Willie Nelson

by Joe Nick Patoski

  The thirteen-year-old Lana and her stepmother hit it off particularly well. “We were pals. My mom hated her so much, I got along with her,” she said.

  It was a new role for Shirley. She had performed since she was a teenager, always onstage, in the band, always playing. Now she was a homemaker and a mom, raising three kids who were the offspring of the man she loved. Shirley instinctively kept her guitar within reach and continued writing songs and working on music, but though she didn’t realize it, she was effectively retired. It was a new role for Willie too. He wanted to do his part to ensure domestic tranquillity by swearing off the road. But when a booking came along, he’d do it.

  The Mullins family down Greer Road became Billy’s surrogate parents. Joel Mullins was a hardworking welder who had a great love for Woody Guthrie songs and other folk music from an earlier time. His wife, Nancy, was a tireless homemaker. They both recognized Shirley was not Supermom and that Billy Nelson needed special attention. “They took Billy in,” Lana said of the Mullinses. “Billy was rebelling. He was having trouble being away from Dad. Shirley tried real hard and had good intentions,” Lana said. “But there was a little boy who wanted his mother or his father and he wasn’t getting either one of them. He was stuck with this person he didn’t even know. The Mullinses stepped up to the plate. Mrs. Mullins coddled him, hugged him, doted over him.” Billy wanted attention, and when he wasn’t getting it, he would make sure he was noticed by doing things like playing with matches in the closet. His daddy was concerned but rarely there to do anything about it.

  Shirley tried to run the house, best she could. “She was patient,” Lana said. “She didn’t lose her temper like a lot of people had.” But she was human. “She wasn’t on the road, singing and playing. She became this instant mother. She always wanted to have kids and never could have kids,” Lana said. Now Shirley had a full-blown family, but she didn’t have the man she’d run away with. Ridgetop was supposed to keep Willie home.

  Other country stars put down roots in Ridgetop. Opry stars Grandpa Jones, famous for his anthem “Turn Your Radio On,” and the country comedian String Bean lived nearby and would entertain residents at the local nursing home with Sunday gospel sing-ins. Sheb Wooly lived in Ridgetop. Fiddler Wade Ray was Willie’s next-door neighbor. Willie’s kids picked blackberries at the Rays’ in the summer. Hank Cochran and Pamper Music were a few miles below the ridge in Goodlettsville.

  Willie grew a beard trimmed around the edges, enhancing his country-boy image, and put on weight from Shirley’s home cooking. “He liked to eat cornbread and beans and a big onion—all that heavy stuff,” Shirley said. The farmer guise was genuine, Willie swore. “It was just a replay of what I wore growing up. There’s nothing more comfortable than a pair of overalls.”

  He took kung fu classes at a martial arts studio in Goodlettsville. Kung fu helped him practice “mind over matter.” He learned to break a two-inch board or a brick with his hand, which Willie said “was a good thing to know if you’re ever attacked by a brick or a board.” He showed Shirley enough moves for her to put the hurt on him worse than Martha had.

  One night, after Shirley tried all day to get Willie on the phone, he showed up at the front door so drunk he didn’t recognize her in curlers and thought he was at the wrong house. Shirley thought he wanted to go back to town and he was so drunk, she wasn’t going to let him drive. When he turned to walk away, she grabbed him and threw him headfirst through the storm door, cutting his forehead deep enough to leave a scar. “He was laying there, bleeding and all, and I thought I’d killed him,” Shirley said.

  Willie ran off into a pasture, where he passed out. The next morning, he woke up bug-bit in the tall grass, with a crust of blood on his head. He vowed then and there he would not teach Shirley any more moves. Shirley didn’t mind. She knew enough moves. “I stood my ground with him,” she said. “It worked. After I threw him through the door, he stayed home a lot more.”

