They didn’t start calling it country western music until the singing cowboy movies of the thirties and forties. This was not real country or cowboy or western music, for the most part, that Gene Autry or Roy Rogers and Dale Evans or the Sons of the Pioneers sang around their movie campfires. These were movie tunes by pop songwriters who tried to sound country. But it all began to blend with the real country music of Red Foley and Ernest Tubb, and with the bluegrass music of Bill Monroe—who gave bluegrass its name from his band the Bluegrass Boys—and the innovative banjo picking of Earl Scruggs, and by the fifties you hardly ever heard us called hillbilly musicians.
By the 1970s Gramm Parsons, a country boy, came along playing rock and roll with a country heart. The Flying Burrito Brothers and the Eagles played rock and roll country. The Band did country lyrics in a sort of rock and roll hillbilly style. We got the Allman Brothers, and my friend Leon Russell, and God knows who all else, and by now country music is mixed up in everything.
But it was Bob Wills who put it all together for me, and it was our old Philco radio that taught it to me.
As Waylon said, Bob Wills is still the king.
In high school I loved sports and won letters from the Abbott Fighting Panthers in baseball, basketball, football, and track. I didn’t have a dream, though, of going on with an athletic career and playing third base for the New York Yankees. Staying up late in honky-tonks was not the ideal way for a young athlete to keep in shape.
I mopped the cafeteria floors in school for a free lunch, and Bobbie and I held a variety of odd jobs around town. For a while we worked the night shift as Abbott’s telephone operator—actually it was Bobbie’s gig, but she cut me in on it—which was interesting, because we listened in on all the conversations.
Bud Fletcher kept getting us more and more jobs. We went from playing places that seated thirty people into huge halls like the Scenic Wonderland in Waco. Bud booked us in there for the gate. The Scenic Wonderland held 3,000 people. We drew our usual number—about thirty—and didn’t get invited back. But we were working.
Bobbie was still feeling guilty about playing music in joints that sold liquor. It was so much against the way we were raised. In the eyes of the real staunch church people, we were sinful.
At that time a lot of people thought professional musicians were kind of a shiftless lot in a way, like actors. It was like on some of the old military bases where they had signs that said Sailors and dogs stay off the grass. The same thing applied to musicians.
But when Bud wangled us a job playing on KHBR radio in Hillsboro, I thought I had reached the highest stardom this world could offer. This was the ultimate. We had our own radio program, we were getting paid to play and sing on the radio, just like Ernest Tubb and my other heroes. I was famous, I thought. I was already a legend in my own mind. I was a teenager and people were asking for my autograph. My head started swelling immediately.
I thought I was a star because I was treated like one. If you’re the only guy in town who can pick and sing, you receive the star treatment early in life. Same way right now. If you’re the only guy in the barracks in the army who can pick up a guitar and sing a song, then in that particular barracks you’re the star. A local star is just as happy as a national star. Maybe happier, because there’s less responsibility.
I had found out early that a guitar would draw girls. I don’t like to admit it, but if a girl baited her trap with sex, she’d catch me every time—and it’s unlikely this will ever cease to work. As a teenager I already had a fan club. There was a group of girls who thought I was the greatest thing ever. They bought me a uniform, a nice Western suit, and paid for it themselves. They were like groupies. Everywhere I would play, they’d be there.
About this time I found another hero, a fellow named Pat Kennedy. Pat was a World War II veteran who had come back to Central Texas. He was shot up and pissed off. Pat was one of the first rebels that I remember, a real system-bucker. He told everybody in town where to get off. Pat didn’t want to do a damn thing except listen to our band and give us advice. He was on disability. People in town made remarks about Pat not wanting to work for a living. Pat didn’t give a shit what they thought. So what if they thought he was a no-good drunkard? He’d point at his ass and say, “You all line up and kiss old rosy.” Pat did whatever he wanted to do. He seemed like he was old and grown up, but he was in his twenties, a pal of Bud Fletcher’s. Pat would stay up all night and play dominoes and smoke cigarettes with me in a clubhouse we built that had a stove and a domino table in it. He would do anything. You could say, “Pat, why don’t you just go tell old so-and-so he’s a stupid horse’s butt,” and Pat would get right up and go tell them. I loved this guy.
He fell off a truck and killed himself.
I got out of high school and took a job trimming trees in East Texas with Zeke Varnon. I nearly went the way of Pat Kennedy much sooner than expected.
CHAPTER SIX
Suffering is the wrong use of the mind. The reason I have a bad experience is to teach me not to do it again. Generally the cause of the bad experience lies inside of my own self, in the way I am thinking, and so I bring it on myself. Like, for example, climbing forty feet up into an elm tree with a coil of rope over my shoulder. I didn’t really have to do it. But just because the guy who was already up in the tree yelled down that he needed the rope, I decided to show the tree-trimming crew that I was the best athlete of the bunch.
I scooted up that tree like a monkey. It wasn’t until I started back down, missed a grip, and found myself falling through the air that I realized this trip had not only been unnecessary, it was more than a little bit foolish.
