Willie (8 page)

All my songs have been very simply stated, right from the beginning. How much cleaner can you get than “Hello Walls”?

While I was getting involved with the radio and with learning to perform, my daddy Ira was getting himself married again and starting a new family.

Ira had picked up a couple of girls hitchhiking to Fort Worth, and by the time they arrived he had decided he would marry one of them, Lorraine Moon.

I had the normal stepmother resentment toward Lorraine. She wasn't my real mother, so I had to get over seeing her living with my real father. But Lorraine liked me and was always good to me. As a matter of fact, I felt like I was her favorite, even of her own kids. She treated me like I hung the moon.

Come to think of it, women have always loved me and I've always loved them and gotten along real well with them—until I married them.

When I was in the sixth grade, I got my first professional gig.

It was with the John Raycheck Band there in Abbott. The whole Raycheck family—all fifteen of them—played in the band. They played polkas, shoddishes, waltzes—really fun songs to play—and they would have had more use for Harpo Marx on a classical harp than they had for me on guitar. I played a non-electric guitar in a
band with fifteen horn players and drummers. There is no way the audience could have heard a single note from me. But I think the Raychecks thought I looked good sitting over there banging away.

Mama Nelson was horrified that I was playing music in a beer joint. She said, “Willie, I don't want you going on the road with your music. The road is full of temptations and pitfalls.”

To her it was “going on the road” for me to ride six miles with the Raychecks from Abbott to West, where we played on weekends.

The Raychecks' Polka Band played in the SPJST Halls, the VFW Halls, all the Bohemian dance halls around West, Waco, and Ross. The Bohemians would drink beer and have a hell of a time. The old men would be back in another room playing dominoes, and the kids and the women would be out there dancing. Many of our songs sounded like a Mexican Hat Dance—
da da, da da, da da, da da da da da da da
. All them drunk Bohemians pounding the floor with their feet, and me on the stage whacking away at my guitar.

Grandmother Nelson started to relent about my career when she discovered I could pick up $8 or $10 a night playing the guitar. It would take me all week to make that much money working in the fields. So Mama Nelson reluctantly let me do it because we needed the money.

For my part, since I had already fucked up more ways than God would let me get by with and wasn't even ten years old yet, I had in mind that the sky was the limit. You couldn't go to hell more than once, could you?

My mother Myrle had been on the West Coast, working her way through the Pacific Northwest. She had married another husband and divorced him, too. He couldn't keep up with her.

My mother and I are just alike.

I never saw my mother when she wasn't having a good time, laughing, telling jokes. She loved to cook. After I got my own band and went on the road, Mother loved for me to bring the whole band to her house in Yakima, Washington, where she finally settled down. The Northwest meant something strong to my mother. It was about as far as she could go from Searcy County, Arkansas, without jumping in the ocean.

In later years, we'd play Yakima, Spokane, Seattle, and we'd always go to Mother's house and have dinner. Bring everybody, was my mother's outlook. Take all the buses and line them up out there, and everybody get off. It didn't matter whether it was me or Kris or whoever it was—she always loved Ray Price above nearly everybody—Mother would stay up all night and cook and drink and carry on.

When she married her third and last husband, Ken—they came to see Bobbie and Mama and me in Abbott when I was about ten to tell us the news—Mother found something that made her happy and at peace with her wanderlust.

I guess I was in my twenties or thirties when I got this letter from my mother:

Dear Willie,

I fully realize that no wealth or position can endure, unless built upon truth and justice. Therefore I will engage in no transaction which does not benefit all whom it affects.

I will succeed by attracting to myself the forces I wish to use and the cooperation of other people. I will induce others to serve me, because of my willingness to serve others.

I will eliminate hatred, envy, jealousy, selfishness and cynicism by developing love for all humanity because I know that a negative attitude toward others can never bring me success. I will cause others to believe in me because I will believe in them and in my self.

I will sign my name to this formula, commit it to memory, repeat it aloud once a day with full faith that it will gradually influence my thoughts and actions so that I will become a self reliant and successful person.

Myrle M. Harvey

Rt. 8 Box 291 D

Yakima, Washington 98908

And, God love her, that's the person she was.

Well, hello there, my it's been a long, long time.

“How'm I doin'?” Oh, I guess that I'm doin fine.

It's been so long now and it seems that it was only yesterday

Gee, ain't it funny how time slips away.

How's your new love, I hope that he's doin' fine.

Heard you told him that you'd love him till the end of time.

Now, that's the same thing that you told me, seems like just the other day.

Gee, ain't it funny how time slips away.

Gotta go now, guess I'll see you around,

Don't know when tho', never know when I'll be back in town.

But remember what I tell you, that in time you're gonna pay,

And it's surprising how time slips away.

