Willie Nelson

by Joe Nick Patoski

  Two weeks later RCA released its first single on Willie Nelson. Even if he was no match for Roy Orbison, Willie and the label wanted to show up Fred Foster. It was his version of “Pretty Paper.”

  RIGHT before Thanksgiving, Willie raised his profile another notch when Ott Devine, the stage manager of the Opry responsible for extending membership invitations, issued a press release that was announced from the stage of the Ryman: Willie Nelson was joining the Grand Ole Opry. He was a solid choice, still riding the reputation of “Crazy,” “Hello Walls,” and “Family Bible,” and now he was an RCA recording artist. He made his debut on the stage of the Ryman four nights later.

  The Opry crowd was not like audiences back in Texas. “If you’re playing a dance place [like in Texas],” Willie said, “you want them to hit the floor every time and dance.” The Opry was a sit-down affair, restricting shows of appreciation to clapping, cheering, standing up, or dancing in place.

  “I would do different songs when I played the Opera,” as Willie called it, “and I would do different rhythms because I knew up-tempo things were good. Anything to get the old people tapping their feet and clapping their hands was good, and I don’t mean that in a derogatory way. These folks, it was good for them, spiritually, physically, mentally, to start clapping their hands and moving. That’s one of the things I learned early: Get some audience participation.”

  “The Grand Ole Opry was the first time I’d seen Daddy play,” Lana Nelson said. “It was bigger than life. I was on the fourth row. He was there with the Glaser Brothers. He always played honky-tonks, and they wouldn’t let a girl like me in. I never got to see him play till the Opry.”

  Joining the Opry was a smart move politically and careerwise, exposing his music to a national radio audience. He needed the exposure, even though early on, the Opry announcer once introduced him as Woody Nelson.

  In spite of stars such as Flatt & Scruggs, Roy Acuff, Minnie Pearl, Hank Snow, Bill Monroe, Jean Shepard, and Porter Wagoner, the Opry cast was in sore need of new blood in 1964. Other barn dances like the Louisiana Hayride and Big D Jamboree were fading and the road was decimating the Opry’s ranks. Willie’s biggest song benefactor, Patsy Cline, and two other Opry cast regulars, Hawkshaw Hawkins and Cowboy Copas, died in an airplane crash ninety miles from Nashville on March 5, 1963. Singer Jack Anglin was killed in a car wreck on the way to Patsy’s funeral. On March 29 that same year, another Opry cast member, whom Willie had worked with in Houston, Texas Ruby, perished in a house fire. On the last day of July of 1964, another plane crash, ten miles south of Nashville, took the lives of Gentleman Jim Reeves, one of the Opry’s most popular stars, and his pianist and manager, Dean Manuel. On December 6, two weeks after Willie joined country music’s most prestigious family, twelve members were kicked out.

  “Opry Drops 12 Top Stars” screamed the front-page headline of the Nashville Tennessean on December 6, 1964. George Morgan, Don Gibson, Johnny Wright, the Jordanaires, Faron Young, Ferlin Husky, Chet Atkins, Kitty Wells, Stonewall Jackson, Ray Price, and Justin Tubb had not fulfilled their obligation to play twenty-six dates a year, as their contracts stipulated. Minnie Pearl, saint that she was, took a leave of absence. They were all denied the use of the Grand Ole Opry on their showbills and advertising as well as exposure on the radio show and on the syndicated television series that had just started up.

  It didn’t take long for Willie to join the exiles. Doing the math, he realized the Opry was holding him back. Less than a year after he joined, Willie left, allegedly after asking Ott Devine if he could play with his own band on the show and Devine demurred. “Willie, a lot of the members would like that too,” he said condescendingly.

  “Okay,” Willie said, walking away without saying anything. He just didn’t come back.

  “I quit the Opry because I couldn’t afford it,” he said. “You had to play Texas to make any money—at least I did. I’d go down there and work Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, but I couldn’t work down there on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday and work the Opry too. You had to be there twenty-six weeks of the year, and if I did that, I’d miss half of the weekends in Texas, and I just couldn’t do that. The prestige of working the Grand Ole Opry was nice. I loved saying I was on the Opera. But as great as it was, just because you were a member didn’t mean you were going to run out there and set the woods on fire. You might have to get with three or four other members of the Opry and get on a package show and open for Grandpa Jones and several others. I didn’t mind doing that, and did that. I already knew I could do pretty good in the nightclubs.”

