In 1963 Shirley and I went to Reno for her to get a divorce. I took boxing lessons while we waited. Then Shirley and I married and returned to Nashville. On the day President John F. Kennedy was shot, we found our dream house. It was a house thirty miles east of Nashville on a farm that we called Ridgetop. I was eating liver and onions in a restaurant on the Gallatin Highway with Shirley when we heard the awful news about President Kennedy. I decided to quit the road and settle down with Shirley at Ridgetop and be a farmer. I was thirty years old, and I had retired from the road. I thought it meant a major change in my life.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I just wanted to write songs for a while. I wasn’t making any money on the road, and I really wasn’t having no big fun, and I just figured it was time I got off somewhere by myself and wrote some songs.
I decided if I took myself off the market for a while, maybe when I did go back out, I’d be able to draw more money, and as it turned out, it was true. I had a great time, doing nothing but raising hogs.
We had Lester and Earl, the Foggy Mountain Hogs. On our mailbox it said WILLIE AND SHIRLEY AND MANY OTHERS. We had all kinds of dogs and cats and horses. The old man that used to work for me, Mr. Hughes, was a great colorful old guy. A clever horse trader, he’d buy horses for me, and buy cattle for me, and run the farm. His wife was named Ruby. Ruby was a big old gal, and Mr. Hughes was a tall skinny old man that didn’t weigh hardly 100 pounds, and she weighed close to 200.
He used to come in and I’d leave a bottle of whiskey down in the cabinet so he could get to it. He was always sneaking whiskey. I’d notice every day there’d be a little gone, a little more gone, and I’d always keep a full one, so when he’d run out, I put another one in there. And we used to sit down and drink a lot together. We’d get pretty loaded, and he’d say, “Well, I’m gonna go home and if Ruby’s got me a steak cooked, I ain’t gonna eat a bite of it, and if she don’t have me one cooked, I’m gonna kick her clothes off.” He was a funny old man.
Shirley loved farming as long as I was there with her. But then when it come time for me to go back on the road, she had to stay home. I knew that was probably the wrong thing to do. I should have taken her out with me again. So pretty soon, I was out on the road, and Shirley was home taking care of Lana, Susie, and Billy, who’d come back to live with us. She became a mother. I’m not sure that’s what she had in mind in the beginning, but she did great, and it worked out fine for a while. Then she got restless, and the marriage started going downhill after that.
I didn’t lose much money farming, but the fact that I lost any money at all was hilarious. I was making a little money writing songs and raisings hogs was just a hobby for me, to give me something to do.
Johnny Bush and I went out and bought seventeen weaner pigs. Paid 25¢ a pound for them. In the sleet and the snow, we built a pigpen and throwed them in the pen. But what we’d done when we built the pen, the bottom plank was just about a fraction of an inch too high. Soon as we turned the pigs loose, they went right out under that bottom plank and into the hollow down there and it was cold and sleeting and we chased them God damn pigs all over that hollow. We wouldn’t have worked that hard for no man alive. Ever. But we finally caught them, every one of them, and got them back in there, and I put them on a feeder where all they had to do was eat and get their bellies full and go over there and get them a drink of water and go back over there and eat some more.
But I should have put their water farther away from their food so they’d get a little more exercise. What they did was sit there and get so fat that some of them actually ruptured themselves. They ate so much, they got so fat, that their whole ass end fell out because they were just too lazy to go get exercise. I fed them like that for five months, took them to the market, and sold them. By then the market had dropped so I only got 17¢ a pound for them. But I couldn’t keep them because when it comes time to sell a hog, it’s time to sell a hog. I didn’t want to put more feed money into them. On that one little batch of hogs, I think I lost about $5,000.
We had some chickens at Ridgetop, some laying hens, because I like fresh eggs. Shirley named them like pets. She had eight or nine hens that layed every day. Ray Price kept fighting roosters back then, though their fighting ability was debatable. Some people said he had running roosters and fighting horses. Anyway, Ray called me and said he had a rooster that he wanted to put out on my farm to exercise. I said, “Sure, but Shirley’s got some laying hens out here, and I don’t want them bothered.” He said, “Any problem, I’ll come get the rooster.” So I said okay. About the third day, one of Shirley’s hens was dead. I called Ray and I said, “Ray, we’ve got a problem. Your rooster’s killed one of Shirley’s hens.” Ray said, “Oh no, I’ll come and get it.”
But he didn’t come that day, and he didn’t come the next day. The next day after that, there was another dead hen. This time Shirley is hot. She’s going in the house looking for the shotgun. Rather than turn her loose in the barn full of horses and chickens with a double-barrel shotgun, I decided I would do it myself. I took the gun and I killed the rooster and I gave it to our maid who took it home and cleaned it and had a big rooster dinner.
I called Ray and told him what I’d done.
I think everything Ray was trying to say kind of got clogged in his throat. Finally, he said that he would never record another one of my songs for doing that. It was the end of everything between us. My answer was that there wasn’t a fighting rooster in the world that was worth one good laying hen. It took him years to get over it but we laugh about it a little bit now.
