Willie Nelson

One of country & western's most popular, prolific, and distinctive singer/songwriters, Willie Nelson started out as a songwriter without much of a solo singing career and eventually became a star singer mostly covering pop and C&W standards. His dry, wry voice and plaintive, understated delivery helped him transcend country to reach wider pop audiences. In the '70s he spearheaded "outlaw" country - the non-Nashville alliance between "redneck" country musicians and “hippie” rock musicians - and helped establish Austin, Texas, as a country-rock capital. His grizzled face brought him film roles in Electric Horseman, Honeysuckle Rose, Barbarossa, and 1984’s Songwriter, in which he costarred with Kris Kristofferson (who, a year later, would join Nelson, Johnny Cash, and Waylon Jennings on the first Highwaymen project). His problems with the Internal Revenue Service, as well as his leisure-time marijuana use, made Nelson an “outlaw” for real - and a counterculture style hero to many, long after the counterculture had gone back underground.

Nelson was raised by his grandparents and worked cotton fields until he was 10, when he began playing guitar in local German and Czech polka bands. He joined the air force, after which he attended Baylor University in Waco, Texas. Before dropping out, he sold Bibles and encyclopedias door-to-door, worked as a disc jockey and musician, and taught Sunday school. While teaching Sunday school in Fort Worth, Nelson was also playing honky-tonk clubs on Saturday nights; when his parishioners demanded he choose between the church and music, he chose the latter. He played bars around the country, taught guitar, and wrote songs.

With the $50 he earned from his first published song, “Family Bible,” Nelson went to Nashville, where songwriter Hank Cochran got him a publishing contract. Nelson wrote pop and C&W hits for many artists: “Night Life” for Rusty Draper, “Funny How Time Slips Away” for Jimmy Elledge and Johnny Tillotson, “Crazy” for Patsy Cline, “Hello Walls” for Faron Young, “Wake Me When It’s Over” for Andy Williams, and “Pretty Paper” for Roy Orbison. Eventually, he had a recording contract of his own, but his weathered tenor and his taste for sparse backup were considered uncommercial.

When his Nashville home burned down around 1970, Nelson moved back to Texas, continuing to record, write, and perform. In 1972 he held his first annual Fourth of July picnic with young and old rock and country musicians in Dripping Springs, Texas - an event that would soon become a local institution. The Fourth of July was named Willie Nelson Day by the Texas Senate in 1975. In Austin, Nelson also began to clarify his own ideas on country music, simultaneously reclaiming traditions of honky-tonk, Western swing, and early country music and giving the songs a starker, more modern outlook. Phases and Stages, a concept album produced by Arif Mardin, introduced Nelson’s mature style, and 1975’s Red Headed Stranger, a “country opera,” made his music a commercial success. With a hit remake of Fred Rose’s “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” (originally recorded by Roy Acuff in the ’40s), the album went gold. In 1975 Nelson shared the Outlaws compilation LP with Waylon Jennings, Tompall Glaser, and Jessi Colter, three other country musicians ignored by the Nashville establishment; it was the first platinum country LP.

Nelson and his band, which included his older sister Bobbie on piano, toured constantly through the ’70s and were a major concert attraction through the South and West before the rest of the country caught on. But by the end of the decade, Nelson was an established star. Willie and Family Live (1978) went double platinum.

Meanwhile, Nelson’s songwriting tapered off; he did an album-length tribute to Kris Kristofferson and made duet albums with George Jones, Merle Haggard, and Ray Price. The 4 million–seller Stardust, produced by Memphis veteran Booker T. Jones, was an album of old pop standards. For Honeysuckle Rose, Nelson wrote one new song, “On the Road Again,” that became a #1 country single and a #20 pop hit. In the ’80s Nelson had multiplatinum albums withAlways on My Mind and Greatest Hits while maintaining his prolific output of music and films. The first Highwaymen collaboration with Kristofferson, Jennings, and Johnny Cash (#35, 1985) went gold - as did the 1985 Half Nelson, though it reached only #178 on the pop albums chart. In 1984 Nelson dueted with Julio Iglesias on the #5 pop hit “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before”; in 1985 he helped launch the first Farm Aid concert for America’s embattled family farmers. Along with Neil Young and John Mellencamp, he has helped organize each succeeding Farm Aid benefit show.

Since the early ’70s, even while performing in Las Vegas (as he did in the late ’70s), Nelson has sported his standard attire: long hair and beard, headband, jeans, T-shirt, and running shoes. The latter four items were nearly the only possessions he had left after the IRS investigated him and in 1990 slapped him with a $16.7 million bill. Nelson was forced to auction off almost all of his possessions in 1991 (most of them reportedly bought by friends who vowed to return them to Nelson once he regained financial stability). To help raise desperately needed capital, Nelson sold Who’ll Buy My Memories? (subtitled The IRS Tapes) direct through an 800 telephone number. Nelson and the IRS eventually agreed to a $9 million settlement, and the singer sued the accounting firm of Price Waterhouse, claiming it had mismanaged his finances. More money came in through Nelson’s appearances in TV and radio ads for Taco Bell.

In 1993 Nelson recorded the acclaimed Across the Borderline, on which such in-demand rock pros as producer Don Was (who’d recently rescued Bonnie Raitt and the B-52’s from commercial oblivion) and mixer Bob Clearmountain recorded Nelson duetting with Bonnie Raitt, Sinéad O’Connor, and Bob Dylan, on tunes by Dylan, Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, John Hiatt, and Lyle Lovett. Nelson followed that up with Moonlight Becomes You, a Stardust-style album of old pop standards that began with a “hidden” track in which Nelson told listeners that the album was on independent Justice Records because no major label would gamble on releasing such a record. Be that as it may, Nelson moved to Liberty for his next recording, 1995’s Healing Hands of Time, another set of pop standards. The following year, he became the first country performer to sign with Island Records, and he released the self-penned, self-produced Spirit; he followed that with the critically acclaimed Teatro (#104, 1998), a collaboration with producer Daniel Lanois. Eclectic as always, Nelson then released a jazzy collection of instrumentals (1999’s Night and Day) before seguing into his first blues record (2000’s Milk Cow Blues), on which he revisited some of his older songs. Nelson was inducted in the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1993.

from The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll (Simon & Schuster, 2001)