Outlaw Country · Songwriting
A Texas songwriter who made breaking the rules sound like coming home.
The biography
Willie Nelson is a Texas singer, songwriter and guitarist whose career runs from the Nashville songwriting rooms of the early 1960s to the center of the outlaw country movement a decade later — and then onward for another fifty years. Born in Abbott, Texas, in 1933 and raised by his grandparents, he learned guitar as a boy and was writing songs before he was a teenager. Nashville first knew him as a writer: he wrote “Crazy,” which became Patsy Cline’s signature in 1961, along with “Hello Walls” and “Funny How Time Slips Away.” He could write hits for others, but the city’s polished studio system never quite knew what to do with his own voice — a nasal, behind-the-beat phrasing that sounded like conversation set to music.
The break came when Nelson walked away. In the early 1970s he moved back to Texas, settled in Austin, grew his hair out and started playing for the longhairs and the rednecks at the same time. Albums like Shotgun Willie (1973) and Phases and Stages (1974) announced the change, but it was Red Headed Stranger (1975) — a spare, quiet concept album about a preacher on the run — that made him a star on his own terms. “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” an old Fred Rose song, gave him his first No. 1 as a singer. Around the same time, his friendship and rivalry with Waylon Jennings gave the press a name for the whole movement: outlaw country. The outlaws were not really criminals; they were artists demanding control of their own records.
What followed was one of the longest hot streaks in American music. Nelson duetted with Jennings on “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys” (1978), wrote “On the Road Again” for the film Honeysuckle Rose (1980) and turned “Always on My Mind” into a Grammy-winning standard in 1982. He co-founded Farm Aid in 1985, recorded duets with everyone from Julio Iglesias to Snoop Dogg, and kept touring with his battered guitar, Trigger, year after year. Through it all, his gift stayed the same: a songwriter’s ear for a plain truth and a singer’s gift for making it sound easy. The braids, the bandanna and the grin became symbols, but the songs were always the point.