Willie (7 page)

I didn't know what to make of it. I think I was sad because the whole family naturally was weeping and moaning, everybody crying. It was an almost unbearable situation. It's not that I don't think you should grieve for loved ones who die. I just knew, even then, that there were things more terrible than death, that death is not necessarily bad.

Maybe I knew at that early age that death is just an illusion. Maybe I believed in reincarnation. But I think it was even more basic than that. I had learned in Sunday school about heaven and hell. If you
were a good person, when you died you went to heaven, which is a beautiful place. From the way my grandfather treated me and everybody around him, I knew he was a very good man. If heaven was the greatest place imaginable, with streets of gold, I couldn't see the necessity of getting so upset. My mother and my dad had divorced way before that point, and I hadn't even had time to grieve for the loss of a mother and a daddy, much less my grandfather.

Our separation from Mother and Daddy seemed worse than a death because they were still out there in the world but they weren't with me and Bobbie where they were supposed to be.

After Daddy Nelson died I started writing cheating songs. I was writing songs about infidelity and betrayal, at the age of seven, long before you could sing such songs in Texas. There was heartbreak in all my early songs—a lot of you-left-me-but-I-want-you-back-again.

It was 1939 when Daddy Nelson passed on. Superman and Batman were my comic book heroes.
Gone with the Wind
and
The Wizard of Oz
were playing the movie houses in Dallas. There was a World's Fair in New York. The
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
said Hitler invaded Poland, whatever that meant.

But the most important thing to Bobbie and me was we got our first radio.

It's impossible today to understand what a big event that was. The radio opened up the world to us. A godlike presence came into our home and our lives.

We heard Bob Wills singing “San Antonio Rose” on the Philco. It was a number-one hit. Little Orphan Annie was giving away decoder badges on the radio. You could turn the dial and hear songs like “Over the Rainbow” and “Deep Purple.” We listened to Kay Kyser's Kollege of Musical Knowledge and laughed at his comic, Ish Kabibble.

Grandmother and Bobbie listened to soap operas like
Stella Dallas
and
Gal Named Sunday
and
Ma Perkins
. On sick days when I stayed home from school with mumps or measles or whooping cough, I listened to all the soaps. It was great when I wasn't real sick, just sick enough to get Mama Nelson to take my temperature and give me
some ice cream. When everybody got sick of me being sick, they'd leave the house and I'd crank up the volume on the radio and twist the dial and the radio would put wings on my imagination and fly me to places I had never dreamed of.

I'm not sure why we didn't have a radio while Daddy Nelson was alive. Maybe he didn't believe in it.

After he was gone, our grandmother couldn't afford to keep us in the two-story house Bobbie and I were born in, so we moved to a smaller place that today I guess people would call a shack. But I didn't know it was a shack. Like most other families in Abbott, we had an outhouse and a water well. We never had a telephone all the years I was growing up there. You could see the bare earth through the floor planks. We pasted
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
newspapers on the walls to keep the wind from blowing through. In some places we had a layer of
Star-Telegrams
, covered by a layer of wallpaper, covered by another layer of
Star-Telegrams
. If there was nothing else to do, I could read the walls.

I would lie in my bed and look through the cracks in the roof and watch the stars. When it rained we put buckets down to catch the rainwater and used it for washing our hair. Everybody knew rainwater was the best for washing hair.

There had been a serious family conference after Daddy Nelson's funeral about who we should live with. Bobbie and I didn't want to leave Mama Nelson. We did not want to be anywhere else and we refused to be split up. We'd been with our grandmother all our lives. She lived and breathed for us, worked for us, gave us her undivided attention. We were allowed to stay in our own little home with her, and we were happy.

By the time I reached the first grade I was a confirmed believer in the customs of Abbott boyhood, codes as definite as those of
Ivanhoe
's knights. You showed respect to women and were halfway afraid of girls. If any boy insulted your sister or stood in your way in a challenging fashion, it was your duty to kick his ass. If you didn't, he would definitely kick yours.