  He tried to be a better husband and a better father, chasing Mickey Newbury off the property with a gun when the young Nashville songwriter from Texas asked Willie for the hand of his teenage daughter Lana in marriage. And he tried to be in better touch with his neighbors, flagging down one of the Greer boys, Ronald, when he saw him driving a tractor hauling wood. With winter coming on, he needed firewood and introduced himself to the twelve-year-old boy. “I’m a country singer and I’m going to be famous.” He went inside and fetched a copy of Here’s Willie Nelson to give to the boy. Ronald, more attuned to rock and roll than to country, quoted him twice the usual price for a cord of wood, figuring if he really was a country music star, he could afford the higher price, although Ronald did pick out “the best wood we had.” Ronald took the record Willie gave him and put it on the turntable when he got home. He let one side play through, then tossed the record into his closet. “I felt sorry for him,” Ronald said.

  Ronald was clueless about the growing cadre of believers and converts in the small circle of rowdy songwriters Willie ran with in Nashville. A half hour from his country retreat were hangouts where making up rhymes, telling lies, passing around a guitar and a bottle, swapping songs, and swapping pills was called work.

  The guitar pullings at the Downtowner Motor Inn were particularly serious affairs. Joe Allison told Tommy Allsup a surefire way to hear songs was to rent two rooms, one to sleep in and the other for picking, and stock the second room with a hundred bucks’ worth of booze. “You’ll get every songwriter in Nashville to come and hear songs before the song publisher does,” Allison said.

  “I remember they did an extended guitar pulling that lasted five days and five nights and Roger Miller never went to bed,” Tommy Allsup said. “Willie to me was the big dog writer in Nashville. He was the guy all the songwriters would come out to see. If we was in the Downtowner, you could be sure five to ten songwriters would be in there. I never saw a reaction to another writer like there was with Willie.”

  Willie bought another hundred acres of pasture down the road for his cattle and pigs, some of which he named Lester Earle and the Foggy Mountain Hogs. He’d invite Hank Cochran up to the house to sit by the fireplace and read the Bible to Hank for hours. Home was great. But it wasn’t the same as playing for people.

  “He had to have his little kingdom on the road,” Shirley eventually figured out. “That’s what made him happy.” Shirley Nelson had tried to adjust and ended up blaming herself. “I loved him so much that my understanding really left,” she said. “I would get calls when he was out on the road and I never did think he did anything wrong. I thought it was me. Maybe I wasn’t a good enough mother because I’d never had any kids and didn’t know anything about raising kids and here I was, raising three kids. I didn’t know anything about running a home.”

  After a while, Willie’s absences didn’t make Shirley’s heart grow fonder. Instead, she grew jealous, knowing he was prone to mess around on the road whenever a pretty young thing showed up after a gig. In her loneliness, missing the stage and the attention that came with it, Shirley became involved with men other than her husband. “That was her way with dealing with Willie being gone,” Lana said. “She didn’t hide having lovers, because we were friends. She felt like I would never tell. I didn’t. Susie told.” Finding comfort in other partners was a repeat of the Willie and Martha saga, done partly out of need, partly to get back at their spouse.

  DESPITE his initial efforts, family took a backseat to career again. After Liberty Records’ country division folded in 1964, Willie talked to Chet Atkins about signing a recording contract with RCA, the top country label in Nashville. But at the last minute, he convinced himself he’d found a more willing ear in Fred Foster, a native of the mountains of western North Carolina who’d come of age in Washington, DC, hustling songs and promoting records. Foster came to Nashville to record a song with Billy Grammer, the guitarist from The Jimmy Dean Show with whom he’d reworked a traditional folk song in the public domain into “Gotta Travel On.” Su
bsequent success with the made-in-Nashville recordings of “The Shag (Is Totally Cool),” by Billy Graves, and Grammer’s “Bonaparte’s Retreat” prompted Foster to move his small label, Monument Records, to Nashville in 1959.

  A fan of eclectic artists and enduring songs, Foster struck gold as the guiding light behind Roy Orbison’s biggest hit records, which burnished his reputation as a Nashville outsider, tight with neither Owen Bradley and the Decca crew nor Chet Atkins at RCA. Wesley Rose, who’d dropped Roy Orbison from RCA before Foster signed him, ambushed Foster at a luncheon once, asking, “We want to know why you’re trying to destroy Nashville. What have you got against Nashville? You’re cutting all that nigger music. We had a great thing going until you showed up and messed it up. We’re the country music capital of the world, and you’re cutting all that crap.”