As I fell I thought, well, Lord, I have done it again, and if You will bail me out one more time I will use the brains God gave me and devote my talents to the musical arts instead of work that You never intended me to do.
It had seemed like a good idea at the time to finance an old car with Zeke on a no-money-down deal in San Antonio and go to Tyler to become expert tree trimmers. This was in the summer of 1951. I was just out of high school. The Korean War had become real to me because of the draft. Now I believe there should be required national service for a year or so for all kids soon as they turn eighteen, with no exemptions. They don’t have to go in the army. They could work in hospitals and parks or whatever. This would force kids to realize they have a working stake in our democratic government. I don’t believe a democracy should have a totally professional military force. I believe the military should be in large number made up of people who don’t want to be there and will help make the generals honest.
But when I drove to Tyler with Zeke, I was too young to understand this. All I knew was that I was I-A in the draft, prime meat, and the politicians could throw my ass into the infantry and ship me off to war. President Truman had fired General Douglas MacArthur a month before my graduation. I heard MacArthur’s “old soldiers never die, they just fade away” speech on the radio. I didn’t know what the controversy was all about, but I liked the idea of a general getting fired if the president thought he was fucking up. If I was on my way to Korea, I wanted President Truman to put the best generals over there he could find.
But here I was falling through the air in Tyler and praying, and then I felt a blow as I bounced off a branch and crashed through smaller branches and tangled in some wires that slowed my fall.
I hit the ground and it knocked the wind out of me. My bad back that I’d gotten from baling hay struck me a punch above the right hip as I stood up and laughed and tried to make it look like, why, hell, I can fall forty feet any day, a tough rascal like me.
Inside a voice was telling me, Willie, don’t you go back up in no trees, understand?
I walked off that job and enlisted in the air force for a four-year hitch.
This accomplished two things at once. It got me out of Tyler, and it solved the problem of the draft.
The navy didn’t appeal to me. I could remember my sailor suit with th
e blood all over it, and I didn’t want to be on the water all the time. The army or the marines didn’t enter my thinking. I decided I wanted to be a jet pilot.
The first thing that happened at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio was they marched us down a road between rows of tents, heading us straight to the barbershop.
There were hundreds of tents. Everybody was living in tents because they didn’t have barracks. Guys were sticking their heads out of the tents and yelling at us. Their heads had no hair on them. The guys were yelling, “You fucked up! You fucked up!”
I’d always had longer hair than other boys. I was a long-haired musician before hippies came along. I would let my hair grow for months, go to the barbershop and get it cut real short, and then let it grow a long time before I got it cut again. It was mainly to save money, but people called me a long-haired musician.
Marching down the road toward the barbers’ tent at Lackland, my hair was long enough that if I let it come down over my eyes it covered my face. I brushed it straight back, and it hung down over my collar.
The air force barber sheared me like a sheep.
I had already learned enough about the air force to realize I wouldn’t make a jet pilot. It took years of concentrated dedication to be a jet pilot. I just couldn’t see my future at the controls of a jet. For one thing, I tend to be a little absentminded. An absentminded guy should not fly a jet.
I marched out of the barbers’ tent with a billiard ball for a head, and I knew right then I had changed my mind about being in the air force. I started to figure how I could get out. During my physical, the doctors had spotted on the X rays that I had a lower back problem. I told them, “Yes, I hurt it baling hay.” They made a note of it and sent me out to do my basic training.
Going through basic I didn’t have much problem with my back because I was mainly getting up at 4 A.M. and doing a lot of running. I had been accustomed to going to bed about the time the air force expected me to get up. The training cadre sergeant would come out of the dark moving into our tent and blow his whistle and shout, “Drop your cocks and grab your socks! Rise and shine, you sorry shitasses!” We’d be off and running for the next sixteen hours.
But there was no lifting to speak of. I was used to running from my glory days with the Abbott Fighting Panthers. Marching didn’t bother me a bit. I sort of liked the feeling when the whole platoon was marching in step and the cadre sergeant was calling out the cadence, “You had a good girl, but she left! You’re right, she left!” Running long distances with a pack on my back wasn’t so bad, either. I would see bigger guys falling out all around me, fainting and throwing up, and I would just grin and keep running. I made it through the obstacle courses—climbing ropes and crawling under barbed wire and all that—ahead of nearly everybody and would look back and see the field littered with the struggling bodies of guys who thought they were star athletes.
I finished basic at Lackland and was promoted to private first class. They gave me one stripe to sew on my sleeve. I had no sooner put my stripe on my khaki shirt than one of the guys smarted off about it. He said there wasn’t no little redheaded fucker going to tell him what to do. It pissed me off. I hit him. He got up and hit me back. We got to fighting, knocking over cots and wrestling through the side of the tent.
The air force took my stripe away after one day. That was fine with me. I realized I didn’t want to have leadership thrust on me by the military. I didn’t want to become a squad leader or any such shit as that. I didn’t want stardom in the air force.
They sent me to Shepherd Air Force Base in Wichita Falls for some additional basic training and then stuck us trainee graduates in a bus and hauled us to Scott Air Force Base in Illinois. They kept us at Scott while they tried to figure out what to do with us. “Relocation” is what they called it. All I did at Scott was play poker and run around and drink beer at the Post Exchange.