  Willie liked to tell about being so miserable in Nashville that he lay down on Broadway, trying to get someone to run him over late one night but nobody would—though it sounded more like a drunken dare than attempted suicide. Nashville was actually treating him pretty good. He could swim in Webb Pierce’s guitar-shaped swimming pool or putter around Old Hickory Lake on Hank Cochran’s boat, listen to jazz musician Gary Burton play vibes at Boots Randolph’s club in Printer’s Alley, or watch fellow Texan Candy Barr do a striptease at the Rainbow. Being in Nashville meant easy access to recording studios, booking agents, song publishers, television studios, and shows like Country Music Time, a radio program sponsored by the United States Air Force and broadcast around the world on the Armed Forces Radio Network.

  Willie’s official base of operations was the house he’d bought from Bobbie and Paul Tracy in Fort Worth, which he still owned. His checks read “WN Enterprises, 2921 Morrell, WA 3-7659, Ft. Worth, 15, Texas,” including one for $150 that bounced, made out to Johnny Bush for playing some road dates. The business was in Texas because that’s where his audience was. “Whenever I’d run into him,” Johnny Gimble said, “he’d say, ‘Let’s go to Texas and play some dances.’”

  Performing in a bar with a bandstand brought more satisfaction than singing two tunes at the Ryman, where whiskey-drinking, pussy-chasing, backroom gambling, and carousing were officially frowned upon. Hidebound tradition couldn’t match the pay or pleasure of a one-nighter, no matter how tight the space was in the station wagon pulling a trailer. Staying in motels and being able to leave behind whatever mess you made, night after night, day after day, made you feel like you were at least going somewhere as the fading memory of the last town and the last performance shrank into a vanishing point in the rearview mirror.

  But to work the road successfully, Willie had to be a recording star. Now Chet Atkins, the player’s player who’d risen up the ranks under Steve Soles to take the reins of the Nashville division of RCA, was his guide. Chet was the champion of the Nashville Sound, which aimed to reach a larger audience. Willie wanted to reach a bigger audience too. But in order to do so, he would have to mesh with the efficient system Chet had built.

  Chet Atkins brought in the cream of session players for the November 1964 session for “Pretty Paper” and the Harlan Howard/Hank Cochran collaboration “What a Merry Christmas This Could Be.” Pig Robbins played piano, Pete Drake pedal steel, and Henry Strzelecki bass, while Kenny Buttrey drummed and Jerry Reed Hubbard and Velma Smith, Hal Smith’s wife, split guitar duties. The vocal chorus included Velma and Ray Stevens. Willie was leader, playing lead guitar and singing vocals. He squeezed in two of his own tunes, “Talk to Me,” a plaintive midtempo ballad with echoing choruses that recalled “Hello Walls,” and “Healing Hands of Time,” a lush ballad with violins and viola adding to the stirring spirituality of the lyrics.

  Willie returned to the studio in December with Harold Bradley, Ray Edenton, Henry Strzelecki, Buddy Harman, Floyd Cramer, Pig Robbins, and the Anita Kerr Singers to cut two tracks in phonetic German for Chet and coproducer Wolf Kabitzsky, “Whisky Walzer” and “Little Darling,” which was “Pretty Paper” in deutsch, as well as his version of “Don’t Fence Me In,” the Cole Porter cowboy song written from a poem by an engineer named Bob Fletcher. RCA wanted to tap into Germany, the third-largest record market in the world, which bought a disproportionately large amount of country
music made in the USA. The single would help pave the way for a place on a package show tour of Germany starring Hank Snow with der Country-Boy aus Texas.

  Most of the same cast returned for sessions in January and April 1965, accumulating enough tracks to make an album. Willie’s debut LP for RCA, Country Willie: His Own Songs, was a countrypolitan effort that resurrected “Mr. Record Man,” “Funny How Time Slips Away,” “Hello Walls,” and “Night Life.” The album also introduced originals, such as the spiritual-on-the-surface, creepy-and-dark-when-you-think-about-it “Healing Hands of Time,” along with “Darkness on the Face of the Earth” and two numbers that spoke of Willie’s evolving personal philosophy, “My Own Peculiar Way” and “One Day at a Time.” The songs were wrapped in overwrought semi-orchestral arrangements not unlike what Ernie Freeman did for his Liberty recordings.

