam Cooke, told Tommy that Willie had the most natural voice he’d heard in a studio. “I don’t have any EQ [equalization of the increase or decrease of signal strength for a portion of audio frequencies] on his voice and it just cuts through like a knife. He’s the easiest guy I’ve ever recorded. I don’t have to do nothing.”

  When the newly wedded Shirley Nelson added her vocals, the sound took on a whole other texture. “They burned it up on ‘Columbus Stockade Blues,’” Allsup marveled of the fast-paced number allegedly written by Jimmie Davis in the 1920s. The February 20, 1963, sessions were Willie’s most fiery tracks yet, featuring Shirley and him speed-scatting like harmonizing jazz vocalists. “She could hang right in with him,” Tommy said with respect. Willie had recorded “Columbus Stockade Blues” earlier in Nashville, but it was nothing like the two versions he did at United. One version featured flashy Merle Travis–inspired finger picking by John Gray and Tommy Allsup. The second version was pure jazz, pushed by bassist Red Callender and drummer Earl Palmer, seasoned jazz musicians who earned their keep doing recording sessions. “We did two takes on it,” Tommy Allsup said. “First one, Earl played brushes. The second one he did with sticks. It was fast for a swing tune but they played their asses off on it. Red usually played bass in a business suit, and when he heard we were doing a second take, he said, ‘Excuse me, gentlemen,’ and removed his jacket.”

  Tommy Allsup produced twenty-six sides on Willie between December 1962 and November 1963, including another Nashville session at RCA Studios, where Ray Price’s pedal steel guitarist Tommy Jackson replaced Jimmy Day, and two final sessions back at Bradley’s Barn in Nashville with Fred Carter Jr., Jerry Kennedy, and Wayne Moss handling the guitar chores. Some of those tracks found their way onto his second album, Here’s Willie Nelson, on which Willie’s voice was complemented by a pronounced country and swing sound, although the tracks arranged by Ernie Freeman blatantly pushed him in a pop or jazz crooner direction. “Nobody could get a handle on what he was doing,” said Tommy with a shrug.

  The liner notes to Here’s Willie Nelson were written by none other than Bob Wills, who observed that Willie’s style was “just right for his material,” suggesting he did his songs as well as the big stars like Patsy Cline, Faron Young, and Ray Price. Willie returned the favor by opening the album with “Roly Poly,” written by Fred Rose, and “Right or Wrong,” both from the Texas Playboys repertoire. The pop chestnut “Am I Blue?” followed, then “The Last Letter,” a sadder-than-sad song written by Rex Griffin in 1937. He did other covers—Jimmy Day’s “The Way You See Me,” “The Things I Might Have Been,” a song popularized by his fiddling pal Wade Ray, Roger Miller’s “Second Fiddle,” “Let Me Talk to You,” by Nashville songwriters Don Dill and Danny Davis, “Feed It a Memory,” written by Hank Cochran and Justin Tubb, ET’s son. The strongest songs were the four he wrote—“Half a Man,” “Lonely Little Mansion,” “Take My Word,” and “Home Motel.”

  The first single, “Am I Blue?” came out of the chute fast. “Man, that was busting out of Cleveland on the radio,” Tommy Allsup said. “Then the Beatles came out.”

  The British Invasion that began in early 1964 didn’t scare Tommy Allsup, but the impact of the British rock groups caused Liberty to reassess their commitment to country while prompting Willie to assess the songwriting game, country music, the music business, and all the new sounds he was hearing. He would soon be covering the Beatles’ “Yesterday” in his shows.

  The sessions produced two more Liberty singles, with “Half a Man” and “You Took My Happy Away” on the A-sides. “Half a Man,” a very personal, cry-in-your-beer blues peaked at number 25. “Half the country stations wouldn’t play ‘Half a Man’ because they thought it was morbid,” Tommy said.

  A similar fate awaited Little Joe Carson, another Liberty artist Allsup produced, who had recorded Willie’s “I Gotta Get Drunk” backed by guitarists James Burton and Glen Campbell. “That record sold a hundred thousand copies off jukebox play—five times what ‘Heart to Heart Talk’ sold, and that was number one,” Allsup said. “But Joe Carson barely made it into the charts, no higher than number thirty-five. There was a thing about Nashville at that time. They didn’t use electric bass on their recordings. Disc jockeys wouldn’t play a record with an electric bass. Figure that out.”

  Willie was having to settle for word-of-mouth buzz and for being a musician’s musician, a well-kept secret only insiders were hip to. The Liberty sessions made a fan of labelmate Timi Yuro, a soulful pop balladeer who covered Willie’s “Permanently Lonely” and “Are You Sure?” and recorded duets with him on “Did I Ever Love You?” and “There’s a Way.” “She dug the shit out of him,” Tommy Allsup said. Except to her and a few others, Willie Nelson was hardly a household name.