Soon as I knew how to lick a stamp, I started sending off for all these books on self-defense that were advertised in
Batman
and
Superman
. Since I had to fight a lot—and I liked it—I wanted to be good at it. I got all the books on jujitsu and judo, which were the main martial arts of the time. I've always been interested in martial arts. Twenty-five years later I took kung fu classes where I learned how to let things slide instead of trying to act macho. Kung fu taught me about patience. I learned I didn't need to jump to get in fights.

All the great teachers have said we can't handle power unless we learn to love. But this concept was considered pure chickenshit when I was a boy in Abbott. No matter what size you were in Abbott, if you let anything at all slide, you were a sissy. A sissy could not possibly avoid a fight.

If somebody said, “Hey, Booger Red, I hear you said my ears are too big. Maybe you'd like to pull 'em off?” and I said, “No, indeed, I never mentioned your ears and in fact consider them pretty normal-looking,” I wouldn't get any credit for patience.

If he says, “My ears ain't as big as your sister's boobies” and I say, “You're right,” I don't get credit for truthfulness.

When he'd come back with “Your feet stink so bad it makes my uncle sick across the road, you yellow turdknocker,” and I'd say, “Kiss my ass,” by the time he'd say, “It looks too much like your face,” I would have had to turn into the Incredible Hulk to regain my status in the pecking order.

So instead of going through all that, I'd just land the first lick. I rushed at chances to fight. I had a real hot temper. At morning recess you might challenge a kid to meet you after school. The news would be all over the school in ten minutes: Booger Red and Johnny are going to fight after the bell. Sometimes the teachers would hear about it and put boxing gloves on me and Johnny and let us fight in front of everybody.

But usually I'd meet my opponent in a vacant lot with a crowd around, and after the first punch or two we would go to wrestling. Maybe I had stung the kid with the first blow, and then I got a headlock on him. I pushed his face down in the dirt and said, “You take it back?” Usually he didn't until I choked him some more. When he finally took it back, I said, “You give?” When he gave up to my satisfaction, I would rise and dust off my clothes, hoping I hadn't torn my shirt—which could mean a
real
ass whipping—and stand proud as my opponent walked off, crying. Not only had I won approval, I also had one less kid I'd have to fight.

Every time a new kid came to town, you had to try him before he tried you. The score had to be settled constantly. The way to go straight to the top of the pecking order and avoid dozens of fights at lower levels was to call out the toughest guy in school and whip his butt.

Naturally, romance goes along with fighting. The first girl I fell in love with was Ramona Stafford in the first grade. She was beautiful. She had long hair, and she was tall and thin. I tried to talk to her but I was pretty bashful. She knew I liked her, though, and she liked me.

Ramona and I went to the Texas State Fair in Dallas where I took her through the Tunnel of Love. I put my arm around her. Was I nervous! You drape your arm on the seat in back of her, not daring to touch her, and then slowly you reach over and kind of brush her coat with your arm and look over to see if she's getting ready to slug you.

We went through the Tunnel of Horrors, where we screamed and—
yes
!—
hugged
each other! Lord, it felt like an electric charge to hug Ramona Stafford.

I used to hate to ask girls to dance because I'd been told no a couple of times, and I didn't like that at all. So I was pretty shy with girls until I started playing the guitar. When I was up on stage, I didn't have to talk to the girls. I could watch the whole evening progress in front of me and see who was left at the end of the dance. A few years later, the girls would be drunk when the evening was over, so it was easier to talk to them after the show.

Life's not so much different now from when I started playing the guitar for girls at age seven. It's the same line, just different phases.

The old tabernacle stood between Mama Nelson's house and the intersection that separated the Baptist and Methodist churches.

The tabernacle had a wood frame with vines growing on it—morning glory and sweet-smelling honeysuckle—and people sat on benches on the dirt to hear the music and the preaching. Us kids would move the benches out on the grass to play marbles between services. Those were great nights at the tabernacle, listening to the singing. The nights were always full of lightning bugs, winking in the sky like thousands of tiny flashlights. I'd get so sleepy and so comfortable I would doze off before the preaching was over. Then when I heard the singing I would wake up and join in.

