Willie (6 page)

Rock of Ages, Rock of Ages, cleft for me.

You can grow up side by side with a blood relative, be bound to that person heart and soul through love—and yet no two human beings remember the same experiences in the exact same way.

Some people call it Old-Timer's Disease. That's when you think everybody you know is losing their memory.

But even two people as close as me and my sister Bobbie Lee, who were never apart from the day I was born until she ran off and married Bud Fletcher at the age of sixteen, look back on our childhood in Abbott and recall the same events with wildly different emotions and impressions.

She remembers it was fun to pick cotton when we were little barefoot kids, before we ever started to school. Mama Nelson, our grandmother, would let Bobbie ride on her cotton sack and pull her between the rows. Bobbie wore a bonnet to protect her beautiful skin from the sun—look at her today, not a wrinkle on her face—and when she got tired of picking, she took a nap in the shade.

It wasn't fun from my point of view. When I was three or four Mama would pull me along on her sack, too, and I'd sneak off and sleep if I got tired. But by the time I was seven or eight, I worked the rows beside Mama Nelson, and it was serious business. You got paid
by the amount of cotton you put in your sack. The nice bosses would let the little kids like me pick whatever we could, but the nasty bosses would chase little kids out of the rows as a nuisance even though the kids needed work as bad as anybody. I saw grown men and women—whites and blacks and Mexicans—stooping to pick cotton in the most forlorn time this country has known since the Civil War. Mama Nelson, Bobbie, and I weren't in the fields for exercise. We desperately needed the few dollars we could earn in a day. I saw the bigger boys who could pick more than me were getting higher pay. I knew that, eventually, I would have to outpick them, fight them, or outwit them. But mostly I just wanted to get out of those fields.

I already knew, while Bobby and I were toiling in the fields for a living and beginning to learn music, that we weren't going to spend our lives hauling sacks of cotton. Though I have total respect and admiration for people who labor with their hands—farmers like my folks, blacksmiths like my grandfather, mechanics like my dad Ira, hod carriers, carpenters, and other physical jobs that fill me with awe—my desire to escape from manual labor started in the cottonfields of my childhood and cannot be overstated.

Four years before I was born my daddy, Ira, then sixteen years old, married my mother, Myrle, fifteen, and they packed up with Granddad and Grandmother Nelson and moved from the ridges and valleys of Searcy County, Arkansas, to Abbott, Texas, in search of a better life. They were tired of picking shoetop cotton on the slopes of the Ozarks for pennies and trusted that the fields of Central Texas would treat them better. It was the year of the stock market crash, called Black Tuesday, when Union Cigar stock dropped from $113 to $4 in only three hours and the company president took a header out of a hotel window. The stock market crash was big news in New York, but I doubt if my folks paid much attention to it. The big story of 1929 to most Americans was Admiral Byrd flying to the South Pole.

The Great Depression didn't really hit until 1931, a few months after Bobbie was born. By the time I came along in 1933, there were bread lines and soup kitchens in the cities. Franklin D. Roosevelt took office as president and started the New Deal six weeks before my opening act in Abbott, which was a loud yell at Dr. Simms. Prohibition was repealed, which opened up my future in beer joints. Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, Chicago opened its World's Fair, Walt Disney introduced a cartoon movie short of the Three Little Pigs singing “Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” and the top song of the year was “Stormy Weather.”

Not that I knew any of this at the time, of course.

But I did know, even as a baby, that I had been born into a world of music.

All of my people on both sides of my family were musical people as far back as I know. I am including my Indian blood—which I got from my mother—as being musical. If you ever spent the night dancing and chanting in a huge circle with 15,000 Indians, like I did when they made me Indian of the year in the spring of 1987 in Anadarko, Oklahoma, you would understand how powerfully musical Indians are.

My mother's family was the Greenhaws of Arkansas and Tennessee. They were talented bootleggers and moonshiners as well as musicians. My mother told me that her folks used to run hideouts in the mountains where outlaws could come and find safety. When I was little, I would daydream about Billy the Kid hiding out with my mother's family. My mother was a very strong woman, a beautiful woman. She had long hair and an Indian profile like Bobbie's and mine. Sometimes, if it was necessary for their survival, the Indians in the Greenhaw family would claim to be Mexicans. Whether they were Indians or Mexicans makes no difference to me—I would be just as proud either way—but if you've ever seen an Indian head nickel you've got a pretty good idea of what I look like side-on with my hair down.

The other side of the family—my daddy Ira's side—was totally different than the Greenhaws, but they were even more musical. My granddaddy on Ira's side was William Alfred Nelson. He'd made it through the second grade before he had to quit school to work in the fields. He married Nancy Elizabeth Smothers in the year 1900. The Ozarks in those times were full of English and Irish who were moving west in large numbers now that the Indians had been thrown off their land by the U.S. Army. These English and Irish immigrants like the Nelsons brought their folk music with them from the old country. They had a tradition as storytellers and singers and dancers and fiddle players. I believe in reincarnation and the laws of Karma. If I could have chosen as a soul about to be reborn, I would have chosen to come into the family that produced me. It wasn't an easy life I was reborn into, but it was the right one for me.

I never had any problem understanding why my parents split up. Myrle hit the road to get out of Abbott when I was six months old. Ira took off for Fort Worth a couple of years later. But they would come back to visit us and it was easy, even for a child, to see why they couldn't live together. Myrle was smart, flashy, full of energy, sharp-tongued, and beautiful. She was a dancer and a card dealer
and a waitress, and she loved the road and one honky-tonk after another. Ira was a handsome guitar picker, so naturally he attracted the ladies. But Ira wasn't much for long-distance travel. He loved his life playing music in the beer joints, but he had another aptitude that has totally escaped being passed on to me. Ira was a master mechanic, like his daddy. Ira became the top mechanic at the Frank Kent Ford Company in Fort Worth. My mother could never have stuck it out as the wife of a Fort Worth mechanic who played music on weekends. Myrle had to be moving on. A child could see it.

