It's a Long Story

by Willie Nelson

  Church, however, did not calm my restless and rambunctious soul.

  Mama Nelson had to tether toddler Willie to a pole in the yard to keep him from wandering off. Don’t know where I’d have gone if I could have, but I had the itch early on—the itch to look beyond the bend in the road.

  The Methodist church preached that straight is the gate. Liquor and smoking were seen as first-class tickets to hell, and while I heard those exhortations, even as a small child I never absorbed fear of the fiery pit. I can’t remember being afraid of venturing beyond that straight gate. My natural curiosity overwhelmed my religious piety.

  My first foray out of the tiny world of Abbott into the larger world of Texas was a six-mile bike ride to West, where there was a large community of Czechs. They spoke in different accents, attended the Catholic church, and had nothing against drinking beer. I was fascinated by the presence of these people who had crossed a great ocean and somehow wound up in Hill County.

  I was fascinated by the very fact of being alive—that my heart beat to the rhythm of life under the sun of the huge Texas sky, that my eyes took in the amazing sights of cotton gins and horse-drawn plows and far-off fields scorched brown under the summer heat or blooming green grass in the early days of spring.

  My eyes were even more amazed by what I saw on the screen of the Best Movie Theater in West—an even wider world whose heroes were more than mere men in white hats who shot straight and caught the bad guys. They were men who cradled guitars in their arms and sang the stars down from the heavens. They moved through the world serenading away the sinister side of life. Even though they were macho men who feared no rustler, they sang sweetly, effortlessly, and proudly. I saw that a cowboy hero is a romantic lover of life with a song on his lips, a funny sidekick close by, and a beloved horse on whose back he rides the trails of life.

  First viewed in the small movie theaters of West and Hillsboro, Texas, the Western became an early and beautiful obsession. The Western was all about daring and danger. Up on the big screen, these fearless cowboys were my first heroes. Their moral lessons, like the lessons of the Methodist church, were clear. You live life based on loyalty. You stay on the right side. You protect your own. And when the going gets rough and the day grows dark, you pick up your guitar and soothe your soul by singing the pain away.

  Their songs—eternal anthems like “Happy Trails to You” and “Back in the Saddle Again”—weren’t sung in church, but they entered my soul and informed my heart with the impact of the holy hymns taught by Mama Nelson. They were all about the great adventure. Early on, I yearned for a great adventure of my own.

  Years later I learned that these songs, whether written by Gene Autry or tunesmiths out in Hollywood, signaled the start of a category called country western music.

  Like most every little boy in the America of the late thirties, I wanted to be a cowboy, whether Wild Bill Elliott, Lash LaRue, Eddie Dean, Whip Wilson, or Hopalong Cassidy. But how can you be a cowboy without a horse? And living in a one-horse town like Abbott, that can be a problem. Fact is, Abbott was a no-horse town ’cause the only steed belonged to Mr. Harvel, who lived two miles outside town.

  On a sunny day in summer, I’d walk out to his place and ask if I could take a little ride.

  “Sure thing, little Willie,” he’d say. “Just don’t go too far.”

  Sitting on top of that old nag, I pretended to be Tex Ritter riding the plains of Wyoming until a friend spotted me and called out, “Hey, Willie. You look like you ’bout to fall off that thing.”

  “Not gonna happen,” I said. And it never did. Been a comfortable rider all my life.

  From an early age, I was also comfortable writing poems. I liked stringing words together and telling little stories. I liked the fun of rhyming, the easy flow of expressing my feelings.

  Mama and Daddy Nelson were big on proper speech. In addition to giving us music lessons, they taught us elocution. And though Bobbie and I were essentially shy country kids, they encouraged us to perform before the public, especially when the appearance was part of a religious event.