  The content was fairly sophisticated stuff aimed at the not-so-sophisticated guy in the corner of the local beer joint, alone and lonely, pouring nickels and quarters into the jukebox to hear songs that were sadder and more miserable than he was.

  Sales were puny, the one exception again being Texas, where the album solidified Willie’s standing as a genuine Nashville star, one sure way to sell tickets to a show.

  HITCHING up with Ernest Tubb’s syndicated television show, where Willie would make some 150 appearances over the course of six years from 1965 to 1971, spoke of country music’s growing clout as well as his own potential as a TV personality. ET was a Nashville institution, a one-man empire who was a touring entertainer, recording artist, Grand Ole Opry star, owner of a world-famous record shop on Broadway, and host of the live midnight jamboree that followed the Grand Ole Opry Saturday-night broadcasts on WSM 650. No matter what people thought of his froggy voice or simpler-than-simple approach to music, Tubb was a role model in how to be a country star, always reminding viewers to “be better to your neighbors and you’ll have better neighbors” and thanking the crowd after the last song of the dance by flipping over his guitar to reveal the message “Thanks A Lot” on the back of his instrument.

  Ernest Tubb’s show, “thirty minutes of the finest TV entertainment,” was produced by Hal Smith, Ray Price’s partner at Pamper Music and Willie’s sometimes manager. Pamper’s booking agency worked Tubb as well as Willie and other acts, so the exposure on the tube benefited all parties involved. Though its clout could not compare with radio’s clout in the mid-1960s, TV was seen as another vehicle to sell records and tickets, largely through broadcasts of live-music variety shows such as the Big D Jamboree, and syndicated programs such as the one hosted by Porter Wagoner, with the Pretty Miss Norma Jean and, later, his new partner, Dolly Parton. Buck Owens, the Bakersfield, California, country singer, taped his program in Oklahoma City, where he learned the business and technology of television from the ground up. Perhaps the greatest sign of TV’s embrace of country was Johnny Cash hosting his own network variety show during prime time.

  Willie was The Ernest Tubb Show’s face of modern country, his cardigan wool sweaters and turtlenecks a cosmopolitan contrast to the beehive hairdos of the women singers and the cartoonish sartorial splendor of the Texas Troubadours in their sparkly western suits and western hats with the brim riding higher than the crown. They were descendants of hillbillies. Willie looked like a member of Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack. He was there for his musical talents, and his smooth, sad ballads and hit reprisals fit in with the cast of Ernest, Cal Smith, Jack Greene, Buddy Charlton, and the other Texas Troubadours, who could play as hot as any swing band or play it straight and tight like a honky-tonk band.

  Willie revealed brief flashes of his developing finger-picking style on several models of acoustic Gibson guitars he played, but mostly it was the timbre of Willie’s voice that left an impression. He reminded viewers at home of Ernest with his unapologetic twang of an accent, though his timbre more closely resembled Lefty Frizzell’s and Leon Payne’s. In that respect, he sang like no one else on TV except maybe Wade Ray, the featured fiddler on the show who also liked to move his voice in front of and behind the beat. Even when he joined the Johnson Sisters on “Crazy” and “One Day at a Time” or flirted with edgy by doing “I Never Cared for You” as if he were a folk-rocker, he used his voice like an improvised instrument, redeeming himself during the Sacred Song segment of the program when he sang songs of praise, including his own “Family Bible” and “Kneel at the Foot of Jesus.”

  Willie played his songs, smiled for the camera, but offered precious little banter. Like Bob Wills, Willie preferred letting the music do his talking, which may have been why there was no Willie Nelson Show on television.

  “Hal Smith produced [Ernest Tubb on TV],” Willie said. “Personally, I loved Ernest and all the guys in the band. I had a crush on one of the Johnson Sisters, so that helped a lot. He had a great band. But then I was watching everybody else [who had a show, like Roger Miller, Glen Campbell, and Mel Tillis] crash and burn and I knew why. Roger didn’t make it because they wouldn’t let him be Roger. Glen Campbell was the same thing. Once the corporate people got in there, they took over their deal. It made me not want to do TV.”