During those days Webb Pierce built himself a guitar-shaped swimming pool. His neighbors complained. I think it was Ray Stevens and a bunch of guys that got up a petition to try to keep the tourist buses from driving through their neighborhood. The buses went by Webb’s house to see his pool, and when they came by Webb’s, they went by everybody else’s house, too. In response to the petition Webb said, “Fuck them. That’s what they get for moving next door to a star.”
I just threw in that Webb Pierce story because it says so much about show business.
In the six years I lived at Ridgetop, we gathered quite a family around us. Lana, Susie, and Billy had come to live on the farm even though I never did get legal custody of them from Martha. But that was all right with Martha, because she divorced her second husband in Las Vegas and married Mickey Scott, a guy she had known in Waco, and they moved down the road from Ridgetop. My dad Ira and stepmother Lorraine took up residence on the farm. My stepbrothers, Doyle and Charles, moved onto the land with their families. My sister Bobbie Lee divorced her second husband who had run a used-car lot in Fort Worth and brought her new husband, Jack Fletcher, and her three boys—Randy, Freddie, and Michael—to Ridgetop. My mother Myrle and her husband Ken moved into a redbrick house five miles away. Wade Ray, who played music with me for years, moved across the road with his wife, Grace, a great woman. Wade and Grace belonged to a mystery school called Astara, and I studied their lessons with them. After he joined my band in 1966, Paul English came with his wife, Carlene, and settled at Ridgetop. Frank and Jeannie Oakley opened the Willie Nelson General Store in Madison. The farm was 400 acres in the Cumberland Gap. We accumulated 25 brood sows, 800 Duroc and Poland China hogs, hundreds of white Leghorns and other chickens, ducks and geese, 9 horses including 3 Tennessee Walkers and 2 Palominos and 2 ponies for the kids and a quarterhorse named Preacher for me. The farm produced oats, clover, grazing grass for 200 head of Black Angus cattle. I took up calf roping. Every time I’d rope and tie a calf, somebody would yell, “That’s one in a row.”
I gained thirty pounds and took to smoking a pipe and wearing bib overalls. On November 28, 1964, I made my first appearance on the Grand Ole Opry for which I was paid $35. I began co-hosting a television show with my old hero Ernest Tubb. The whole enterprise was being supported by my songwriting royalties.
Ray Price had cut a record of “Night Life” and used the song as his intro.
He would say, “This song was written for me by a boy down in Texas. It’s not like the songs I usually do, but I hope you’ll like it.” Instead of fiddles, Ray was using violins in his band. (When Ray recorded “Make the World Go Away” by Hank Cochran, he filled it with violins and said, “I believe the symphony audience wants to hear country music.”)
This may sound like I had it made.
But I was starting to feel like a minnow in a dipper. My songs were selling, but my records weren’t. I needed to jump back in the lake and keep swimming.
On a running tour in 1965 I stopped in Phoenix, where the hottest act in town was a kid named Waylon Jennings. I went to catch his show, and afterwards we shared a bottle of tequila and he asked my advice on his career. “Whatever you do, Waylon, stay away from Nashville,” I told him. “Nashville ain’t ready for you. They’ll just break your heart.”
Upon hearing my advice, Waylon did what any good songwriter would do. He went to Nashville.
Crash Stewart came to Nashville in 1966 to plan a Texas tour with Ray Price. Before they could set their tour, Ray got a better offer and pulled out. I told Crash I would step in and take Ray’s place. “Willie, I love you, but you ain’t nowhere near the equal of Ray Price when it comes to filling dance halls,” Crash said.
I agreed. But I had an idea. “We’ll hire another big name—like Marty Robbins—to replace Ray. We’ll fill out the show with Stonewall Jackson, Jeannie Sealy, Hank Cochran, and Johnny Bush and my band. But we’ll call it the Willie Nelson Show.”
Using all that advertising on the radio around the country would be a great way to get my name out to people who’d never heard of me. The crowd might say, “Who the hell is Willie Nelson?” But by the end of the show, they would know. It was a trick I picked up from Colonel Tom Parker. When Colonel Parker was managing Eddy Arnold, he paid somebody $50 a week to phone airports and hotels all over the world and page Eddy Arnold.
Crash bought the idea. He hired one more singer for the package. The new singer was Charlie Pride.
It may not seem like such a big deal twenty years later, but Charlie Pride is black. I told Crash I didn’t think we should put Charlie in our show. We were going into South Texas and Louisiana. I could foresee major problems with bringing a black country singer onstage. I said, “This is too big a risk. It’s our promotion. We could lose money and make people mad.”
Then Crash played me Charlie’s record “Snakes Crawl at Night.” Hearing Charlie sing made all the difference. Charlie was in.
The first night Charlie played with us was in Dallas. He went out onstage and said, “Well, I guess you’re probably surprised to see me singing country music with this deep suntan I got, but I love country music and hope you’ll listen and enjoy it.” Charlie was real humble and nice and Uncle Tommed the shit out of them. He sang great and they loved him.