  EVEN with royalty checks coming in, he was spending money faster than he was taking it in, paying for two wives while trying to satisfy his musical habit. Whenever he and Shirley were staying in Fort Worth, he’d make regular stops at places like the Star Lite Club out on Highway 114 on the northwestern fringe of Dallas, a ballroom known for swing dancing and frequent visits from Bob Wills. Nice as the club was, the players and the management didn’t get him like Joe Allison did. “He used to come out all the time and try to sit in, and basically they didn’t take him seriously; they were laughing at him,” said Mark Fields, son of Sandy Lee Fields, who co-owned the club. “They thought he sang funny.” But as a genuine Nashville recording artist promoting his hits “Touch Me” and “Half a Man,” he fetched a cool $300 guarantee at the two-hundred-seat room, working with the house band, Lynn Echols and the Loser
s.

  “He had on a lime-green suit and a turtleneck sweater, and his hair was combed back. He looked really nice,” Echols recalled. The Losers were a swing band with a sax player, equally schooled in Bob Wills music in “Misty,” “Honky-tonk,” and “Stardust,” and in Jimmy Reed songs you could dirty dance the North Texas Push to. They were bluesy enough to work “nigger nights,” as Echols described Sundays at the Longhorn, when colored acts played for colored audiences and, according to Echols, “there were so many blacks in there you couldn’t see nothin’ but white teeth.” Echols and his boys saw Willie as a writer first “because he wrote all those great songs for Patsy Cline and Faron Young. I wasn’t as impressed with his singing talent.”

  Dewey Groom booked Willie at the Longhorn Ballroom in Dallas, the dance hall formerly known as Bob Wills’ Ranch House. If Willie didn’t draw huge crowds, Dewey liked him well enough to never short Willie on his money. He also played the Remington and the Trianon in Oklahoma City and Cain’s Academy in Tulsa, storied ballrooms from the Western Swing era, and too many small joints, dives, and lounges to count.

  He worked as a solo at the Southern Club in Lawton, Oklahoma, where the house band, the Southernaires, were the stars on the bandstand on weeknights. On weekends, they backed touring acts such as Lefty Frizzell, Ray Price, Ferlin Husky, and Bob Wills.

  Willie arrived with the reputation of having written “Hello Walls” and “Crazy,” which usually meant he was no great shakes as a singer, a guitarist, or an entertainer. That’s why they called songwriters songwriters.

  “Willie, he come loping out there when it come his time to come on,” Carl Cooper, the steel player in the Southernaires, said. “He came out in a suit, white shirt, tie, carrying a little acoustic guitar, and we all looked and groaned, ‘Oh boy, it’s gonna be a long night, here comes a strummer.’ First tune he calls was ‘San Antonio Rose.’ Every musician has always done ‘San Antonio Rose’ ten thousand times. That’s home ground. But not the way that Willie did it. Of course, he does his own phrasing. And when he’s fired up...we tried to follow his phrasing and everything was all messed up. Bobby Day saw that and said, ‘Boys, just hold the row. This guy knows what he’s doing.’ We muddled through until we got used to him. After a while it was a pretty enjoyable job because he wasn’t a great singer, but he certainly was an excellent phraser.”

  Hard to understand, hard to keep up with, and not selling records made road work a struggle. But the Internal Revenue Service had already recognized his success. Willie owed several thousand dollars in 1963, according to the tax man, which Willie did not deny. He had never paid taxes because he’d never had the money to pay them. But whenever he was hit with a bill, he paid it. The IRS found the most efficient way to collect from Willie was to lean on the venues he played and garnish his wages, even the Nite Owl near West.

  He continued gigging, playing Vegas as a single, where he developed a friendship with Curtis Potter, the former teenage singing star who fronted Hank Thompson’s Brazos Valley Boys, Willie’s backup band for two weeks at the Golden Nugget.

  He auditioned a young band from Paris, in East Texas, who called themselves the Sundowners, at an agent’s office on Haskell Street in Dallas. The players already covered “Touch Me” and a few other Willie songs, but when he ran them through “Columbus Stockade Blues,” the kids from Paris folded their tent. “He was at a level way above where we were,” said the group’s guitarist Jerry Case. “They didn’t have to say anything. It was obvious we couldn’t cut it.”

  The Sundowners went back to Paris with their tails between their legs. But Jerry Case got a second chance to play with Willie several months later. He’d nailed down a seat in the house band at the Cavalier Club in Wichita Falls, which backed up Little Joe Carson, the singer signed to Liberty who did Willie’s “I Gotta Get Drunk.”

  When Willie played a date at the Cavalier, backed by the house band, Jerry Case was prepared. “This time I was ready for him,” Jerry said. “We backed him really nice. He was really impressed that I knew his songs. A lot of his songs were off-the-wall and he could throw a basic player pretty easy with his phrasing. Some had more than two or three chords.” Willie acknowledged Jerry’s talent by asking for his phone number.

  “I CAN’T afford a band yet,” he told Case, “but when I do get enough money, would you be interested in joining?”

  Willie never called, but Case was still flattered. “Just him asking was a real compliment.”