  Fred Foster did not have an office along Music Row but in suburban Hendersonville in a building owned by songwriter Boudleaux Bryant. His free lunches for music people, known as Foster’s Follies, attracted Harlan Howard, Hank Cochran, Willie Nelson, and others from nearby Pamper Music. Willie liked to sing his latest songs for Fred, and Fred liked hearing them.

  In the early summer of 1964, Fred Foster signed Willie to a three-year recording contract with the promise he could make records on his own terms and Fred would promote the product. A recording session at the Monument studio next to the Clarkston Hotel was promptly scheduled in July to figure out how to get this cool cat in a cardigan a hit. Three Willie originals were recorded—“(There’ll Be) Someone Waiting for You,” “King of a Lonely Castle,” and “To Make a Long Story Short.” Willie sang and played guitar. Bill Justis, who had had his own hit with the instrumental “Raunchy,” led the session, which included old familiars Harold Bradley, Ray Edenton, Bob Moore, harmonica player Charlie McCoy, and Buddy Harman, and a pianist named Bill Pursell, who’d had his own Top 10 hit with “Our Winter Love” and also played in the Nashville Symphony and taught at Vanderbilt. The recordings were garnished with a xylophone, vibes, French horn, and trumpets.

  A second session with a smaller combo of David Parker, a classical guitarist from Georgia, on guitar, Bob Moore on bass, Jack Greubel on drums, and Boots Randolph on sax, produced five more songs. One Willie composition called “I Never Cared for You” became the A-side of the single issued on Monument b/w “You Left a Long, Long Time Ago,” despite a complaint from Bob Moore to Foster that Willie was singing so out of meter he was impossible to follow. “If you can’t play with him, just lay out,” Foster advised. “I’ll overdub it.” Moore had played Willie sessions before, and Foster knew the basis of the complaint was an old story in country music. “Fred Rose told me Hank Williams had the same tendency,” Foster said. “During the recording of ‘Cold, Cold Heart’ he held the vocal two beats too long to be in meter, or cut it off two beats too quick to be in meter. If you’re dancing, your foot’s in the air. Rose said, ‘Hank, it’s not in meter. There’s a two-four bar in here on “heart.” On “apart” I suggest you hold it two more beats.’ Hank said, ‘Mr. Rose, I don’t know nothing about no meter. I thought that was something on the wall to tell you how much electricity you’re using. I tell you what I do know. When I get to a note I like, I’m going to hold it till I get ready to turn it loose. You’ll just have to watch me.’”

  David Parker’s flamenco guitar lead on “I Never Cared for You” suggested a Marty Robbins gunfighter ballad, but the words were far more complex than the Anglicized corridos Marty sang. The dark love song cut straight to the bone, painting a portrait of passion, rejection, and desperation, seething and sizzling under the surface:

  The sun is filled with ice and gives no warmth at all

  the skies were never blue

  the stars are raindrops searching for a place to fall

  and I never cared for you

  The single flopped nationally. Those lyrics were way too dense for mainstream country and western. Country radio programmers shared Chet Atkins’s assessment of the song as “weird.” If anything, the lyrical imagery he conjured was as deep as the folk-rock of Bob Dylan, the nasally singer-songwriter who’d found his voice with profound pieces of poetic commentary such as “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” Country music harbored only a few free spirits whose words compelled the listener to pay attention, notably Johnny Cash, whose compositions reflected the blue-collar, working-man foundation of America and established him as the king of folk-country music.

  But the single of “I Never Cared for You” got enough airplay back home to tour Texas behind the record, which kept Willie on the road chasing guarantees. Houston was the only big city in America where the single was a radio hit. KIKK, the big country station in what was growing into the top country music market in the United States, gave the single enough spins for KILT, the powerhouse pop music station of Houston, to add the single too, crossing the record over from country. KILT was one of three Texas radio stations owned by Gordon McLendon, the Dallas radio innovator who helped invent the Top 40 format in the 1950s that became a critical component in the global explosion of rock and roll.