Dad and Mom Nelson filled our house with music. They studied music by kerosene lantern. Granddad would put me in his lap and teach me to sing “Polly Wolly Doodle All the Day” when I was barely out of diapers. They pushed Bobbie and me into music and into performing.

I really don't believe that our grandparents expected us to do anything but play music. Our dad, Ira, felt at some point in my life that I should give up a lot of that music bullshit and go find a job to support my family. Ira didn't think I was a good enough musician to go on, and that's not to say anything against him. It was his own personal opinion, and there were plenty of people who agreed with him. One problem my dad had was he couldn't learn to pick guitar behind me. My style was nothing like his. He was on the beat, and to him it sounded like I was playing all over the place.

Bobbie and I developed perfect pitch. All this means is our grandparents trained us to reproduce the memory of how many vibrations were passing through the tunnels between our ears. Music is vibrations. A housefly, for example, hums in the F key in the middle octave of your piano. Hit that key and hear it for yourself. The sense of pitch changes with the number of vibrations. A B-flat is 400 cycles of vibrating molecules, G is something else. You might hit a Bach note at 415 or hear the Austin Symphony playing at 440. Perfect pitch is when you can remember these vibrations and go back to them any time.

The most powerful influence in my early life was Granddaddy Nelson. Along with teaching us music, he and Mama Nelson tried to raise us to be solid Methodists and obedient kids. They taught us if we ever took a drink of booze or smoked a cigarette or went dancing we were doomed to hellfire. This never did make sense to me, but a little kid was supposed to believe that his grandparents and the Methodist Church knew all about heaven and hell. I can't tell you how many Sundays I would be singing in the choir in front of all those nice, churchgoing folks, and my heart would be sad because I was
thinking I was going to fry in hell because I had already drunk beer and smoked grapevine, cedarbark, and coffee grounds. It didn't seem right or fair, but how could a little kid disagree with the whole Methodist Church?

One day when I was five, I ran off from Daddy Nelson's blacksmith shop and went home without telling him. He was upset and worried about me. When he found me at home, he took his razor strap and hit me on the butt six or seven times. It hurt and it popped real loud and scared the daylights out of me. I never ran off from Daddy Nelson again.

At the age of six, I got my first real guitar. Daddy Nelson put it in my hands. It was a Stella they bought out of a Sears catalogue. The strings were about an inch off the neck. My fingers would bleed from playing it. He gave me a chord book that had the basic simple major and minor guitar chords in it. I would watch Daddy Nelson make a D chord, and then I would take the guitar and he would put my fingers on the same notes, the same frets. I learned the D, A, and G chords—the three chords you have to know to play country music—from Daddy Nelson. I picked up the C and F chords later as I progressed. If I was teaching a child to play the guitar today, I would do it exactly like Daddy Nelson did. Once the kid learns these and can hit them nice and clear any time he wants to, then he can play almost any song you can think of.

I hated music lessons when they interfered with me going outside and playing games. I wouldn't sit there and learn to read music and learn theory like Bobbie did. I wish I had, so I would know more about what I'm doing these days, but Bobbie learned it all. She is a very accomplished musician.

After a while we didn't need to be pushed to perform. You only had to hold still a minute and the Nelson kids would play you a concert. But at first we were both real shy about getting up in front of people. Bobbie and I are still shy deep down, but not when it comes to performing music.

The only time in my life I ever had stage fright, I was four years old.

I couldn't play an instrument then, but I suppose our grandparents knew stage fright was something we would have to conquer, the sooner the better. They gave us elocution lessons and taught me a poem to recite in front of a crowd. I'll never forget the scene or the poem. Nothing that bad has ever happened to me since.

It was an all-day gospel-singing picnic where I made my public debut. I had on a little white sailor suit trimmed in red, with short
pants. I loved that sailor suit. But while I was waiting for my performance to begin, I was very nervous and started picking my nose. I got a forefinger up in my nostril, and stuck a thumb up there, got to picking my nose real thoroughly, concentrating on it—and first thing I knew my nose was pouring blood.

I heard a voice saying, “And now here's little Willie Nelson.” Blood ran down my chin and dripped down the front of my white suit. It wouldn't stop. I was scared and embarrassed.

I stepped up in front of the crowd and recited:

What are you looking at me for?

I ain't got nothing to say
.

If you don't like the looks of me
,

You can look the other way
.

It was hilarious to everybody but me. I wanted more than anything to get out of there. I had learned an important show-biz lesson—when you finish your act, get out of Dodge.

Anyhow, I have never been scared performing on the stage since that day. What could possibly be more horrible than a four-year-old reciting a poem with blood gushing out of his nose onto his sailor suit?

I've performed during barroom brawls, stabbings, and shootings. I've performed for presidents and royalty, for packed houses in Las Vegas and Reno, for crowds of 100,000 in outdoor stadiums. Sometimes I've been too drunk or too high to know what I was doing up there, but, since that day, I've never been scared of guitar picking or singing.

Daddy Nelson came down sick when I was going on seven years old. They said at first he had a cold, and then it became the flu, and then they were whispering he had pneumonia. But I wasn't worried. Daddy Nelson was a giant in my eyes. Nothing could hurt this noble, powerful man. All of a sudden he was gone. It was the first time Bobbie and I ever encountered what they call death.