  Willie opened a date in Dallas for Roger Miller at the Sportatorium, where he met promoter Gene McCoslin. Geno, as McCoslin was known, was a hustler who knew entertainment, knew the street, and knew this Willie guy was worth booking. Willie took an instant liking to Geno because he immediately recognized he wasn’t just a promoter but a real character who knew how to make money. The date was the first of hundreds Willie would do for Geno.

  Willie’s show posters read “Liberty Recording Artist” long after Liberty Records was bought by an electronics company called Avnet and the country division was folded by the new owners. Willie had an untitled album scheduled for release in November 1963, but the record was never released due to the reorganization at Liberty.

  The album in the can included his deepest, most tortured ballad yet, “Opportunity to Cry,” in which love lost leads to murder and suicide, “At the Bottom,” a miserable, depressing blues Willie had written, and “River Boy,” a whimsical song that reflected the popularity of Mike Fink, the King of the Keelboaters, popularized by the Disneyland television series in the 1950s. “I Hope So,” which was credited to Shirley, sounded like something Willie could have written. Covers comprised the rest of the album—Floyd Tillman’s “Cold War with You”; “Seasons of My Heart,” and “Blue Must Be the Color of the Blues,” both early hits for George Jones; Hank Williams’s “There’ll Be No Teardrops Tonight”; “Take Me As I Am (or Let Me Go),” written by Boudleaux Bryant; Hank Thompson’s “Tomorrow Night”; and Sammy Cahn and Jules Styne’s “I’ll Walk Alone,” popularized by Dinah Shore.

  Liberty had turned into a hard life lesson. The sessions in Los Angeles had introduced him to his second wife and a whole new group of musician friends. Being a recording artist had made him some kind of celebrity back in Fort Worth. But neither place, he concluded, was where he needed to be. “It just wasn’t time,” Willie said. If he was going to be a country music star, his destiny was in Nashville.

  After finishing what would be his final sessions for Liberty, Willie signed a contract on November 22, 1963, to buy a red-brick ranch-style home on seventeen acres in Ridgetop, Tennessee, a rural community north of Goodlettsville, twenty-five miles from Music Row. That very same day, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, putting Texas in a different light in the eyes of the rest of the world.

  Ridgetop, Tennessee, 1964

  RUNNING ON THE ROAD with Shirley had been fun, but the newness had worn off for him and for her within a year of their marriage in Vegas. Mailbox money from writing songs, especially from “Crazy,” which was much covered and much played, was what paid the bills, and Shirley convinced Willie to focus on that. Getting off the road to write songs made sense. And Shirley was ready to settle down after an extended run of one-nighters in a station wagon. “I was brought up to be a homemaker and a housewife. I didn’t have any problems adjusting.”

  Hank Cochran and Hal Smith of Pamper Music agreed with Shirley. If Willie holed up and focused on writing songs, he’d be more in demand. “We kept him in Ridgetop up there and wouldn’t let him work dates and wouldn’t let him see nobody for many months to build up a damn mystique about him, by keeping him away from everyone,” Hank Cochran reasoned. “He wore overalls, slopped hogs, and just done everything up there, but he kept writing songs.”

  Faron Young swore he’d cover everything Willie handed him. And Willie had given in. “Nashville is the store,” he concluded. “If you have something to sell, you go to the store.”

  Shirley threw him the
first birthday party he’d had since Abbott a few months after their move to the country. “I fried chicken and made potato salad and we cleaned the basement and had over Fred Foster and Haze Jones and Hal Smith and his wife, Velma, and just scads of people,” she said.

  The Ridgetop farm, purchased with royalties from “Crazy” and “Hello Walls,” was far enough from Nashville to qualify as a hideout. Just as the name implied, Ridgetop was a high, densely wooded ridge with thickets of hickory, oak, pine, sycamore, weeping willow, and cedar. Wherever the woodland had been cleared, the exposed red clay and sandy loam produced abundant crops of corn, tobacco, squash, apples, pears, okra, peppers, and tomatoes.

  The ridge with its hollows, springs, and creeks could have been confused with Uncle Peck and Prilla’s homestead on Pindall Ridge, in Arkansas, the land where Willie’s people came from. Here, Willie would live the life of a gentleman farmer who happened to be a very talented songwriter, raising hogs and chickens and horses, picking and singing and writing songs.

  Over the next three years, one by one, Martha sent Billy, then Susie, and finally Lana to Ridgetop to live with their father. The itinerant country music songwriter offered more stability than their mother, the itinerant waitress. For Willie, it was a second chance to raise his kids. Billy, the youngest, was the first to arrive at the Nelson farm. He was a shy boy who thought that all parents screamed at each other when they were together, that daddies were usually gone, and that families always struggled. Willie may have been an absentee father to Billy, but at least with Shirley around, the boy would have someone to look after him.

  “We were sitting on the porch right after he moved in,” Shirley recalled. “He was six years old. He told me he didn’t want to grow up and do anything dangerous. He was a sweet little boy. We all got along good.” Willie tried his best to make up for lost time. “He was a good dad and spent lots of time with the kids,” Shirley said. “They played out in the yard, rode horses, ate together. He would tell us, ‘This is the way a family should be.’ And we were a family.”