  The seminal event happened when I was four or five. My grandparents had given me a poem to read in front of a gala outdoor tabernacle meeting in Brooking, Texas. The day was part revival, part picnic. You’d eat, you’d pray, you’d hear some preaching, you’d do some singing. This went on all afternoon. Mama Nelson had dressed me up in an all-white sailor suit. The outfit brought me pride, but the idea of reciting a poem in front of this huge audience gave me jitters. Just before I was set to go on, I started picking my nose. I was nervous and didn’t realize how deeply I had dug into my skin. When I hit the stage, red blood was pouring all over my white suit. Right then and there, I ditched the poem and improvised a new one on the spot.

  What are you looking at me for?

  I got nothing to say

  If you don’t like the looks of me

  You can look another way

  That’s how I got the nickname Booger Red.

  What kind of kid was Booger Red?

  I was scrappy. I was physical. I played all the sports. I loved to compete. Winning was important. Winning felt good. I wouldn’t call myself a sore loser, but I did all I could to avoid defeat.

  And even though I’d get into fights now and then, I got along with everyone. I had a naturally easygoing nature.

  Felt natural, for instance, to be living across the street from a Mexican family. We accepted them and they accepted us. Our Mexican neighbors worked out in the fields right alongside us. Before I was old enough to pull my own cotton sack, I’d ride on Mama Nelson’s sack while she picked cotton. I loved that puffy white landscape of cotton plants bursting with blossoms. I also loved listening to the black workers making music of their own. They weren’t singing songs of complaint. They were singing songs of hope driven by a steady beat and flavored with thick harmonies made up on the spot. I couldn’t help but sing along. These were songs that praised the Lord.

  So once again I got the notion that God was everywhere. Even in the midst of backbreaking labor, God was inspiring his children to sweeten the air with melodies of joy. The field workers knew that they were being exploited with tiny pay for heavy labor. And yet they sang. They used music to turn their mood from dark to light. Music was offered up to the sky. Whether they were picking cotton, baling hay, or shucking corn, music was part of the work. As music expressed the pain, it eased the pain.

  For a young kid to absorb that idea was both a heavy and heart-lifting experience.

  Wherever you go, take music with you.

  Music never has to stop.

  Let the music keep coming through you.

  Keep singing and playing and telling your story—no matter how happy or sad—through music.

  Music will protect you.

  Music will keep you going.

  Music surrounded me, and rhythm was everywhere, too. Daddy Nelson was a blacksmith. His work fascinated me. I hung out in his shop every day and acted like his little assistant. I loved watching him take the metal from the fire before hammering the horseshoe into shape. I didn’t really have the strength to handle the anvil myself, so he’d put his hand on mine and together we’d start pounding.

  “You’re strong, little Willie,” he’d assure me, “and getting stronger every day.”

  Daddy Nelson was enormously strong himself, a heavyset man who wielded the heavy tools in his blacksmith shed like they were toys. I saw him as the strongest man in the world. On those occasions when I disobeyed him by running down the road and not returning till dinnertime, he’d spank me, but the spanking was never severe. It wasn’t in the man’s nature to hurt me. But when he did, he’d say, “If you don’t obey, son, we’ll never trust you.” Hearing those words hurt me—and, at least for a while, I stopped running off.

  Might sound corny, but the truth is we were dirt-poor in material possessions but rich in love. Along with our garden and animals, love was our sustenance. I had calves and hogs. T
hese were creatures that I fed and raised. I remember when one baby calf was so small I could stand him on my chest. That thrilled my heart. I spent hours watching the hogs sloshing around their pen. I saw that they had their own kind of keen intelligence. I saw that animals, like people, responded to love.

  I loved watching the vegetables grow—the tomatoes and the lettuce and the carrots, the turnips and the green beans. We’d throw our potatoes and onions under the house to store them for winter. Even though I didn’t use fancy words like “horticulturist” or “breeder,” I was developing skills at farming, not only because of my grandparents’ instructions but because I was a member in good standing of the Future Farmers of America, a proud organization that was strong in the rural cities of Depression-time America.