The air force decided I could go to further training as a regular airman, maybe wind up a tail gunner in a flight crew. Or I could go to the air police or to radar mechanic school or to the medics. I chose radar. They shipped me to radar school in Biloxi. I washed out. It was more mathematics than I could handle. After that, my choices were air police and medics. I didn’t want to be no policeman, so I took the medics.
The medics also trained at Biloxi. Instead of teaching me brain surgery or something useful, the medics put me to lifting heavy boxes. My back gave out on me. It hurt real bad. The doctors took more X rays and found the same lower back problem they had found in the first place.
They kept me in the hospital for two or three months, taking more X rays like if they did it long enough my back would get well. I was able to get out of the hospital at night and go play guitar at the Airmen’s Club in Biloxi. There were a lot more airmen at the club than there were girls. I didn’t care for dancing with airmen. They weren’t too pretty and some of them had two left feet. I snagged a few girls out of that club, but none of them was ever a candidate for Miss Mississippi.
An officer called me in to his office. He said, “Private Nelson, you have a lower back problem.”
I said, “Yes sir,” instead of saying, “No shit.”
The officer said, “We are going to put you in the hospital and operate on your back.”
I said, “No, I don’t want you cutting on me.”
“You won’t let us fix your back? It’s free, you know.”
I said, “I wouldn’t let you cut on my back for a million dollars,” and I meant it.
“Well, we could give you a medical discharge,” he said. “But you would have to sign a release so the air force won’t be required to pay you disability, since you had this injury before you enlisted.”
I said, “Could I use your pen? Where do I sign?”
After nine months in the air force, I was suddenly a civilian again. I rushed straight back to Abbott, put a band together, and started playing beer joints again.
I was eighteen years old and just about to fall madly in love.
Martha Jewel Mathews was tall, slender, black-haired, olive-skinned, just flat out the prettiest girl I had ever seen in my life. She was sixteen years old.
I didn’t know if she was Indian or Mexican or what she was, but I was stone in love immediately. Martha was a little bit afraid of me at first. I had started staring at her when I’d seen her dance in dance halls. She knew who I was because usually I was up onstage singing to her. She knew I liked her although we hadn’t said a word to each other. I guess my reputation had preceded me and Martha was kind of wary of hooking up with a guy who thought he had a future in show business.
Martha was a real lively party girl. She had a lot of friends and they danced a lot and were always going to the different dance halls around. Martha did love a good time, and we had plenty of them all over the country after we got together. Many of the stories people tell today about Martha and me, they dwell on the hellacious fights we had and the terrible things we did to each other. But there were good times, too, really sweet and wonderful times.
I met her at the drive-in where she was working as a carhop. Lord, looking at Martha parading around the parking lot in her short skirt made my hormones feel like the Flying Wallendas. Martha shot her dark eyes at me and said, hell no, she wasn’t getting in no car with me and Zeke, us both drunk. So I borrowed Bud Fletcher’s car a couple of nights later and picked her up.
Up close and comfortable, Martha dazzled me. I felt the kind of in love when you feel every minute away from your lover is agony. We struck that indescribably delicious moment when we both declared we were so much in love with each other that death couldn’t tear us apart.
We ran off to Cleburne and got married.
Martha was sixteen when we married. My mother married at fifteen. My sister Bobbie married at sixteen. My daughter Lana got married at sixteen, and my daughter Susie got married at sixteen. Personally, I don’t think that is so unusual. A lot of girls got married when they were young for a lot
of different reasons, like to get away from the house early or because they wanted to start their own families. In those days there really wasn’t much schooling required for girls. What they mainly wanted girls to learn was how to cook and keep house and be a wife. They didn’t figure a woman had that much need for an education.
Martha and I moved in with Mama Nelson, that wonderful lady who was a rock Bobbie and I could run to for shelter. I got a job working at a saddle factory in the daytime, but I cut my fingers sewing stitches in the leather and that threatened my guitar-picking career, which was then not going so well. There wasn’t enough money coming in to support Martha and me, and I couldn’t put any more strain on Mama Nelson.
Martha and I had already started fighting. It wasn’t over money, not at first. The fights were caused by young people being in love and being extremely jealous of each other. Anybody she would look at, I’d get pissed off. Anybody I’d look at, she’d get pissed off. Me being an entertainer, a singer in a beer joint, and Martha being a waitress, sometimes in the same beer joint, was the cause of many problems.
Plus, Martha and I were both drinking too much and seeing just how much we could do to each other and get by with it. That was a stupid test of somebody’s love, we both know now. It had the ingredients for disaster if we didn’t change our way of thinking.
I realized I had to take my Cherokee beauty out of Hill County if we were going to have any chance of this powerful love not tearing us both apart. There had to be someplace we could go where we could be together in some green and leafy place that would allow us to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative, as the Johnny Mercer song says.
Where else? We packed up and hit the road for Eugene, Oregon. That’s where my mother Myrle—now called Mother Harvey by the family after her lasting marriage to Ken—had established her latest nest.
Willie Page 7