1975 · Behind the Songs

Willie Nelson — “Red Headed Stranger”: The Bedtime Ballad That Became an Outlaw Landmark

A forgotten 1950s ballad, a wife’s road-trip idea, and a $4,000 recording the label mistook for a demo.

Long before Willie Nelson was the Red Headed Stranger, the “Red Headed Stranger” was a song he played for children at bedtime. It was written by two people far from Nashville’s spotlight: Edith Lindeman, the entertainment editor of Virginia’s Richmond Times-Dispatch, who wrote the lyrics, and Carl Stutz, a musician who earned his living as an accountant and high school mathematics teacher, who wrote the music. Published in 1953, the ballad had originally been aimed at Perry Como, but a publishing dispute kept Como from ever recording it.

The first recording arrived in June 1954, when Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith — a Charlotte, North Carolina bandleader whose country music program was nationally syndicated — cut it for MGM Records. The single never charted, yet it drew steady radio airplay; Billboard was still noting its pull with disc jockeys more than a year later. Down in Fort Worth, a young radio host named Willie Nelson was spinning the record on his KCNC show, “The Western Express” — and, by his own later account, playing it at home as a bedtime story for his children.

The story it tells is pure western noir. A stranger rides into the town of Blue Rock on a black stallion, leading the bay-colored horse of his dead wife. In a tavern he meets a blond woman who follows him out into the night; when she grabs for his horse, he shoots her — and rides out a free man after the town decides she had been trying to steal the animal. Lindeman later explained that the lyric began with nothing more than a parlor game: sitting at home one evening, playing with the idea of colors. The redhead of the title was her own husband; she named the town Blue Rock, gave the hero a “raging black stallion,” and set a “yellow-haired” lady on a bay horse against him.

Two decades later, the bedtime song came back to Willie with a vengeance. Driving home to Austin from a 1974 ski trip to Aspen, Colorado, his then-wife Connie Koepke suggested he build an entire western concept album around it. Nelson began composing on the spot, inventing new songs to carry the Stranger’s story forward, while Koepke wrote the lyrics down as they came to him.

What happened next is one of the great studio legends in country music. In January 1975, Nelson took his road band — drummer Paul English, guitarist Jody Payne, bassist Bee Spears, his sister Bobbie Nelson on piano, and harmonica player Mickey Raphael — into Autumn Sound Studios in Garland, Texas. The arrangements were skeletal: Nelson’s battered acoustic guitar, Trigger, Bobbie’s piano, brushed drums, harmonica, a touch of mandolin. Five days of recording and a single day of mixing came to about $4,000. When engineer Phil York sweetened the tracks, Nelson told him to strip the equalization back off.

Columbia Records, the major label that had just signed Nelson with a promise of total creative control, heard the tapes and thought it was being handed a demo. Executives were dubious about releasing something so spare; Nashville producer Billy Sherrill reportedly wondered aloud whether it had been cut in somebody’s living room. Nelson’s manager Neil Reshen and Waylon Jennings traveled to New York to play the album for Columbia president Bruce Lundvall in person. Because Nelson’s contract barred further production without his approval, the record went out exactly as he had cut it.

The gamble paid off beyond anyone’s imagining. The Red Headed Stranger album topped the country chart and reached No. 28 on the pop chart, was certified gold in 1976 and double platinum ten years later, and has since entered both the National Recording Registry and the Grammy Hall of Fame. Rolling Stone placed it among the 500 greatest albums of all time. The title song itself never needed to be a single: it is the story’s front door, the moment the fugitive husband begins his journey south. In 1986 Nelson finally played the Stranger on screen in the film version of the tale, and in 2013 he cut a new duet of the song with Jack White for Third Man Records. The Western Writers of America rank it among the Top 100 Western songs of all time — a bedtime story, grown up and gone outlaw.