To kids in Abbott, far removed from world events careening toward a global war, money didn’t mean much, anyhow. They went crawfishing, hiking down to Dr. Blair’s swimming hole while dodging water moccasins, exploring Hooker’s cave south of town, or scrounging a ride to Mountain Springs, where white kids could swim—no blacks or Mexicans allowed. They rode horses when they could get hold of one and even tried to ride cows. On Saturday mornings they would observe the exotic customs of the colored folks when they came to town and ordered bologna and crackers and a strawberry soda at the grocery for a nickel, or poured peanuts into their Dr Pepper.
Kids would play marbles, pitch washers, or spin tops under the roof of the open-air tabernacle at the corner of Chestnut and Border, attend sing-ins at the church or the tabernacle, fight, or hang around school for the Thursday skate nights in the high school gymnasium, when girls from Hillsboro and West would show up. The sports-minded were doubtless inspired by the banner that hung from the gym’s ceiling, “Losers Never Win, Winners Never Quit.”
In summer, there were games of Hide and Seek, Annie Over, Follow the Leader, and Piggy Wants a Signal, with ghost stories told in the dark. Every Halloween, the mischief makers would drag an outhouse and leave it on the front steps of Pope’s Grocery.
When all else failed, there was the sport of Foolin’ Cars, as explained by Jerry Frank Ruzicka: “We’d tie a string to a purse and leave it in the road and hide behind a sign. If a car would stop, the kids would pull the string and the purse and run off. One time somebody with a running board got the purse before we could pull the string,” he remembered. When the boys were feeling especially mischievous, they’d fill the purse with excrement. “You’d see a car stop and the driver pick up the purse, then go a few hundred feet before the purse went flying out the window,” recalled Jimmy Graves.
There were bumblebee wars too. “The farmers would run into bumblebees and they’d come here and tell the guys at the [Abbott Cash Grocery] store,” Morris Russell said. Billy Pope, the son of the owner of the grocery, was ringleader, being two years older than Morris and about five years older than Willie, Jerry Frank, Gene Crocker, Jimmy Bruce, and Eldon Stafford. “Billy Pope had a horse and wagon and on Sundays he’d round up all the boys in town,” Jerry Frank Ruzicka said. Morris remembered it like this: “We made us some paddles out of shingles. We’d drill holes in them. We’d fan them and get them stirred up. Once they get stirred up, they’ll chase you. It was kinda fun to get at them. If we missed, we’d start running.”
“We’d stick together,” said Jerry Frank. “One time when it snowed, the train pulled into town and we snowballed that train, so the engineer turned steam on us.” When no one was looking, they’d sneak off and smoke cedar bark, corn silk, coffee grounds, and grapevine like it was tobacco. “Willie and I smoked cedar bark in my dad’s lumberyard,” Jerry Frank said. “We wrapped newspaper around it, and man, that fire went down my throat when we drawed on it. That paper was on fire.”
WHEN Willie Hugh turned six, Mamma and Daddy Nelson bought him a Stella guitar out of the Sears catalog. Daddy Nelson taught him how to make the D, A, and G chords (the basic chords in country music), gave him a chord book, and taught him the song “Show Me the Way to Go Home.” “Polly Wolly Doodle” and “She’ll Be Comin’ ’Round the Mountain” followed. He couldn’t read music like Bobbie could. But he was already writing lyrics. The boy’s gift for composing poetry attracted notice from Miss Lawrence, his first-grade teacher, who sought out Mamma Nelson to tell her how special her boy was.
Mamma and Daddy Nelson responded by giving him elocution lessons so he could speak and sing clearly and properly and by teaching him the importance of breathing. “My grandparents were great voice teachers,” the boy would say many years later. “My grandmother taught deep breathing and singing from way down in the diaphragm. These were natural things we were taught growing up, the better your lungs are, the longer you can hold notes.”
Darkness descended upon the family on February 24, 1940, when complications from medication taken for pneumonia unexpectedly took Alfred’s life. He was fifty-six. His six-year-old grandson, Willie Hugh Nelson, was old enough to understand that his family, strong as it was, would never be the same. He was the man of the house now.
