Willie Nelson

by Graeme Thomson

  Neither was this the last blow. Ira couldn’t see much future for himself stuck in Abbott with two children and no wife. By the time his son was four and Bobbie was six, he had forged a new life for himself with a woman called Lorraine Moon, re-marrying and fathering two more children called Doyle and Charles. After fleetingly attempting to merge the two families in the house at Abbott, he decided to call it quits. He loaded his wife and two children into a pick-up truck and headed away in search of something better. They traversed Texas, from Amarillo to Houston, eventually settling in Fort Worth, where Ira found work as a mechanic at the Frank Kent Ford Company. Again, it was sufficiently near in geographical terms for Ira to keep in touch, but not quite close enough.

  Jack Clements: I think after he was grown he got acquainted with [his parents] later, but when he was growing up he didn’t see much of them.

  One can scarcely imagine the extent of the confusion and turmoil this caused a young boy. Still too young to ask the questions or indeed comprehend the answers his mother’s disappearances raised, now he faced the realisation that his father seemingly favoured his new family to the extent that he was prepared to ditch his old one. These were, of course, different times and families were by necessity pragmatic, but it was still incomprehensible to a child. To his immense credit, Nelson has never pointed the finger of blame, but it’s safe to assume it’s an issue that has troubled him deeply through the years.

  Johnny Bush: Willie doesn’t show his emotions. He guards himself pretty well. I think when he was left by his parents to live with his grandparents at an early age, he might have felt: ‘I’ve gotta get tough.’ This is my assumption. I’ve never heard him say one bad or negative thing against his mom or his dad for leaving him like that – but that’s Willie. But [as to] how he really felt inside? He had to have thoughts about why he was dumped like that. I think that’s what made him the way he was: ‘I can be miserable or I can be happy. I can be tough or I can be weak. It’s my choice.’

  There can be no question that the legacy of his abandonment has run deep throughout his life. Noting his father’s lack of will to do anything significant with his own musical gift, he became determined to be more adventurous, to transcend his surroundings. Not for him the life of a mechanic in Fort Worth, playing the odd gig at the weekend, although for a long time it looked like that was the best he could expect. His mother’s lust for life and humour, her energy and intelligence and hospitality would be handed down, but more importantly, he romanticised her departure. She became an outlaw figure, an idealised free spirit. He fantasised about Billy the Kid hiding out with her family in the hills, and she validated in his eyes the seductive if essentially selfish notion of the nomadic life.

  In turn he romanticised and mythologised his own life. He escaped into songs, cowboy movies and kung fu comics like most other boys, but in later life he lived out those storylines for real: he has become the cowboy figure in the films, the leader of a succession of rowdy gangs but at heart a heroic loner. And, above all, he has kept moving, happy to accommodate those who wish to travel in the same direction he is going in, but reluctant to stand still and throw his hand in with those who want him to become a fixed point of reference, to be there through thick and thin. It could have gone either way: people who experience that kind of trauma in early life can either overcompensate and smother those around them, or they keep everything at a distance. Myrle’s absence taught him not to hold on to anything too tightly, in case one day they might simply disappear.

  Willie Nelson: I had to stop thinking that I had a home. You’ve got to be able to move to the next big town without slashing your wrists.4

  There were other obvious repercussions. Years later, when the time came for him to marry for the first time, he practically married his mother: Martha Matthews was young, pretty, had native American blood, was as feisty as hell and as likely to settle for a life of domestic drudgery as Myrle had been. Their obvious unsuitability gave further credibility to his already jaded view of male–female relationships. It became a self fulfilling prophecy. ‘It was a long time before I ran into any positive relationships between men and women,’ he admitted.5 Almost the first song he ever wrote was a cheating song – part pastiche, no doubt, but also already filtered through the lens of experience. The heartbreak that characterised the majority of his early recorded songs was already there, what he called his ‘you-left-me-and-I-want-you-back’ kinds of songs. He wasn’t even ten.

