Jody Rosen has an interesting article about Willie Nelson, who is approaching 90: Willie Nelson's Long Encore (NYTimes, Aug 17, 2022). From the article:
Abbott, a small town about 25 miles north of Waco, is where Nelson was born, in 1933. When he was 6 months old, his young parents split up, leaving Willie and his 2-year-old sister, Bobbie, in the care of their paternal grandparents. Nelson sees this as a stroke of good fortune. His grandparents, Nancy and Alfred — “Mama and Daddy Nelson” — were devoted and conscientious caretakers. They were also musicians. Mama gave singing lessons from home; Daddy, a blacksmith, played guitar. By the time Willie was 6, he had his first six-string and was learning to play chords and write songs. Bobbie was a piano prodigy who seemed to instantly assimilate new styles; she would become her brother’s enduring musical collaborator and “closest friend for a whole lifetime.”
To grow up in rural Texas during the Depression was to know an existence defined by struggle and want. But musically, Abbott held riches. Willie basked in the hymns at the United Methodist Church. The radio transmitted enthralling sounds, too: the Western swing of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, the jazz of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, Tin Pan Alley hits like “Stardust” and “All the Things You Are.” Willie was also captivated by the music he heard at movie matinees, especially the drifter anthems sung by Hollywood cowboys like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. And he worked alongside his sister and grandmother in the cotton fields, where other songs rang out. “There were a few of us white people out there,” he says. “But over here, there’d be Mexicans singing mariachis. And over there, you’d hear a Black guy singing the blues.” The trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis recalls a revealing backstage moment. “It was me, Willie, B.B. King, Ray Charles and Eric Clapton,” he says, all shooting the breeze — “and Willie said: ‘Well, gentlemen, I think I’m the only one here who actually picked cotton.’” Everyone burst into laughter. “Willie has had some profound experiences,” Marsalis says. “His music, his knowledge, comes from a long, long way.”
At 10, Nelson joined a Czech polka band that played beer halls; when he and Bobbie were teenagers, they formed a dance band with Bobbie’s young husband. He graduated from high school in 1950, served in the Air Force for nine months (he received a medical discharge for a bad back), then tried college at Baylor University in Waco before dropping out to pursue music. He married his first wife, Martha, at 19, and had three children in short order. For the next several years, he bounced around the country while working a series of jobs (saddle maker, dishwasher, door-to-door salesman) and honing his craft.
His guitar:
In 1969, Nelson bought a new guitar, a nylon-string Martin N-20, which he fitted with a pickup to produce a tone reminiscent of one of his musical gods, the jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. He named the guitar Trigger, after Roy Rogers’s horse, and before long his fingers had worn a hole in the soft spruce above its bridge.
Success:
The biggest success was Nelson. “Red Headed Stranger” was his first true hit album. Then, in 1978, came a blockbuster, “Stardust,” a collection of standards that stayed on the country album charts for a full decade, establishing the cowboy warbler as an interpreter of the American Songbook on par with the greatest jazz vocalists. In the years that followed, Nelson reached superstardom, attaining a presence in popular culture that arguably no other country singer has, unless Taylor Swift counts as a country singer. He starred in motion pictures. He visited the White House on numerous occasions. (On one visit, he got high on the roof with President Carter’s son Chip.) He did a public service announcement for NASA alongside Frank Sinatra and had a huge international hit with Julio Iglesias, the oily and absurd “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before.” He was one of few country artists to join the pop, soul and rock demigods on the charity single “We Are the World.”
Diversity, classically – concordia discors:
Nelson is a scrambler of categories. He’s down-home and urbane, countercultural and traditional, a political progressive who occupies the loftiest perch in America’s most conservative musical genre. (Presumably, many fans in his home state take issue with his endorsement of Beto O’Rourke and his call to support Texas Democrats in their fight against voter suppression.) It’s impossible to name a white performer more steeped in qualities we associate with Black music — syncopation, improvisation, blue notes, the push and pull between sacred and earthly yearnings — yet not a trace of minstrelsy can be detected in his sound. He is always — indubitably, irreducibly — Willie Nelson.
The most striking feature of his career is not length but breadth. There appear to be no songs he can’t sing and few he hasn’t. Though nominally a country artist, he is really more like an American musical unconscious, tapped into the deepest wellsprings of popular song. He has a way of making everything he sings — from “Amazing Grace” and “Danny Boy” to “Time After Time” (the Cyndi Lauper song) and “The Rainbow Connection” (the Kermit the Frog song) — sound Platonic and primordial. The only comparable figures, according to Marsalis, are Ray Charles and Louis Armstrong. “To be great in all the forms that Willie is great in — it’s extremely rare,” he says. “He has whatever that spiritual thing is, that thing you can’t describe. It’s like a shamanistic type of insight into the nature of all things. From that place of understanding, he can play anything he wants to play that comes out of the American tradition.”
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