One night during that same tour, we had a night off and I went over to Dewey Groom’s Longhorn Ballroom in Dallas to hear Johnny Bush. Charlie Pride was just sitting at a table. I got drunk at the party and got up on Dewey’s stage and told the crowd they ought to hear my new friend sing. That’s when I called Charlie out of the audience and brought him to the microphone. I could hear gasps from the partygoers, and especially Dewey Groom, who had said he would never book Charlie Pride or any other black musician at the Longhorn Ballroom.
I knew something special was called for at that moment, so I grabbed Charlie and laid a big kiss on his lips, and once the crowd recovered they listened to Charlie and went crazy over him.
After the show me and Charlie Pride and Dewey Groom and a bunch of us went over to the motel room and partied and played songs all night long. Dewey got drunk and wound up passing out in the same bed with Charlie. I said, “Look at Dewey. He’s trying to change his luck.” Dewey woke up with a smile on his face, and Charlie was happy, and they’ve lived together ever since. I’m kidding about living together, of course, but Dewey sure never had no more prejudice about booking Charlie Pride.
I was making about $100,000 a year from my songwriting royalties, but me and my band was always right on the edge of broke. We bought an old bus and started touring the country. Shirley hadn’t wanted me to go on the road. Particularly for a month at a time and without her. She was a performer and a good one and wanted to be part of the show. But I needed her to stay home with the kids. She did a good job of it for a long time before she got bored and pissed off and our marriage fell apart.
Anyhow, by 1968, my life with Shirley had turned into blithering hell. She helped me fall through a plate-glass window one night when I was too drunk to walk straight. We had a lot of terrible, nasty fights. Shirley was boozing as bad as I was and we were all swallowing enough pills to choke Johnny Cash when he was at his worst.
Then one night I looked down into the audience while I was performing at Larry and Pat Butler’s 21 Club in Cut ’N’ Shoot and saw this tall blond knockout sitting at the band table. It was classic eye contact, lightning across a crowded room. I told Jimmy Day, “Get that blond for me.” After the show, there she was. Her name was Connie Koepke. We didn’t have time to do much but gape at each other before the band took off for our next gig. But I got her phone number. I called her the next time I was in town and first thing I knew, I was stone in love again.
Connie was in her early twenties and had never been married. She had been raised a devout Catholic girl, and her family didn’t think highly of her running around with a married man. But Connie was in love with me, too. We were very happy. She traveled with me some, and it was a great time for both of us. Back at Ridgetop, Shirley had no idea Connie existed. Shirley and I were into a very bad period, having terrible fights, breaking up and getting back together, and then breaking up again. With me and Connie, though, every day we saw each other was like going on a honeymoon.
My sister Bobbie Lee and me, when we were four and two.
The old family place in Arkansas.
My second grade school photo.
Mama and Daddy Nelson in front of their old house in Searcy Country, Arkansas, just before they packed up and moved to Abbott with my parents in 1929.
An outing to the park in Waco with Mama Nelson. We could hardly wait to get to that watermelon.
Me, Mama Nelson, Bobbie, and one of the Nelson cousins.
The Abbott City Hall.
This photo is from my junior year at Abbott High in 1949.
All dressed up for a school dance (and a pretty girl).
Mama Nelson and me in the old porch swing in Waco.
Me, my dog, and Bobbie in front of our house with our friends.
Bobbie and me.
The gang posing on our front lawn.
Just hanging around Abbott High.
The sophomore football “star” of the Abbott High Panthers.
Me, Bobbie, Bud (on the fiddle) and my pop, Ira, (on the guitar) perform at the local radio station.
Ira performing on stage in 1977.
My mother at one of my shows in the ’70s.
The dashing Air Force man in uniform.
Onstage with Larry Butler, who gave me a job in his band so I wouldn’t have to sell my songs away.
At 18, with Joe Massey and the Frontiersmen.
Couples’ night out on the town. That’s Martha with me on the right.
In the studio, working on my first album.
Lana and me.
Susie, Lana, and Billy moved in with Shirley and me in 1965.
Me and all the ladies down at the radio station.
A promo shot from 1962.
My first two albums, with Liberty Records in 1961.
Shirley and I got married in 1962.
The house at Ridgetop, outside Nashville. When it burned down at Christmas time in 1970, we all moved back to Texas.
Me as a pig farmer, 1963.
With Paul English in 1965.
Signing on with Haze Jones and Ott Devine of the Grand Ole Opry, in 1964.
On tour in 1968 with
Paul English, Jimmy Day, and David Zentner.
Mama Nelson at one of our shows in the ’60s.
I was sitting in the living room at Ridgetop reading the paper one afternoon in November of 1969 when Shirley walked in with a handful of mail.
Shirley opened an envelope and stared at a piece of paper like she couldn’t believe what she was reading. “Willie,” she said. “This Houston hospital has sent us a maternity ward bill that says you and a Mrs. Connie Nelson have a baby daughter named Paula Carlene, born October 27th, 1969!”
A lot of thoughts went through my mind all at once. What a dumb fucking thing to do was one of them. I had put my home address on the registration forms when we checked Connie into the hospital. But I ain’t stupid. I must have been tired of the secrecy and wanted to get this out in the open.
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