  Connie Nelson: I think he’s got a lot of abandonment issues that come from childhood. I really do. Oh my God, it’s not at all [surprising]. Waylon [Jennings] told me one time after Willie and I split up that he felt he probably [leaves] before [people] can leave [him]. It was interesting that Waylon had that take on it. I honestly do believe that Willie has abandonment issues.

  But he did not lack love. He had his sister Bobbie, with whom he remains almost telepathically close into their 70s, he had aunts who would visit, and he had his grandparents. Nancy and William were known simply as Mama and Daddy Nelson, and they provided the first kind of stability that the Nelson kids would ever have known. It was a tough kind of love: they would be woken in the morning with a bucket of ice water thrown at them, and they had to work hard for their keep. Mama earned money working in the cafeteria of the local school and teaching music, while Daddy worked as a blacksmith, but there was very little going spare. Daddy Nelson was strict, not averse to doling out a beating with a razor strap, but his grandson adored him. When he died of pneumonia Nelson was not yet seven, and it was a devastatingly cruel blow. Another father figure bit the dust.

  Willie Nelson: I didn’t know what to make of it. It was an almost unbearable situation. I hadn’t even had time to grieve for the loss of a mother and a daddy, much less my grandfather.6

  The kids elected to stay with their grandmother, although financial restraints dictated that they had to leave their two-storey house and move into what would now be classed simply as a wooden shack. Bare earth could be seen through the floorboards. ‘They were really raised poor,’ recalls Nelson’s close childhood friend Jack Clements. ‘Everybody was poor back then, but they were poorer than most.’ It was 1939, and war was coming, but that all seemed a very, very long way away from Abbott. As Johnny Bush points out, Willie Nelson got tough. What else could he do?

  Nelson paints his early years in cowboy colours, casting himself as the hot-headed young punk who would take back-chat from no one. Quiet, but strong. There is no doubt that kids in Abbott were raised tough, and if you couldn’t fight your way out of a corner you were doing yourself a grave disservice, but he is remembered by all as a pleasant boy. It’s likely that he was already on his way to mastering the quiet charm that would see him get away with all number of moral felonies through the years with his honour and very often his hide intact. He certainly looked the part: auburn-haired, freckled, brown eyes, protruding ears, skinny and short, occasionally persuaded to don his sailor suit with the red trim and do the cute thing.

  When the Nelsons had arrived in Abbott they had joined the Methodist church, and Mama and Daddy Nelson proved to be much stricter upholders of its teachings than their children had been. One of his first really significant compositions as a songwriter, ‘Family Bible’, is a straight autobiographical recollection of this time, if bathed in nostalgia: the battered Good Book sits on the kitchen table after dinner, Dad reading, Mum singing. His grandparents instilled the basic tenets of decency with some success, but the fire and brimstone preachings which promised a sticky end to those who misbehaved left Nelson cold. He would always be a deeply spiritual man in the broadest sense, but he had no patience for the practical sacrifices and personal denials that conventional Christianity demanded. His upbringing rapidly became defined by twin, opposing forces: the stark good-or-evil religion of the Methodist church as preached by his grandmother, and the typical small-town, yet universal, temptations of girls, alcohol, music and fighting. It’s a dichotomy – rather than a contradicti
on – which has remained throughout his entire life. He has never been a definitive person.

  He grew up fast, the way most children did back then. He got drunk for the first time aged nine, courtesy of his father – the two of them colluded so that Ira’s mother wouldn’t find out and punish her grandson – and by his teens he was well into the usual mix of collective hi-jinks and private self-discovery. The escapades very fairly innocuous. There was a local rivalry with the boys of West, the kind which would be common between any small towns both then and now. He and his friends would meet in the fields out of town and fight, or sometimes turn and run if the odds were against them. He was small – 5′ 7″ at his peak and barely 130 lbs – so he had to learn how to scrap; mostly it was wrestling, but sometimes something more brutally effective was required. Nelson was fascinated by self-defence and martial arts, and would send away for the books on kung fu and jujitsu advertised in the comics he read. He is remembered by all as a personable boy, a good kid, quiet and funny, but he had a foul temper, rarely unleashed but violent in its intensity.

