Willie (24 page)

A promo shot from 1962
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My first two albums, with Liberty Records in 1961
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Shirley and I got married in 1962
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The house at Ridgetop, outside Nashville. When it burned down at Christmas time in 1970, we all moved back to Texas
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Me as a pig farmer, 1963
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With Paul English in 1965
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Signing on with Haze Jones and Ott Devine of the Grand Ole Opry, in 1964
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On tour in 1968 with Paul English, Jimmy Day, and David Zentner
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Mama Nelson at one of our shows in the '60s
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I was sitting in the living room at Ridgetop reading the paper one afternoon in November of 1969 when Shirley walked in with a handful of mail.

Shirley opened an envelope and stared at a piece of paper like she couldn't believe what she was reading. “Willie,” she said. “This Houston hospital has sent us a maternity ward bill that says you and a Mrs. Connie Nelson have a baby daughter named Paula Carlene, born October 27th, 1969!”

A lot of thoughts went through my mind all at once. What a dumb fucking thing to do was one of them. I had put my home address on the registration forms when we checked Connie into the hospital. But I ain't stupid. I must have been tired of the secrecy and wanted to get this out in the open.

It was definitely out in the open now.

Well, Shirley took to cussing, screaming, fighting, threatening to sue, calling my sorry ass every name she could think of—and Shirley was an eloquent lady with plenty of insults in her repertoire. She did all the normal things a woman would do under the circumstances.

What could I say? My only defense was the truth—that Connie and I were in love—but this didn't calm the atmosphere at Ridgetop. Finally I got on my high horse and acted outraged and offended and stomped out of the house.

Connie and I got married at a wedding chapel in Las Vegas on my birthday, April 30, in 1971.

There was one little matter I neglected to mention to the preacher.

I was still married to Shirley.

Shirley and I had been split up for a year and a half. After our bitter battles the first couple of months following the hospital bill, Shirley moved out of Ridgetop and I didn't see her again for ten years. In my mind, my marriage to Shirley was over long ago.

I don't know whether Connie realized I was still married then or does now or really cares that much. I think she knew in her mind, too, we felt the same way. We always have felt that when we got married, we blew it. We got along so great when we were just hanging out, living together, and having a good time and she was following me around all over the country and she was my lover. When we got married, she became a wife with all the definitions that go with it.
Every time you see a joke about marriage, it's about either his infidelity or hers or he's no good, she's no good, all the nagging connotations that go along with a marriage, a husband and wife. We hated that. We didn't want to be that, and then we got married and we became that. We became a husband and a wife and all the things that go with it.

I think the paperwork in marriage means more to women than it does to men. I've always felt that a marriage contract was in the minds of the people that did it and not on a piece of paper. A judge somewhere in some courthouse had no right over me and over my mind, over my thoughts and feelings for another person. That's why, probably, they call me a rebel. I don't believe that one person can judge another person's actions. I don't think a person should say, well, okay, you're legally married or you're legally divorced. That has to be between the two people, and Shirley and me were divorced in my mind. I had divorced myself from the Shirley situation, and that was good enough for me.

Shirley was granted a divorce from me in Nashville on November 2, 1971, six months after Connie and I had our ceremony at the wedding chapel in Las Vegas.

Connie being a Catholic could have presented obstacles that we couldn't overcome in the eyes of her church, but our love was stronger than anything. All she asked of me was to agree that Paula Carlene—and Amy when she was born nearly two years later—be raised Catholic.

In 1978 Connie and I had a second wedding. It was like a reaffirmation of our love and commitment. Our second wedding was held on June 10th in the Las Vegas home of Steve Wynne, who owned the Golden Nugget. When people asked why we wanted to get married again, Connie said it was to change the date of our anniversary.

“Will is always working on his birthday,” she said.

Connie came to Ridgetop before Christmas of 1969, as soon as Shirley left. Suddenly Lana, Susie, and Billy had not only a new stepmother but also a new sister, Paula Carlene.