  His ET association influenced his second RCA album, Country Favorites: Willie Nelson Style. Like his second Liberty album, the recording made in mid-December 1965 had a strong Western Swing flavor. At Willie’s request, he was backed up by the Texas Troubadours (Buddy Charlton, Jack Greene, Jack Drake, Cal Smith, and Leon Rhodes) along with his buddy Wade Ray, pianist Pig Robbins, and bassist James Wilkerson. The pairing made musical and commercial sense, since the Troubadours knew Willie’s work from the television show and tours and were regarded as an ensemble with enough appeal to make their own records for Decca sans Ernest. With Chet Atkins once again at the controls, Willie’s performing talents were showcased on covers of Lawton Williams’s Texas dance-hall classic “Fraulein,” Harlan Howard’s “Heartaches by the Number,” two Hank Cochran tunes, the Fred Rose swing number “Home in San Antone,” a reprisal of “Columbus Stockade Blues” that would better have been left off compared with the fiery earlier versions he’d recorded with Shirley Collie for Liberty Records, a spirited interpretation of “My Window Faces the South,” first popularized by Bob Wills, and an exquisite interpretation of Wills’s trademark “San Antonio Rose.” No Willie originals were included.

  The counterintuitive approach paid off. Although singles were still the engine of the business, albums were beginning to sell on their own almost as well as they did in the pop and rock fields, where they were no longer just two singles with a bunch of filler material in between. When Country Favorites was released in early 1966, it stayed on the country albums chart for seventeen weeks, peaking at number 9. Trend spotters could make much of the photograph of Willie on the album cover, wearing a powder-blue fuzzy wool pullover with matching pink and white diamonds on the chest, looking very uncountry.

  The way he had dressed since leaving Ray Price said a lot about where his head was at. “I had to wear those Nudie suits [with Ray],” Willie said, referring to the rhinestone suits favored by country stars. “I had a pink one with rhinestones and a blue one with rhinestones. Ray was doing that, Porter was doing that, Webb was doing that, everybody had on the Nudie suits.”

  He was not like them. “I personally liked to dress up, wear [business] suits,” he said. His heroes had been cowboys, but Playboy provided the fashion cues. When The House of Lords [a Nashville clothier] came up with a bunch of clothes they wanted him to wear, he was game. “I said, ‘Fuck, yeah! Free clothes! What else you got?’ I enjoyed dressing up.” And dressing down.

  According to the official Willie Nelson souvenir program sold at Willie Nelson shows, Willie Nelson was really a farmer and a rancher who happened to dabble in entertainment. He was pictured in the program wearing dark shades and doing a variety of farm chores. One photograph showed him sitting astride his Ford 3000 tractor. “Farming is my business and songwriting is my hobby,” the program quotes Willie saying. “I can make
a good living working the farm, and it would bug me if I thought I had to make it writing. The pressure would get to me. Yet it is sure nice and I’m fortunate to have a hobby that is financially profitable.”

  He’d accumulated more land and more animals by 1966, including a four-hundred-acre produce farm where twenty-five brood sows produced eight hundred Duroc and Poland China hogs a year, along with two acres of cultivated tobacco and a two-hundred-acre ranch where his Black Angus cattle grazed on clover, fescue, and lespedeza grasses alongside a stable of horses that included three Tennessee Walkers and two palominos and a three-year-old quarterhorse named Preacher. The operation was overseen by his right-hand man, George Hughes.

  In 1966, Willie repaid his long ago $500 debt to Faron Young, who’d loaned him the money rather than buy his rights to “Hello Walls,” by delivering a $50,000 bull to Faron’s ranch with a sign hanging around its neck that read “No Bull. Paid In Full.” Faron pawned the bull to Jimmy C. Newman, another country singer and gentleman farmer who lived nearby. “It was show livestock, a Simmental bull bred in Switzerland that he bought at an auction,” Jimmy C. Newman said. “It weighed three thousand pounds. I started wondering what I’d gotten myself into. I took care of that bull for a year or two, but it was so big, I wouldn’t let my cows breed with him. I used him for AI [artificial insemination].”

  Ridgetop also led to an extended estrangement from Ray Price over a chicken. “I had a game rooster,” Ray said. “Willie said I could bring him out there to be cock of the walk with Willie’s hens. The rooster didn’t like the hens and he tried to kill ’em. So Shirley got upset at Willie and said, ‘If you don’t kill it, I’m going to kill it.’ Willie called me, so I told a worker to go get him, and he didn’t, so Willie killed it.” Ray was pissed at Willie for years, although he eventually conceded, “The boy should have went and got it.” Was Willie a good farmer? “No,” Ray said. “But I ain’t either, and I was raised by one. Willie tried raising hogs for a while, and they almost ate him out of house and home. Willie’s a country boy. If you gotta go broke, go broke doing what you like to do.”