  ONE faithful KILT listener was a statuesque blonde two years out of Galena Park High School named Connie Koepke. She considered herself a rock and roll and soul gal, partial to Elvis, Jimmy Reed, and James Brown, as were the majority of white teenagers in urban Texas and the South. But “I Never Cared for You” was different. She liked it so much she switched over to KIKK, the country station, to hear the song more often. Connie was working the night shift in a glass factory in Houston when she heard that the singer of the song would be appearing at the 21 Club in Conroe, in the Piney Woods just north of Houston. She traded out her regular night shift to go hear him with her girlfriend Jackie.

  Bassist Eddie Rager couldn’t help but notice the two pretty young women seated behind a girder in the back of the club. Why didn’t they come sit up front by the stage at the band’s table? Connie Koepke got a close enough view of Willie Nelson to be smitten. She checked his ring finger for a wedding band but saw none. (Willie, like many musicians, knew well enough to remove his ring when he was onstage so as not to disappoint female fans and to keep his options open.) She flipped when he sang “I Never Cared for You,” letting the lyrics do all the talking. He sang the song in person with even more passion than he did on the record, she thought.

  During a set break, Jimmy Day asked Willie, “Anything I can get for you, boss?”

  “That tall blonde over there,” Willie replied.

  Jimmy fetched Connie and seated her next to his boss so they could talk during set breaks.

  The band made $784 for the night, not bad considering the cover charge was $2.

  After the gig Connie and Jackie went to the motel and met the band and the owners of the 21 Club, Larry and Pat Butler. Somewhere toward daybreak, Willie asked Connie for her phone number. He came through Houston frequently, he told her, and he’d like to see her again. Willie may have been married to Shirley, but his eye couldn’t help wandering, especially when he was rambling on the road. In this case, it confirmed he wasn’t blind to beauty. She gave him her number but wasn’t fooling herself. He was a musician. She’d never see him again. He gave Connie Crash Stewart’s phone number. His Texas booking agent would know when Willie was coming through before anyone else did, himself included.

  TOWARD the end of October 1964, Willie came to Fred Foster’s office to pitch a Christmas song he’d written. “I know it’s too late for anybody to do this year,” Willie told Fred, “but listen anyway. Maybe someone can do it next year.” The song was inspired by a legless man who got around on rollers and sold pencils and “pretty paper, pretty ribbons” on the sidewalks of Leonard’s Department Store in downtown Fort Worth when Willie walked its red-brick streets.

  “Good God!” Foster exclaimed at the end of the recitation. “It’s not too late.” He picked up the phone and called London, England, where Monument’s biggest act, Roy Orbison, was living.
He told Orbison he’d just heard a smash hit and was sending the tape of the song special delivery. “If you love it like I do, call me back with your key [to sing in]. I’ll take care of the rest.”

  Willie’s eyes widened when he heard what Foster was doing.

  Two days later, Orbison called back. It was a go.

  Less than a week later, Roy Orbison lay on a sofa in the Decca studios in London, fighting off a fever of 102 while Fred Foster and Bill Justis finished the orchestral arrangement with the symphony they’d hired. Each violinist wore experimental custom microphones around their neck that Decca engineers had designed for amplification of the strings. Once the symphony was set, Roy rose from the sofa, feverish and flu-ridden, and sang “Pretty Paper.” He nailed his vocal in one take.

  But by the time “Pretty Paper” was released in late November, Willie was no longer with Monument. The excitement that “I Never Cared for You” stirred up in Houston had already been forgotten. The split was over the full-page color advertisement in all the music trade publications that Fred Foster had promised Willie when he signed him. The label had planned a dual release of Willie’s single “I Never Cared for You,” aimed at the country market, and a single by Lloyd Price that was aimed at the rhythm and blues audience. Foster was gambling both would cross into the mainstream. Lloyd Price’s ad looked fine, Willie’s not so much. The colors ran and bled, rendering the lettering illegible.

  “Willie got upset when he saw it and in a huff went to RCA,” Fred Foster said. “Willie says he intended to sign with RCA all along, but if he did, why did he sign a three-year contract with me? I think he got drunk when he was so upset and went and signed with RCA. We only got one record out. I could have caused him problems because I had a signed contract. But rather than lose Willie as a friend, I let it go. I wanted to keep him as a friend if I couldn’t keep him as an artist.”