The loss of Alfred left a giant hole in all their lives. Nancy, Bobbie Lee, and Willie Hugh moved from the house on the edge of town to a smaller dwelling by the tabernacle. The house had plank floors. Its walls were made of cardboard and pages of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the newspaper of West Texas, which provided insulated protection from cold drafts in the winter and more fodder for a boy’s imagination. The cracks in the ceiling were big enough for him to stare at the stars at night.
The loss of the grandfather who raised him had a profound impact, inspiring Willie to write a flurry of heartbreak songs about losing in love, betrayal, and cheating, subjects a seven-year-old boy had not experienced himself, although he was working on it—he already had a girlfriend, Ramona Stafford. On a school trip to the State Fair of Texas in Dallas, he sat next to her and took her hand in his. They both looked straight ahead and smiled, their hands clasped together.
Nancy Nelson did her best to get by, teaching music lessons on the pump organ for a quarter or fifty cents and eventually taking a job at the Abbott school cafeteria for $18 a week. Sometimes the boy would help out, mopping floors for a dinner. It was no way to keep up with the prominent families who lived west of the tracks and the highway on the “nice” side of Abbott, but Nancy managed to instill in her family a sense of dignity and the urge to be creative.
Within a couple years of Alfred’s passing, sister and brother were putting their music learning to practice. World War II was raging in the bigger world and three local boys who joined the army—Nookie Holland, Cleo Rafferty, and J. V. Kennedy—were killed in action. But music was more than a call to arms in the small wood-frame house in Abbott; it was the glue that held them together.
THE WORDS flashed on the big screen.
REPUBLIC PICTURES PRESENTS
BACK IN THE SADDLE
The letters were superimposed over black-and-white images of singing cowboy and radio star Gene Autry, riding his stallion, Champ. It was a dramatic introduction to a story about a cowboy named Gene Autry who discovers copper on his ranch only to have evil miners pollute the water supply and poison his cattle. Along with his loyal but hapless sidekick Frog Millhouse (played by Smiley Burnette), Gene retrieves the jailed son of a neighboring ranch owner and cures him of his big-city ways to fight the bad guys and prevail in a climactic gunfight. The saga concludes back at the corral, with Gene and his beloved gal, Patsy (played by his “Little Darlin’,” Mary Lee), and all the ranch hands singing together.
The whole concept of good over evil had never made so much sense. Not even the most inspiring preacher had explained the whole cosmic reason for being as fully and eloquently as Gene had. All of Willie’s friends wanted to be like Gene, who grew up in Tioga, northeast of Dallas. Willie just wanted it a little bit more.
“Willie liked them ol’ western movies,” his friend Morris Russell said, citing films starring cowboy actors and recording artists such as Gene, Roy Rogers, Bill Boyd, Ken Maynard, and Tex Ritter. “We called them shoot-’em-ups.” “We could spend the whole afternoon on Saturdays at the Ritz in Hillsboro,” Bobbie said. “We loved Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, Johnny Mack Brown, Tom Mix, Sunset Carson,” she said, laughing. “We’d try to reconstruct the movie. I’d try my best to be Mary Lee. Until we went back again, we were into that movie, playing all the parts. We never were bored.”
When Willie was seven, he went to Hillsboro to meet his first real live cowboy-movie star. Johnny Mack Brown was no Gene or Roy, but the former football player who won the 1926 Rose Bowl for the University of Alabama Crimson Tide was certainly prolific, starring in more than 130 movies and serials. He came to Hillsboro in 1941 to do a fund-raiser for war bonds, and although “we didn’t have a hell of a lot o
f money,” Willie said, the family scraped together $18.75 for a $25 war bond. For doing their patriotic part, young Willie got to meet handsome Johnny Mack, shake his hand, and get an autograph. He came away telling friends that Johnny Mack was “a very good guy with a strong handshake and a winning smile.”
The encounter fanned the flames of his wanting to perform. “Johnny Mack, Gene, Roy, all those guys, made me want to ride my horse [or the family milk cow, the only animal the Nelsons had to ride], play the guitar, sing, shoot my gun, and win all the fights,” he said. “I wanted to do that.”
Willie and Bobbie fantasized about cowboys and cowgirls, horses and singing. Their play acting did not include cotton.
Few places on earth are hotter than the blackland prairie of North Central Texas in late August and early September. At least that’s the way it felt when you were stooped over from sunup to sundown, trying to separate the soft white fluffs of cotton from their thorny dead plant stems with your bloody fingers while dragging a nine-yard cotton sack behind your feet. The heat was wicked, with temperatures soaring well past one hundred degrees during the day and rarely dipping under eighty degrees at night.