  At night we came together in front of the little Philco radio, where we heard about the suffering caused by the economic calamity. But I wasn’t old enough to understand. All I knew was that I was protected by a man and a woman devoted to making me feel safe.

  There was gospel music coming out of the Philco radio—music already close to our hearts—but also music from the Mexican station, the same kind of spirited guitar-and-marimba music we’d heard our neighbors playing late at night. We heard music from powerful faraway stations like WLS in Chicago and XERF in Mexico and KWKH in Shreveport—mariachi music or the big band music of Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller or, closer to home, country music by masters like Ernest Tubb, whose songs like “Walking the Floor Over You” made a deep impression. They called him the Texas Troubadour.

  I loved that word “troubadour” and wondered what it meant. When I was told it referred to a wandering singer of songs, that seemed like the greatest job in the world.

  The greatness of Tubb had to do with the ease with which he performed. His appeal was naturalness and sincerity. He didn’t hide his heart. A woman had left him and he had no shame about letting you know how much it hurt. He had the blues. I didn’t know the name “blues” yet, but I knew the feeling. It was the feeling of loneliness and loss.

  The blues hit me—a deep and gut-wrenching case of the blues—in 1939, when Daddy Nelson passed away at age fifty-six. He had caught pneumonia and stayed sick for a week before he died at home in bed. I was devastated the way any six-year-old boy losing the most important man in his life would be devastated. This was my first encounter with death, and the encounter could not have been closer. I wish I could tell you that I cried for days on end because I believe crying is healthy. There’s healing in tears. But my memory is foggy. Maybe I just suppressed all the scary stuff going through me. Maybe that was my way of surviving the ordeal.

  No one expected this. Daddy Nelson was a healthy giant of a man, the man with the anvil, the man with the golden voice, the man with the courage to move his family from Arkansas to Texas so that we might live off the fruit of the land, the man who sat in the first pew in the Methodist church, the man adored by his wife and his grandchildren, the man who kept it all together.

  Our rock solid world was suddenly ripped apart. Like a thief in the night, death broke down the door and stole Daddy Nelson away.

  And yet…

  I did not fall apart.

  Sister Bobbie did not fall apart.

  And, most certainly, Mama Nelson did not fall apart.

  Mama Nelson gathered her strength, gathered us to her side, and assured us, no matter what, that this family would not be broken. This family was staying together. Even though Mother Myrle and Daddy Ira were still not in a place where they could care for us, Mama Nelson could. And would. And did. And God bless her beautiful loving soul for doing just that.

  After Daddy Nelson’s death, Myrle and Ira came around. They loved the man and paid their respects. When they left us again, after services, they knew full well that we were in good hands. They realized that Mama Nelson possessed the strength and fortitude to raise us right.

  If we were poor before, without Daddy Nelson’s blacksmith trade we were that much poorer. We had to move from our two-story house to something I’d call a cottage or even a shack. Sometimes we pasted newspaper on the walls to keep the wind from blowing through. It wasn’t much. And yet…

  We tended our garden, we raised our animals, we worked the corn and cotton fields alongside the whites, blacks, and Mexicans who were in the same shape as us—folks looking to survive. We went to church, we praised the Lord, we sang his holy hymns. Bobbie kept playing that church piano and got better by the day. Music kept providing me with nourishment and bulking up my spiritual muscles.

  I don’t think it was any accident that I received my first guitar only months before Daddy Nelson passed. It was a Stella fresh from the Sears catalog. My grandfather was there to give me my first lessons. This would be the instrument that would enable me to survive life without him and endure a whole mess of heartbreaks to come.

  Like the heavy metal shoe forged to fit the horse’s foot, the guitar allowed me to trudge ahead. The guitar also awakened me to the wider world. It was the instrument I heard played when Ernest Tubb was walkin’ the floor, the instrument that, because of its simplicity, spoke to me. Sister Bobbie’s vast musical mind could deal with all those white and black keys on the piano. She knew what to do with them. Six strings was about all I could handle. Six strings made sense.