Connie and our baby arrived just in time to get into the middle of what our family has come to call the Great Ridgetop Shootout.

My daughter Lana had gotten married at age sixteen to a country boy named Steve Warren who was in his middle twenties. They lived a few miles away with their kids. Steve and Lana stopped by Ridgetop one morning, but Lana stayed in the car. Susie went out to talk to her sister. After Steve drove Lana away, Susie told me Lana had two
black eyes and bruises on her face. “Steve beat up Lana,” Susie told me.

I ran for my truck and drove to the place where Steve and Lana lived and slapped Steve around. He really pissed me off. I told him if he ever laid a hand on Lana again, I would come back and drown his ass.

No sooner did I get back to Ridgetop than here came Steve in his car, shooting at the house with a .22 rifle. I was standing in the door of the barn and a bullet tore up the wood two feet from my head. I grabbed an M-l rifle and shot at Steve's car. Steve made one pass and took off.

I drove straight back to Steve and Lana's. Steve had come home and taken their son Nelson Ray and left again. He told Lana he was going to get rid of me as his top priority.

Thinking Steve would come to Ridgetop to pick me off about dusk, I hid the truck so he couldn't tell if I was home. We laid a trap for him. I had my M-l and a shotgun.

He drove by the house, and I ran out the garage door. Steve saw me and took off. That's when I shot his car and shot out his tire.

Steve called the cops on me. Instead of explaining the whole damn mess, the beatings and semi-kidnapping and shooting and all, I told the officers Steve must have run over a bullet.

The police didn't want to get involved in hillbilly family fights. They wrote down what I told them on their report and took off. Then we turned back to the immediate problem of seeing to it that Steve wouldn't mistreat Lana again.

It was kind of an unusual introduction to our family, but Connie reacted like a real trouper. She's a strong person, Connie is, really good and dependable. I admired the way she handled herself at the Ridgetop Shootout.

My records still weren't selling, and we had wrecked five cars in three months. Down in the basement of the Ridgetop house we had a crude little recording setup where the guys and I would get drunk and write songs day and night. The week of Christmas in 1969, Hank and I wrote “What Can They Do to Me Now?”

On the night before Christmas Eve, I was at a party in Nashville when I got the news that the Ridgetop house had just burned to the ground. Connie and Paula Carlene were home when the fire broke out, but they were safe.

It was a horror to see the smoking black skeleton and smell the burnt wood that sizzled in the water from the fire hoses.

I ran into the smoking, stinking debris and kicked through the ashes until I found an old guitar case that contained two pounds of Colombian tea.

I stuck the case under my arm and went back to the car and sighed with relief. In 1969, you could get life in prison for being caught by the law with one joint. In Louisiana you could get the death sentence.

I was glad to find my stash before the authorities did.

The Happy Valley Dude Ranch was closed for the winter, but Crash Stewart arranged for us to move the whole family there after the Ridgetop fire. Happy Valley is near the town of Bandera, about fifty miles west of San Antonio. The country is rolling hills and cedar trees and pure flowing creeks and springs bubbling out of the limestone everyplace. As spring came to the Hill Country, the land was a riot of wildflowers—bluebonnets, Indian paintbrush, desert willow, and primrose. The afternoon sky was bright pastel blue. The way mountains of white clouds built up above the hills, looking like snowy peaks, you could imagine you were in the Rockies.

Connie and baby Paula and I moved into the ranch foreman's house. The other kids and relatives and friends and the band and their families scattered out into clapboard guest cabins. The Happy Valley Dude Ranch was a great location for us. We had an Olympic-size swimming pool, tennis courts, stables, and a nine-hole golf course. Although I had batted the golf ball around a little before, it was living on the Happy Valley golf course that started my addiction to the game.

I was reading Edgar Cayce, the healer and prophet. The poems of Kahlil Gibran made sense to me. Gibran said life on earth is a quest for returning to God.