Picking cotton under such conditions may have struck outsiders as exceptionally strenuous labor. But to poor white folks, poor black folks, and poor brown folks scattered around the southern edge of the Grand Prairie, picking cotton was one of the few sure ways to earn a few dollars in late summer. The voices of colored people were a constant across the cotton patch, and the freckle-faced redheaded kid took it all in.
“One guy would start a line over to my right and then another guy would answer him a quarter mile away on the way down the field,” Willie remembered as a man. “Next thing you knew, you’d have a whole opera going on. They sounded good to me.”
The boy picked cotton, baled hay, whatever it took. “It was sort of expected that I went and make the money, because we needed it,” he said. “I just went out and earned wherever I could.” There wasn’t much choice.
“When school started in September, they’d have half a day, then let the children go to help pick cotton,” explained Leo Ruzicka, who was a few years older than the red-haired boy. “We’d make seventy-five cents a hundred [$.75 per 100 pounds]. If a kid going to school could make that much, he’d help his mom and dad. All the farm kids did it. So did the town kids. I’d run, trying to get out there in the fields. Before school started, you picked all day. Bending over, or getting on your knees without knee pads, was the worst, one hundred degrees eating you up. You’d be glad when a cloud comes over you.”
Willie used cardboard or a piece of tire as pads for his knees to ease the pain that came from doing stoop labor. While lifting one-hundred-pound hay bales on his friend Morris’s family farm, he hurt his back. But he kept at it, and Mamma Nelson, Daddy Nelson, cousin Mildred, and sister Bobbie all picked at one time or another.
Picking made the boy wish sometimes he was anywhere else. Every time he paused to watch a car go by, headed to Waco or Dallas or Chicago or West, he’d feel the tug. “I want to go with them,” he would think.
The boy had convinced himself he could do anything if he set his mind to it. When he spied a passing train, he’d stare hard at the engineer at the helm of the locomotive to see if he could attract his attention. More often than not, the engineer would turn his head in the boy’s direction.
But he stayed and picked and sang, along with everybody else, accompanied by the rhythm of their labor. Besides stooping down in the field, he always had chores to do, lessons to learn, and things to do to take care of Bobbie and Mamma. In the summers, he would do farmwork at his friend Morris Russell’s family place, two miles east of town, or pick up money baling hay with Morris for Rudolph Kapavik.
There was always music to work on. “His grandma would make him practice guitar every day,” Jerry Frank said. “His sister was a really good piano player. I really enjoyed listening to her. She could play boogie-woogie and make that piano walk.”
The Nelson place was always a reliable place to quench a thirst. “His grandmother always had a bucket of water at the door with a gourd with a handle like a dipper,” said Jerry Frank. “They caught the rain off the roof and it went into a cistern. That’s how they got water.” Mamma Nelson used the water as a motivational tool. If Bobbie Lee or Willie Hugh was slow to rise in the morning, she’d splash them with water. The slower they got up, the more she splashed water. Bobbie Lee figured out the drill and was quick to get out of bed. Willie Hugh got wet a lot.
WILLIE Hugh passed a milestone when he got drunk on beer for the first time, at the age of nine. He’d accompanied his father, Ira, to Albert’s Place, a beer joint across the county line toward West. Both sat in with Charlie Brown’s band, and little Willie sang a couple numbers. When nobody was looking, he was also knocking back beer. After two bottles, he felt a buzz and somewhat dizzy. His words slurred, his eyes blurred. “I had to sleep it off in the car before my father would take me home to my grandmother, because she would have kicked the shit out of both of us,” he later said.
He got drunk but did not regret it. Nancy Nelson, charged with raising him, was upset when she found out, and gave both Willie Hugh and his father a tongue-lashing. But it didn’t put the fear of God in him enough to keep him from doing it again and again.
“I was going straight to hell, no doubt about it,” Willie said. “It freaked her out, plus it freaked out my neighbor Miss Brissler. By then, I decided that there was no chance for me to go on to heaven, I had already fucked up more ways than God was going to put up with, and I wasn’t even ten years old yet, so I had in mind, the sky’s the limit from here on, I mean I can’t go to hell twice.”