  Connie Nelson: He’s not real confrontational with anybody unless they get right in his face. Otherwise, he’s pretty passive. But the wrong thing at the wrong time and boy! – he’s like a locomotive. If you try to cross him or mess with any of his friends or family, that’ll get a big rise out of him quickly.

  Even now, up close, it is easy to see where that anger lives. It was partly inherited from his mother, and partly a rage that was entirely his own. In later life it would be exacerbated by alcohol, disappointment and people ‘fucking up’, as his friend Larry Trader puts it, but in Abbott it was born of confusion and frustration. By no means inclined to self-pity, he was quick to feel that he was being attacked and wasn’t always able to mask his sense of sadness from his schoolfriends.

  Dwayne Adair: I always felt sorry for Willie. We’d pick cotton in the fields and he’d say: ‘My momma and daddy are coming down from Fort Worth this weekend.’ The next Monday I’d ask him and he’d say, ‘No, they couldn’t make it.’ And he’d look so sad.7

  He would ride the freight train with friends, or they would wait in the station and rock the train as it passed through. Sometimes a rock would be thrown at the caboose at the back of the train and a federal man would come to the school to investigate. On Hallowe’en he and his friends would gather together and run around the town, pulling the wheels off wagons or stealing outdoor toilets and putting them up on the roofs of buildings.

  They might hunt squirrels or rabbits for eating, or just kill sparrows and feed them to the alley cats. On a Sunday they would fight bumblebees with paddles made from apple boxes. They would play basketball at the local county ground and on Saturday night they might go to the movies in Hillsboro and West. He stayed over at the houses of close friends like Gayle Gregory and Jack Clements, who lived right out in the country, and tried to ride horses. His aunts would sometimes take him on picnics to the huge open expanses of Cameron Park in Waco, where he would stand high up on the sheer rock and look down at the Brazos river. Later there were girls and hitchhiking and trips to Dallas, but mostly it was a self-contained environment.

  Jack Clements: There wasn’t a whole lot of activities going on. You didn’t have a lot of spare time because everybody was poor and had other things to do.

  Like everyone else, Nelson worked his way through school. There were constant chores to perform for the family, and in the summertime he picked cotton or pulled corn and packed hay bales, working with the local people. Nelson didn’t like too much manual work, especially cotton picking, and would shirk his duties. ‘It was a real hard paying job,’ he recalled later. ‘If like me you picked awhile and sat on your sack awhile, it’s not as hard as it was for some.’8 By the time he was in High school he had landed a more agreeable job, working at the barbershop on the main drag, shining shoes on a Saturday and singing while he shined them. ‘They’d tell him not to sing,’ laughs Clements. ‘They’d say, “Just shine the shoes!”’

  Abbott was like most small towns at that time in that it had its own school, despite the fact that the total pupil roll barely exceeded one hundred. The High school is still there on the western outskirts of the town, although none of it resembles how it would have appeared back in the 1940s. Now it’s a neat, modern little building, and only the football pitch remains of the original layout. It was known as White Rock Field back in Nelson’s day and was not for the faint-hearted. Before the boys played they would throw the rocks off the field, and sometimes at each other.

  Sport was a big part of his childhood. He was a decent athlete, the shortest member of the senior boys’ basketball team and a passable footballer. He was active in all sports – baseball, volleyball, track, even softball – but that was hardly a reliable indication of aptitude. The school was so small that practically everybody had to take part; there were barely forty boys between freshman and senior. Nonetheless, he must have felt he had something; after leaving school he tried for a baseball scholarship at the junior college in nearby Weatherford, but didn’t make the grade.

  He served as song leader for the Future Farmers for America, the organisation founded in 1928 to encourage agricultural education throughout the US, and also took an interest in the more creative elements of school. He enjoyed poetry and theatre studies, and when the school came to put on their annual play he was always in it. ‘He was,’ says Clements intriguingly, ‘a pretty good actor even back then.’

  Jack Clements: I don’t remember him being [unconventional] at school. He was a good student, and he didn’t get into trouble or anything like that. That came later! He was an A/B student, probably, but dropped down to a B student by the time we graduated, because he had already started to use up a lot of his time with music.