I was sprinkled in the Methodist Church when I was real small. The Baptists used to say they waited until kids got old enough to make up their own minds about the Church before they got submerged in the baptismal tank. But the Methodists sprinkled sacred water on your head and saved your soul as early as possible. I was one of those kids who kept going down front when the preacher called for converts at the end of each sermon. I'd see somebody next to me start to the front, and, well, there I'd go again. I joined the Methodist Church at least thirty times when I was a kid. Every time I'd do something bad, I'd go join the Church again. I'd walk down to the front and renounce my sins and ask Jesus Christ to come into my heart and make a date for another sprinkling, and all of a sudden
I had a new slate in the eyes of the Church. Then I'd slip off and smoke a long strip of cedarbark rolled up in a newspaper—and suddenly I was back facing the fiery furnace again.

Each time I went to the front and rededicated my life, I wanted to leave my sins with God and walk away clean. Scot-free. Except I never felt scot-free. I felt like,
wait a minute, that wasn't enough payment for all my sins
. I felt I shouldn't have got off so easy. I mean, the Church had let me off, but I hadn't let myself off.

That was the real problem—learning to let myself off.

From the first moment I heard voices on the radio, I was practically hypnotized.

Working in the cottonfields I heard migrant pickers singing—the blacks would be singing in one field, the Mexicans singing nearby, us local hands singing our own stuff. It was an awesome sound, all those voices blending, and it sure taught me the blues.

But the radio was my real education.

Much as I love jazz and am knocked out by a good jazz player who knows what he's doing, like Django Reinhardt or Jackie King—I confess a lot of “modern jazz” sounds like rehearsal noise to me—the radio taught me I was born to country music. My fingers continually turned the dial, bringing in big band dance music from the Aragon Ball Room in Chicago and Tin Pan Alley music, Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer, Bing Crosby, jazz from the powerful station in New Orleans that covered the whole country.

My fingers, though, stopped the dial at country music.

The Grand Ole Opry was a necessity on Saturday night. In the daytime I'd listen to the Light Crust Doughboys from the Baker Hotel in Mineral Wells. “We are the Light Crust Doughboys from Burrus Mills,” they would sing. Hank Thompson had a show on WACO there in Waco at noon, and I listened to it every day. I loved Lefty Frizzell, Bob Wills, Floyd Tillman, Leon Payne, Hank Williams, Bill Boyd and the Cowboy Ramblers.

A skinny kid named Frank Sinatra started on
Your Hit Parade
when I was ten years old. Sinatra's style caught my attention at once. I listened to his phrasing and admired his breath control. Somebody had taught him how to breathe.

But the same year Sinatra joined Your
Hit Parade
, 1943, a fellow called Ernest Tubb landed on the Grand Ole Opry, and the search was all over for me—I had found my first singing hero. They called him “The Texas Troubadour.” He had a song called “Jimmy Dale,” about his son who died, and it was one of the saddest songs I ever
heard. Then there was “Walkin' the Floor Over You,” which I loved and learned to play from the radio.

I could compare Ernest Tubb to Frank Sinatra, in that they both had distinctive styles that you wouldn't confuse with anybody else. I'd put Floyd Tillman in there with them. Floyd has an individual phrasing, a western swing-type jazz way of doing things.

Roy Acuff had his own style, too. I'll never forget his recording of “Great Speckled Bird,” a truly mystical song that Mama Nelson used to sing to us. I think style is why a singer is either real popular or not. If you have your own style, it doesn't really matter whether you are technically a great singer. Hoagy Carmichael, Johnny Mercer—those guys were not great singers, but they were capable of singing a song and getting their message across a lot better than a lot of good singers.

Ernest Tubb says the two most important things for a singer are clarity of thought and individual style. He says there are thousands of people who can sing on the beat but not many with a clarity of message. If you don't say your words plain, like Ernest always did—you could understand every word he sang—then you damn sure can't sell them a song.