At least when he was playing music, Willie didn’t have to grapple with the question of whether or not dancing was sinful. He was too busy making the music for dancers to dance to. He may have been baptized and raised Methodist and been just as involved with the church as his sister and their grandparents, but Booger Red was what preachers would deride as a questioning Christian. He believed in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, as did most everyone around him, but also realized that in that big world beyond Abbott were millions and millions of people who followed different faiths. Jerry Frank Ruzicka remembered Willie talking about reincarnation when they were kids. It may have been a reaction to Alfred’s unexpected death, which the Nelsons never got over. Whatever reincarnation was, Jerry Frank and Willie talked about it and went back to playing marbles.
As a ten-year-old, Willie joined Billy Pope, Burl and Merle McMahan, and a bunch of older town kids in building a clubhouse out of pasteboard. They played dominoes, cooked, smoked, and drank coffee in the hangout. The red-haired kid was tolerated. For his part, he liked hanging with guys old enough to have a car, if they had a car. Cars took you places. Like out of Abbott.
The urge for going was almost a birthright of growing up in Abbott. In 1941, the main highway through town, US 81/77, was rerouted one mile west. The new US 81/77 was a paved road and major thoroughfare, making Abbott seem a little sleepier, a portent of the stagnation that would impact most small towns and rural areas in Texas and America once residents began their mass exodus to nearby cities in search of opportunity.
MUSIC was an opportunity, and it took you places too.
Willie had started writing songs and now he became a performer too, strumming acoustic guitar in John Rejcek’s orchestra, a family ensemble of brass instruments and drums that played polkas, waltzes, and schottisches at Czech dances. Mr. Rejcek sired sixteen children in all, but he took a shine to little Red and his musical aspirations. The night Mr. Rejcek paid the ten-year-old $6 for doing what came naturally was a revelation to Willie Hugh. It didn’t take him long to realize that was as much money as he could make on a good day in the cotton fields. Only, playing music felt good and didn’t leave him wasted and hurting, and strumming a guitar didn’t make his fingers throb the way the thorny cotton burrs did.
The stage was where Wil
lie was meant to be. “I felt right at home up there,” he said. “That was what I wanted to do. It seemed normal for me to be on a bandstand.”
He also played on the courthouse steps in Hillsboro and at Frank Clements’s barbershop in Abbott, where he shined shoes and sang a song for fifty cents a pair. By his twelfth birthday, Willie had finished his first songbook. Written on manila paper by hand in cursive script that resembled a lariat, “Songs by Willie Nelson, Waco Texas” featured an index and the lyrics—some handwritten, some typed—of fifteen original songs, including “The Moon-Was-Your-Helper,” “Sweethearts Forever,” “I’ll Wonder Alone,” “Only True Love Lingers On,” “You Still Belong to Me,” “Long Ago,” “Faded Love and Wasted Dream,” “The Storm Has Just Begun,” “Hangover Blues” (“You can keep yo rotgut whiskey / you can keep yo gin and rye / I’ll quit waking up with headaches and a wishing I could die / Don’t want no hangover blues / You can keep yo hangover blues”), “I Guess I Was Born to Be Blue,” “So Hard to Say Goodby,” “Teach Me to Sing a Long Song,” “Whenever,” “Gold Star,” and “Starting Tonight.” At the end of each lyric, he wrote “THE END” and “WILLIE NELSON,” the W and N done with a practiced flourish. On the last page, he wrote “HOWDY PARD” in lariat script and drew small cowboy hats on the borders.
At the invitation of his friend and classmate Roy Gene Urbanovsky, he also joined the Urbanovsky family’s jam sessions out at their farm near Brooken, and when Bernard Urbanovsky got married, he hired thirteen-year-old Willie to play at his wedding, along with the dance band Bernard fronted, the Czech Mates. Willie promised Mamma Nelson he’d be home by eleven, played the gig, and was paid $5 for his services.
By then the kid was old enough to have figured out that if there was money to be made in music, it was in the beer joints and dance halls, two of the few places where people spent money freely even though America was at war. He knew he was already condemned to hellfire and damnation by loitering in beer joints, and Nancy Nelson let him know she was not happy her boy worked in places like that. But she allowed it, since he went into such places out of a desire to help provide for the family.
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