I started writing poems when I was five years old. I called them poems because I hadn't yet learned to communicate the melodies I was hearing inside of me. My poems were songs without melodies.

After I learned to play the guitar, at the age of six, I thought of the songs I composed as poems with melodies. I'm not sure whether I'm a poet or a songwriter. But I do think the first poems I wrote would have turned out to be songs had I known how to set down their melodies.

I was a serious songwriter by the age of eight. One day when I was about eleven, already a veteran of the Bohemian polka band circuit, I was thumbing through a stack of songbooks when the idea struck me that I should have a songbook of my own. Jimmie Rodgers had a songbook. Hank Williams had a songbook. Johnny Mercer and Hoagy Carmichael had songbooks. Roy Acuff had a songbook. Obviously there should be a Willie Nelson songbook. This, I decided, would be my brochure. I would hand it out to show people what I had written.

I chose the straighforward title
Songs by Willie Nelson
, which I artfully printed on the front cover. For the back side of the songbook, I drew a lariat intertwined with the words “Howdy, Pard.” Then I
drew eight little cowboy hats on the cardboard and bound the book together with string. Once it was finished, I realized this was not meant for the public. I just wanted to keep it on the table with the songbooks by Jimmie Rodgers and the others I admired.

I haven't seen the songbook but a couple of times in forty years and yet I remember every lyric to every song in it as if I had written them yesterday. Ain't it funny how time slips away?

Looking at the songbook now, I see that at the age of eleven I was already a show-business kind of guy, a kid from Abbott claiming to be from the big town—Waco.

A few years ago Waylon Jennings was pissed off at me over something or other. Flying down to Austin one day, Waylon wrote a song that went “It don't matter who lives in Austin, hoss, Bob Wills is still the king.” Waylon sang it in public for the first time at the Austin Opera House before a crowd that had jammed in there shoulder to shoulder so tight that even the fire marshal couldn't get out. The crowd screamed with surprise when they heard it because they assumed Waylon was putting me down on my own turf. But the truth is, it was just a little jab because Waylon knew I agreed. Bob Wills
is
still the king.

Back in Abbott when I was thirteen years old, playing in the band that Bobbie's husband Bud Fletcher had put together, I actually went in pardners with Bud to book the great Bob Wills for a gig at the Oak Lodge, a beer joint with a dance floor over on Lake Whitney. It was the biggest thrill of my life to that point.

Bob Wills was such a big star that he looked like he was made out of wax. He was almost like an animation. Watching him move around, I thought: This guy ain't real. He had a presence about him. He had an aura so strong it just stunned people. I doubt very seriously if Bob was aware how much that had to do with his popularity. Everyone knows he wasn't a great fiddle player and he wasn't a great
singer. But he did command respect, no argument about that. It was because of his charisma, his natural ability to take control. When he pointed at you, you
played
. Bob Wills was more than his music is what I'm saying. Elvis was the same. You had to see him in person to understand his magnetic pull. John the Baptist had the same pull. John the Baptist could sit in one spot for seven days and attract thousands of people.

The main thing is to attract people. I do it. I always thought that's what a musician was supposed to do—try to draw a crowd to hear you play. I started out thinking I want to draw attention to myself, and it was inevitable that it happened because of the power of my creative imagination.

Bob Wills taught me how to be a bandleader and how to be a star. He would hit the bandstand at 8
P.M
. and stay for four hours without a break. One song would end, he'd count four and hit another one. There was no time wasted between songs. I learned from him to keep the people moving and dancing. That way, you don't lose their attention, plus your amplifiers drown out whatever the drunks might yell. The more you keep the music going, the smoother the evening will be.

Another thing he taught me was people came and paid their money to hear what they wanted to hear. Even if Bob had a mediocre band that night, the people knew his records and his radio shows and they heard what they
thought
Bob Wills sounded like. Whether he had a good night or a bad night, every night was a good night.

Western swing was just about the only kind of country music you could hear in the state of Texas until Hank Williams came along. Western swing was jazz, any way you want to look at it. It was jazz riffs inside a country lyric with a 4/4 beat behind it. That was the Bob Wills beat that made everybody get up off their ass and dance all night long.

There were probably a dozen road bands in Texas playing western swing when I was a kid. They all played Bob Wills songs. There was Adolph Hoffner, Easy Adams, Texas Tophand, Dewey Groom, Hoyle Nicks, Spade Cooley—he was California western swing—Olie Rasmussen and the Nebraska Cornhuskers with Teddy Wiles on feature vocals. They all copied Bob Wills. The bandleaders used the same structure as Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. If Bob was carrying two fiddles, everybody else got two fiddles. If he had three, they'd go hire another fiddle player.