Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die: Musings From the Road

by Willie Nelson

  DEDICATION

  To my mother and father, Myrle and Ira Nelson,

  who blazed a musical trail for me

  and Sister Bobbie to follow

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Willie Nelson: The Foreword

  The Beginning

  About the Author

  Also by Willie Nelson

  Copyright

  Credits

  About the Publisher

  WILLIE NELSON: THE FOREWORD

  BY KINKY FRIEDMAN

  In April 1933, Willie’s mother, Myrle, gave birth to him in a manger somewhere along the old highway between Waco and Dallas. There were angels in attendance that night, and there would be for the rest of his life. Some of them, no doubt, flying too close to the ground.

  In 1939, when Willie Nelson was six years old, he received his first real guitar. Hitler had just invaded Poland; the World’s Fair had just opened in New York; and in Hollywood, Gone with the Wind had just beat out a quirky little film called The Wizard of Oz for Best Picture of the Year. These things were very probably not known to young Willie. Nor was he aware that his grandfather had just purchased a cheap Stella guitar from the Sears catalog. It would not be a cheap guitar to Willie; it would become his most prized possession, an instrument of transcendental beauty.

  Unlike many famous people who left their hometowns and never looked back, Willie felt Abbott was always the home of his heart. It was where he was born, where Daddy and Mama Nelson raised him, and where he wrote his first poems and songs. He would come back many times to play concerts there, or maybe just dominoes; to visit old friends; and to reconnect with the land and the memories.

  Willie’s ticket out of Abbott was music, and to make it in music you had to be able to draw a crowd. The population of Abbott at the time Willie lived there, according to Bobbie, was a little over two hundred people. But, she added, you never could prove that. The little town simply could not hold all of Willie’s dreams. Like the cat who always goes into the neighbor’s garbage cans, he wanted to go to all the places where the music on his radio came from.

  Once he left Abbott, Willie was traveling light like the gypsy in his soul. He’d been a songwriter since he was six years old; why the hell should he try to change course now? He kept writing songs and took gigs whenever and wherever he could get them; sometimes they fell like manna from the skies, sometimes they just seemed to dry up like a river in the drought. When he could, Willie found work as a country music disc jockey, playing some of the music that had influenced and inspired him throughout his childhood—Lefty Frizzell, Ernest Tubb, Hank Williams, Ray Price, Hank Snow, and, for sure, Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys.

  MERLE HAGGARD ONCE REPORTEDLY SAID TO WILLIE, REGARDING Kris Kristofferson, the most talented janitor in Nashville, “You know, that guy is probably the best songwriter in town.” Willie is said to have responded, “After you and me.”

  Willie, of course, a wordsmith since childhood, had already spent a lifetime pursuing his craft. Miss Dianne, Willie’s first-grade teacher in Abbott, was one of the very earliest to notice his songwriting talent. She read some of his poems, soon to be lyrics, and was quite deeply impressed. She told Mama Nelson to keep an eye on this boy, because he was going to be something special. In Nashville, however, he found himself rapidly becoming the songwriter’s songwriter. In other words, he was too hip for the room.

  The word “songwriter” can apply to many different kinds of people. Barry Manilow is an accomplished songwriter and he’s made more money than God. Basically, he writes songs that make you feel good for a short period of time. Willie, on the other hand, writes songs that may make you think, and some of them will stay with you for a lifetime.

  Willie is hesitant about giving advice on songwriting. “I will never say anything to discourage a songwriter,” he says. “But if you are a real songwriter, nothing I could say would discourage you, anyhow. If my opinion could change your mind about being a songwriter, then you really weren’t a songwriter to begin with and I would have done you a favor by making you look for a different career. If a real songwriter happened to hear that I didn’t like his work, he would say, ‘What the hell does Willie Nelson know? Fuck Willie Nelson.’ ”

  We come to see what we want to see in this world. The same song may have a totally different meaning to different people, and the guy who wrote it may have an entirely different interpretation from any of them. Willie says there is no formula for writing songs. You might add to that that there is also no formula for relating to songs or understanding them in any one particular way. In my opinion, “Kaw-Liga,” the song about the wooden Indian who falls in love, is one of the saddest songs Hank Williams ever wrote. But I saw an old compilation of his work recently that some record company had put together long ago. The album was entitled Kaw-Liga and Other Humorous Songs. It’s a close-to-the-heart, personal matter, and it’s all in the ear of the beer-holder. Sometimes a writer’s best work is what is written between the lines—in other words, what the song leaves up to the imagination of the listener. “If a song is true for you,” Willie says, “it will be true for others.”

  In 1969, during the week before Christmas, Willie and Hank Cochran wrote a song that dealt not so subtly with the frustrations he was going through regarding his life and his career. The song was entitled “What Can You Do to Me Now?” A day or two later, on the night before Christmas Eve, Willie was in Nashville at a party when somebody came up to him and told him that the Ridgetop house had just burned down. Willie rushed home to find, much to his relief, that all of his extended family and all of his animal family were safe. But the house had been destroyed, along with almost everything he owned. He stumbled through the ashes until at last he found an old guitar case, inside of which were two pounds of Colombian tea. In the late sixties there were places you could get life in prison for getting caught with one joint.

  Perhaps Willie took it as a sign. Perhaps, as he said, he was just feeling like “a minnow in a dipper.” Whatever the reason, it was time to jump back in the river. When you write a song called “What Can You Do to Me Now?” and almost immediately afterward your house burns down, it would appear that somebody is trying to tell you something. If it was God speaking to Willie, She was only telling him what he’d already been thinking himself.

  Willie is that rare bird who never bothers to sift the ashes after the fire has gone. He is forever embracing the future, even if it slaps him in the face. Most of the time it hugs him back. So he followed in the footsteps of another iconoclastic American hero who’d made the trek almost a hundred and fifty years earlier. Willie told the Nashville music establishment the same words Davy Crockett had told the Tennessee political establishment: “Y’all can go to hell—I’m going to Texas.”

  This move went deeper than the simple, obvious fact that Willie didn’t fit in musically and stylistically with the Nashville Sound. The deeper problem was that in the sixties the good ol’ boy network that was the music establishment was dead set against ever accepting Willie as one of them. They feared and despised his lifestyle—i.e., smoking pot. To the good ol’ boy southern, Christian, straitlaced, humorless, constipated prigs who ran Music Row, dope was indubitably the devil. Country music, whatever its blessings and faults, would never gather reefer madness unto its collective, commercial, corporate bosom. That, indeed, was at the very heart of the problem. But it would not be a problem in Texas.

  Like Davy Crockett before him, Willie would walk into history by way of his pilgrimage to Texas. Texas, where even before the music caught
up with the ethos, outlaws were celebrated. But Willie did gain some practical wisdom from his Nashville experiences: “Get yourself a good Jewish lawyer before you sign anything, no matter how much the company says they love you.”

  Many years have come and gone, but the great body of work that Willie managed to create along with a small handful of others still resonates today, shining like musical diamonds in the rough despite the changing seasons, trends, and times. They were songwriters and they created some of their best work when they were broke, drunk, and stoned half the time. Maybe more than half.

  Throughout his life, Willie has written most of his lyrics on scraps of paper, cocktail napkins, and worse. He wrote “Shotgun Willie” on a sanitary-napkin envelope. He wrote “On the Road Again” on a vomit bag. I once asked him whether he found it interesting that he wrote “On the Road Again,” one of the greatest road anthems of all time, while on an airplane, and that he wrote “Bloody Mary Morning,” a poignant portrayal of a heartbroken man on an airplane flight, while on the ground. He never really responded to my question. Of course, he was smoking a joint the size of a large kosher salami at the time.

  This may indeed be conjuring up a romantic vision of Willie and the others, but when compared to today’s Music Row, you can’t help but see the obvious difference. Nashville after Willie and the boys is not the same. For decades now it seems to have spawned corporate publishing brothels, replete with long hallways filled with tiny little rooms each inhabited by two or three young songwriters who rushed to get to their songwriting appointment by four thirty sharp. In theory, this could produce some great new music; in practice, it has only resulted in the homogenized, sanitized, and derivative tissue of horseshit you usually hear on the radio these days.

  Surely these writers are making money for somebody or the publishing corporations wouldn’t be paying them. But it is worth mentioning that in the more than three decades since Willie got out of Dodge, nobody has written “Hello Walls.” Nobody has written “Me and Bobby McGee.” Nobody’s written “Silver Wings.” And nobody’s written “King of the Road.”

  I asked Willie why he thought that was, and he didn’t have a ready answer except to say that back then times were really tough. Perhaps that is the answer; perhaps this modern crop of songwriters, though not untalented, was merely born too late. Great art is rarely produced by someone who sits down to paint his masterpiece. The guy who sets out to write the great American novel never does it; the great work is invariably written by the guy who was just trying to pay the rent. Of course, it helps if you’re a genius. But if you’re a genius, you probably fucked up and missed your four-thirty songwriter’s appointment.

  EARLY MEMORIES

  I’m flashing back to my first memories; they are of a blacksmith shop in Abbott, Texas. My grandfather is shoeing a horse. He is heating the horseshoe in the roaring hot coals in the furnace. I’m standing on my tiptoes turning the bellows that blows the air on the furnace, keeping the fire going. He heats the horseshoe till it is red-hot, then fits it to the horse’s hoof, cools it off in water, and nails it onto the horse’s hoof. A horse kicked him one day and ruptured his stomach.

  He wore a truss the rest of his life until he died from pneumonia at fifty-six. I was seven years old at the time my grandfather died.

  The next memory is my first introduction to gospel music. It is of a tabernacle that sat next to my house, where in the summertime we had revivals. The Methodists, the Baptists, and the Church of Christ all held their church services in the tabernacle. I am sitting at the table looking out the window, listening to them all. My first performance in church was when I was about five. I was wearing a white sailor suit with red trim. I start to recite a poem my grandmother taught me, but I have been picking my nose, which now starts to bleed. I hold my nose with one finger and while blood runs all over my little white sailor suit I recite my poem:

  What are you looking at me for?

  I ain’t got nothin’ to say

  If you don’t likes the looks of me

  Just look the other way

  My next memory is of our bumblebee fights. On Sundays we would all go out and fight bumblebees. I was ten years old. The farmers around Abbott would run into bumblebee nests during the week while they worked their fields. They would let us know where to go, and eight or ten of us boys would go out and fight the bees. Some days I would come home with both eyes swollen shut from bee stings.

  What fun we had!

  We made paddles, sawed out of wooden boxes, that looked like Ping-Pong paddles with holes. One of us would go in and shake the nest and stir up the bees. Then, when the bees were swarming, everyone would start swinging. The bees always headed for your eyes.

  The next memory is when we (the same bee-hunting boys and me) are all hiding behind a billboard sign on the main road, Highway 81, that runs through Abbott, which is between Waco and Dallas. We have tied a string to a lady’s purse that we laid in the middle of the highway. A car would come by, see the purse, hit the brakes, stop, and back up to get the purse. At that moment we would pull the purse back to us behind the billboard sign. The driver would then realize that it was a prank, give us the finger, and speed away. We laughed a lot.

  Another great Sunday!

  REDDY THE COW

  Reddy was a big brown milk cow that I literally grew up on. Reddy was my first “horse.” She was the first thing that I ever rode in my life, other than a stick horse. One of the first pictures that I ever saw of myself was of me sitting on Reddy’s back. I couldn’t have been more than two years old. I rode her all the time. It was my job, as I got older, to stake her out with a twenty-foot rope to graze on any grass I could find in Abbott. In the evening, I would go pick her up and ride her back home to her barn. On the way home, she always wanted to run because she could smell the barn, and she knew she was going to get fed, have some water, and get great treatment. It was also my job to take her to a bull about a mile away, when she came in heat. She seemed to sort of pick up the pace on the way to the bull. I never seemed to have any trouble getting her to go over there—Reddy was always ready!—but she walked a little slower on the way back.

  A BETTER WAY TO MAKE A BUCK

  One day while I was picking cotton, on a farm by the highway that ran between Abbott and Hillsboro—it was about a hundred degrees in the hot Texas sun, and there I was pulling along a sack of cotton—a Cadillac came by with its windows rolled up. There was something about that scene that made me start thinking more about playing a guitar. Here I was picking cotton in the heat and thinking, There’s a better way to make a dollar, and a living, than picking cotton. Sister Bobbie and I picked cotton on all the farms around Abbott every summer and every day after school. In Abbott, the schools let out at noon during harvest season, so we could all work in the fields. That’s how we made our extra money. I did a lot more farmwork than Sister Bobbie, things like baling hay and working in the cotton gin and on the corn sheller, all of which was very hard work but in a lot of ways was good for me because it made me work harder on my guitar.

  SISTER BOBBIE

  Willie and I were born to Ira and Myrle Nelson in a small Texas town called Abbott. I was born in 1931 and Willie in 1933. Our parents were seventeen when I was born and nineteen years old at Willie’s birth. We always lived with our grandparents, our father’s parents. They had moved to Texas from Arkansas the year before I was born. Ira and Myrle were married in Arkansas at the age of sixteen in order for Myrle to come to Texas with Ira and his family. The marriage lasted only long enough for Willie and me to be born. We continued living with our grandparents William Alfred and Nancy Nelson. Our grandfather was a blacksmith. A large man in stature, a quiet man but very strong in spirit, Daddy Nelson never spoke unkindly of anyone. He was very protective of Willie and me. Our grandparents were students of music and studied the music that they received through mail-order courses by lamplight every night after supper. This was our inspiration and these were our teachers.

&nb
sp; Our grandmother Mama Nelson was our music instructor. Daddy Nelson insisted that Mama start teaching us before we started school. We had a pump organ that I received my first music lessons on.

  Daddy Nelson got sick with the flu and then pneumonia when I was nine and Willie was seven years old. He died only two weeks after he got sick. But before he died he had already bought a piano for me and a guitar for Willie. He made sure I learned to play the piano a little and he had already taught Willie some guitar. Daddy Nelson played stringed instruments, and Mama Nelson had knowledge of music from her father, who taught voice classes at singing schools in Arkansas. He traveled by horseback and buggy teaching singing classes. Our grandparents were gospel music singers. Daddy Nelson’s voice was very beautiful; he was a tenor.

  Willie and I continued living with our grandmother after Daddy Nelson died. We wanted to stay with her. We were afraid they might take us away from her and put us in an orphanage. We were very fortunate we got to stay with her. She took care of us and we tried to take care of her. We had a fabulous, blessed childhood with her. She gave us all of her: her life, her time, her knowledge of the world, her spirituality, and her devoted love.

  MY NEXT-DOOR NEIGHBOR WAS MRS. BRESSLER, A DEVOUT CHRISTIAN lady who was very good friends with my grandmother. They lived next door to each other in Abbott all the time I was growing up there. She told me when I was about six years old that anyone who drank beer or smoked cigarettes—anyone who used alcohol or tobacco, really—was “going to hell.” She really believed that, and for a while I did too. I had started drinking and smoking by the time I was six years old, so if that was true, I’ve been hell-bound since I was barely out of kindergarten! I would take a dozen eggs from our chicken, walk to the grocery store, and trade the dozen eggs for a pack of Camel cigarettes. I liked the little camel on the package—after all, I was only six. They were marketing directly to me! After that I liked Lucky Strikes, Chesterfields, even tried the menthol cigarettes, because they said it was a lot easier on your throat. That’s a lot of horseshit. Cigarettes killed my mother, my father, my stepmother, and my stepfather—half the people in my family were killed by cigarettes. I watched my dad die after lying in bed with oxygen the last couple of years of his life. Cigarettes have killed more people than all the wars put together I think. But like my old buddy Billy Cooper used to say, “It’s my mouth. I’ll haul coal in it if I want to.” I think I’d have been better off with the coal.