  The flood of music coming out of the Texas of my childhood made complete sense, too. And the guy who made the most sense was Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys. Later I learned that his brand of western swing changed the nature of country music. As a kid, all I knew was that I loved every song he put out. He was a fiddler and a singer and a bandleader located in neighboring Waco before he moved up to Oklahoma. He was always close by. In 1940, the year I turned seven, his “New San Antonio Rose” was a million seller. You’d hear it on the radio every ten minutes. They were calling Wills the “King of Western Swing.”

  I felt the “swing” deep in my soul. Because I had been listening to and loving the jazz of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington coming out of the Chicago station, I knew Bob Wills had been doing the same. There was the syncopation of jazz in his music. That was the swing, the part that got folks to dancing. And because I had been so close to black people, hearing them sing in the fields and on those faraway radio stations, I also heard blues in Bob Wills. Like Ernest Tubb, he sang of loss and loneliness.

  I’m not here to psychologize, but maybe because I had just suffered the loss of Daddy Nelson, maybe because I understood how lonely Mama Nelson was without her loving husband, I related to those emotions.

  This was the time when I started writing poems. I was getting more comfortable moving my fingers up and down the strings of the guitar and able to marry words to melodies. I did all this with great confidence.

  Convinced that both Bobbie and I would make our way through music, my grandmother bolstered that confidence. Every little song I invented—no matter how lame—gained her approval. There was never harsh criticism. And even though she was a God-fearing woman who loved praising the Lord, she never frowned when the secular music of Ernest Tubb and Bob Wills started stirring my heart.

  As much as this book is the history of my heart—and especially the ways in which my heart has been shaped by music—the seventh and eighth years of my life were a turning point.

  The arrival of that little Stella guitar, the death of Daddy Nelson, my introduction to suffering loss, my introduction to the joyous sound of western swing, my willingness to commit words to paper, my understanding that emotions and music could be—must be—combined… these were elements that forged a mighty motivation deep within my soul.

  The mighty motivation was to move forward.

  To write another poem.

  To learn to pick that guitar with crazy precision.

  To keep those melodies swirling inside my head.

  To let these songs help me overcome my shyness.

  And—if I’m really honest—to use these songs to get closer to the girls at school.

&n
bsp; And oh man, did I want to get close to the girls at school!

  2

  TO ALL THE GIRLS AT SCHOOL

  MY RELATIONSHIP TO THE FEMALE sex is a major theme. I’d like to think it’s a good theme, a strong theme, and one that has resulted in a great happiness. Because I’m a man who doesn’t like conflict, I’m not going to dwell on every last conflict I’ve encountered in the area of romance. But because I’m a guy writing a truthful memoir, I know that there are certain conflicts—hell, many goddamn conflicts—that I can’t ignore. All that will come later. But here, in my grade school years, such conflicts didn’t exist at all. I thought that the girls in Abbott were the prettiest flowers in all of Texas. They charmed me and, at the risk of boasting, I think they saw me in a favorable light.

  When it came to girls, I got off on a good foot. Fact is, I got along beautifully with members of the opposite sex my entire life—until I started marrying them. But that’s a different story for a different chapter. In this chapter, Booger Red, at age eight or nine or ten, began seeing the sweet correlation between music and romance. Booger Red was fascinated by the workings of the guitar and the composition of simple little songs, but it was a fascination fueled by the knowledge that a kid with a guitar in his arms and a song on his lips had a better chance of coaxing a pretty young thing into a moonlight stroll and maybe stealing a kiss.

  At school, Bobbie and I were seen as musical prodigies—she still far more than me. We were asked to perform at the assemblies and were always greeted with warm appreciation. That, along with Mama Nelson’s undying support, made us feel special and helped melt away our natural shyness. Bobbie took in the praise gracefully. I got spoiled.

  I was getting more interested in what was coming out of that Philco radio, our central source of information. These were the years when I delivered the Hillsboro Mirror on my bike, but when it came to news I was more of a listener than a reader.