  It was music that really held him. Ira played the fiddle and picked the guitar, of course, and even Myrle had strummed the banjo, but both Nelson grandparents cherished and actually understood music, and had passed it down to the kids. Bobbie always loved the piano: she built one out of cardboard almost before she could speak, then tinkered with a toy one. When she was about five her grandfather finally bought her one for $35, no little sacrifice for a family as financially strapped as the Nelsons, and she would play songs like ‘Jesus, Lover Of My Soul’ from the Methodist hymnal book one moment, then a pop standard like ‘Moonlight In Vermont’ the next. Bobbie would drink up the serious musical theory that her grandparents taught her and quickly learned to read music, but Nelson never did. He was less keen on the theoretical study. He just wanted to play.

  His first public performance came when he was just four, reciting a poem at an all-day gospel-singing picnic. He got a nosebleed that dripped all over his white sailor suit. Daddy Nelson bought him his first guitar two years later from a Sears catalogue and taught him how to play the D, A and G chords. It was one of his final bequests, and perhaps his most useful. You can go a long way in country music with those three chords.

  Despite the poverty of their circumstances after Daddy Nelson’s death, as if by magic a radio appeared in the house, ‘a godlike presence’,9 as Nelson remembers it. Until then, he had had to rely on his grandfather and a few old 78s to provide him with music and songs. Now the whole world opened up, or at least the whole of the country. It would be hard to over-emphasise the impact that the radio made.

  It was a time when few poor people had cars, television was virtually unheard of, telephones were scarce, and radio opened up a unique and immediate line connecting global events and your own little corner of the planet. There were numerous small local stations that sent their signals over areas of a 70- or 100-mile radius, but it was also the time of the advent of the huge ‘X’ stations – so called because they all had an X in their names, such as XERA – beaming their 150,000-watt signals from across the border in Mexico and connecting the whole land. ‘Border radio’ could pretty much play what they wanted without kowtowing to the rather stringent restrictions laid down by the FBC in the Unite
d States. It opened up whole new markets for country acts like the Carter Family, and it also opened up a whole world of music for Willie Nelson.

  In Texas Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys were the kings of Western Swing, spawning dozens of local imitators. Wills would hit the stage and play for four hours straight, keeping the crowd in his pocket with barely a pause between songs, much as Nelson does today. It was hard, fast country but had elements of blues and jazz interwoven into its fabric. It sounded simple but it was devilishly hard to do well. Nelson learned much of his stagecraft from listening and watching Wills lead the band, hearing how he effortlessly moved from a shit-kicking hoedown to a heart-wringing ballad in the blink of an eye, never once losing the intensity or the crowd. He also learned a degree of professional responsibility from Wills, who kept a twelve-piece band ticking over. It’s arguably one of the main factors that has kept Nelson hitting the road so hard in recent times. When your music is keeping food in the mouths and hope in the hearts of literally scores of people, it’s hard to quit.

  Paul English: If I didn’t have Willie, I would die very shortly. I know that. I would go crazy. I would not have a purpose. Right now I feel like I have a purpose in life. We all out here have a job to do and we try to do it. We have a great inspiration.10

  Before Nelson took his place in Texan folklore, Wills was the local hero, alongside Ernest Tubb, who first landed at the Grand Ole Opry in 1943. But Nelson was soaking up sounds from all sides and all sources. Mama Nelson had taught him that ‘the definition of music is anything that is pleasing to the ear’,11 and he was testing the theory as he slid along the radio dial. Big bands from Chicago, traditional jazz, crooners like Bing Crosby, as well as the more obvious country – or hillbilly, as it was often known – fare of Hank Williams, Floyd Tillman, Leon Payne, Red Foley, Bill Monroe and live shows from the Grand Ole Opry, broadcast by WSM in Nashville. His tastes have never really changed. Sixty years later he would sit in a London hotel and reel off a list of his favourite artists, the ones he still listened to, the ones that still mattered, and most of them were the same voices he would have heard on the radio back in his wooden house in Abbott: