Willie Nelson

ALSO BY JOE NICK PATOSKI

Selena: Como la Flor

Stevie Ray Vaughan: Caught in the Crossfire
(coauthor Bill Crawford)

To the Nelsons, the Patoskis, and families everywhere

Somewhere in America, 2007

T
HE SEA OF
humanity swells and roils all the way to the horizon, thousands of eyes fixed on him, thousands of hands clapping, a chorus of voices cheering and yelling, lips whistling, feet stomping, smiles everywhere, all because of him. Lone Star flags and arms thrusting skyward, hands clutching cigarette lighters and cans of beer above heads bobbing like buoys because of the music. The old man with the wild white eyebrows and wrinkled skin, his long white hair pulled back into two braids, tries to make eye contact with as many eyes as he can in ten seconds before glancing offhandedly over his shoulder at the musicians standing and sitting in place behind him. He straps on his guitar and steps to the microphone with a casualness that betrays a lifetime of going through the very same ritual night after night, year after year. He half sings, half talks five magic words that trigger a sonic roar.

Whisk-key Riv-verrr take my miiiiiind.

Abbott, 1938

E
YES HAD BEEN
gazing at him wherever folks tended to gather ever since he could remember. His first audience was a group of families at the Brooken Homecoming, an all-day reunion, picnic, and songfest in a shady grove by the small community eight miles southeast of Abbott, Texas. His grandmother had dressed him up in a white sailor suit with matching shorts. The stage was the back of a flatbed truck. The five-year-old boy showed little sign of nervousness other than picking his nose, as young boys are known to do. There was praying, singing, eating, visiting, more singing and more praying, and so much nose picking that when it was his turn to stand and recite the psalm his grandmother had taught him, his white sailor suit was splattered with blood redder than the boy’s hair. The boy acted like the nosebleed was no big deal. He followed the prayer with an original poem he recited while holding one nostril shut with his hand. In a voice that was small but not shy, he said:

What are you looking at me for?

I ain’t got nothin’ to say.

If you don’t like the looks of me,

You can look some other way.

The audience clapped and cheered. The boy beamed. He’d remembered all the words. The people seemed to like him. He liked the attention, all eyes on him. He liked making them smile. The people listening felt like family. He flashed a not-so-shy grin of gratitude. From that moment forward, Willie Hugh Nelson, who earned the nickname “Booger Red” for his bloody nose, was determined to give a good show.

East of Western Grove on Pindall Ridge, 1925

M
USIC WAS IN
the Nelson blood long before Texas, back in the rugged hills of north central Arkansas, where the isolated communities of settlers could hardly be described as settlements.

The rickety wooden shack on cedar blocks that passed for a one-room schoolhouse was hardly fit to be occupied. The floor sagged and creaked with every step taken. And yet, the room was packed to the rafters. Those present were just happy to be there.

Singing school was in session. Singing school was the social event of the year for many folks living in the hills, hollows, and backwoods of Searcy, Newton, Boone, and Marion counties in north central Arkansas. Sometimes the only social event of the year outside of church, a funeral, or a barn raising, singing school brought out the whole community, from babies to elders. For a week or two, the singing school students would learn music theory, how to sight-read by recognizing music notations, how to write lyrics, and how to write multiple parts to a song for harmonizing.

The Baptist and Methodist congregations, the faiths of the God-fearing white folks attending the schools, warmed up for each song by singing the words of the notes on the scale. Their voices were robust. No instrumental accompaniment was needed. When a particular song roused the gathering, they clapped hands and stomped feet, about as loose as Protestants got around Pindall, and sang with such power, the whole building would shake.

At times like that, Willie’s grandparents, Alfred and Nancy Nelson, knew they were doing their job.

Alfred was a blacksmith by trade, but music was his pleasure. Nancy embraced music formally, earning a degree through mail correspondence from the Chicago School of Music. She gave lessons to children around Pindall Ridge throughout the year, and both Alfred and Nancy taught singing school in surrounding communities with names as lyrical as the music they taught: Western Grove, Union Y, Everton, Snowball, Gilbert, Morning Star, Lone Pine, Evening Star, Harriet, Canaan, Hasty, Erby, Valley Springs, Zinc, and Eros.

Their love of teaching music came from Nancy’s father, William Marion Smothers, a farmer born in Barren Creek, Marion County, Arkansas, whose people had emigrated from Carroll County, Tennessee. William had married twice, fathering eighteen children, and learned music from his parents well enough to teach it himself.

For the first 150 years of the United States, singing school masters like William Smothers, Nancy and Alfred Nelson, and others were the most influential music educators in America. Few folks in the hills and hollows and backwoods in and around Searcy, Newton, Marion, and Boone counties could read, so they used songbooks in which notes were represented by distinctive shapes: a triangle for fa, an oval for sol, a square for la, and a diamond for mi. The major scale was sung in syllables: fa sol la fa sol la mi fa. Shapes made it easy for people who couldn’t read words to follow when they were cued by the teacher or in the songbooks.

Shape note singing conventions were held in churches, schoolhouses, and campgrounds, and singing sessions extended from hours into days, with voices the sole musical instruments and the audience the participants. Shape note singing was vigorous in the early twentieth century, sometimes bordering on shouts, and subtlety was not part of the curriculum in the Arkansas singing schools. Alfred Nelson led the singing in his rich bass voice, complemented by Nancy’s alto. If there was a pump organ or piano where they gathered, Nancy played it while Alfred led the singing. If not, their voices led together. Either way, they made beautiful music.

Students paid their traveling teachers with shelter, food, and other necessities, and sometimes money—just enough for them to come back again when the opportunity arose, and when Alfred wasn’t pounding hot steel into horseshoes, wagons, barrel staves, and fences for their neighbors back in the hills of the Boston Mountains, a vast woodland of sharp ridges and steep valleys in the southwestern part of the Ozark Mountains, a vague western extension of the Appalachian Mountains.

T
HE FOREBEARS
of the Nelsons stopped near the Buffalo River in the mid-nineteenth century along with a few thousand others—in sufficient number to push the Cherokee nation into Oklahoma “beyond the Permanent Indian Frontier,” where many settlers eventually moved, too. The ones who stayed were called Arkies or, more generically, hillbillies. Many had Cherokee blood.

Arkies were a curious mixture of self-reliance and self-denial. Most settlers were religious, and even after Prohibition ended, the counties around north central Arkansas continued to ban the sale of alcohol. At the time, moonshine stills proliferated in back hollows for those who took a nip of liquid corn or enjoyed gargling “White Mule.” Few African Americans lived among them; farms were so small and farmers so poor that owning slaves was considered a luxury.

The one thing Pindall Ridge and most of north central Arkansas had going for it was water. The area’s springs, caves, and sinkholes spawned gristmills, water mills, and stave mills throughout the valley. If you were near water, you could survive, and in 1882, when Franklin C. Nelson paused at a spring in an area designated Prairie Township, between the settlements of Western Grove, Pindall, and Everton, he liked what he saw. He and his wife settled the land and fifteen years later, on June 11, 1897, made it official with a homestead declaration: eighty acres—enough for a man to make something of himself and raise a family.

The Nelson homestead contained a grove of hardwoods shading a trickling stream that emerged from the pile of rocks marking the headwaters of Clear Creek, which drained into the mighty Buffalo River a few miles away. A log house would be raised a few hundred paces east of the spring, along with a barn and a smokehouse. Chickens, hogs, cows, and mules were kept nearby. Franklin came to be called Uncle Peck, and his wife, Aprilla Ann, was called Prilly. She kept a sizable garden and cultivated hollyhocks and other ornamental flowers around the home.

A small clearing was made for Uncle Peck’s blacksmith shop near the path to Western Grove and Pindall by an old stagecoach stop under a towering walnut tree by the creek, one hundred yards from the spring. There, Uncle Peck mentored his son, William Alfred, in making horseshoes, wagon wheels, staves for barrels, wheels, gates, plows, gigging poles, tools, and whatever else was needed to keep the whole grand enterprise of an agrarian and industrial society going in the hills and hollows.

William Alfred, one of Uncle Peck and Prilly’s seven children, married Nancy Elizabeth Smothers in 1900. They built their own log house over a rise on the other side of the creek on a gentle slope in a hardwood grove of walnut and red oak. Nancy had five children—Clara May, born in 1902, Rosa Lusetta, born in 1903, a stillborn child in 1904, a stillborn daughter in 1909, and Ira Doyle, born July 9, 1913.

The youngest, Ira, the only boy to survive birth, was a free spirit who enjoyed playing guitar and banjo and working with his father around his blacksmith forge. He had a striking presence and rode a jenny mule to school. “He was tall and handsome and would make music,” recalled Irene Young, who attended Pindall School with him through the eighth grade (anyone seeking a higher education had to go somewhere else). Irene was one of dozens of children who took music lessons from Nancy Nelson. “She had a big ol’ pump organ. She’d go all around, teaching lessons at country schools. She taught at Glencoe school, Union Y school. Nobody had no money, so sometimes she took chickens for teaching.” Young knew Miz Nelson was special. “She and the rest of the family was talented. They could sing. All the Nelsons and Smothers played guitars and French harp. All them Nelsons was musicians.”

But music was not enough to sustain the Nelsons, and in the fading heat of the summer of 1929, a few weeks before the October day when the stock market would crash and send the economy of the United States tumbling into the Great Depression, Alfred, his wife, his son, and Mildred Turney, a niece they were raising, decided to go to Texas.

Alfred had lost his mother earlier in the year, and after his daughter Rosa Lusetta married, she and her husband, Ernest Nichols, had moved to Hill County, Texas, a place where cotton grew tall and plentiful on the blackland prairie. The living was good down there, she informed her father and mother in letters, and after their Ira came back from visiting his Texas kinfolks and declared he was ready to move, his parents were persuaded to go with him. The family needed to be closer together, Alfred reasoned. He left little behind except blacksmith customers, the land, and his father; Frank—Uncle Peck—was determined to die on the homestead.

Before they left, Ira, the youngest of Alfred and Nancy’s children, married his girlfriend, Myrle Greenhaw, on September 6, 1929, in Newton County and took her along.

Like the Nelsons and just about everybody else in this part of the Ozarks, a fair number of Greenhaws were music people. Myrle’s daddy, William, a noted moonshiner in the area, was an expert banjo player. Myrle’s brother Carl played piano, and Myrle played guitar. The whole family sang. Myrle was a well-known flirt around Pindall, with a wild streak attributed to her mother’s being three-quarters Cherokee. But if Ira was game for settling down, she was game too.

The family left the rocky outcroppings and impenetrable thickets and headed south five hundred miles, where the farm fields were like fertile river bottom. And just like that, the Nelsons were GTT. Gone To Texas.

The Nelsons were gone to Hill County, a sprawling plain that opened up to the heavens in a way not seen back in Arkansas. The sky dominated the landscape there. The Brazos, the longest river in Texas, marked the county’s western border on its journey to the Gulf of Mexico. The landscape was lush with native grasses, including buffalo grass, big bluestem, and switchgrass. Post oak, live oak, pecan, and hackberry were the most common trees. An average of thirty-five inches of rain fell on the prairie every year, enough to make one or two crops, although one quickly learned that in Texas,
average
was merely an arbitrary number halfway between drought and flood.

Except for the cultivated crops, the small communities, and the railroads and highways, the land had been little altered since the time when woolly mammoths and, later, buffaloes rumbled through on seasonal migrations, eventually followed by native peoples, who set up seasonal campgrounds to take advantage of the abundant wildlife before moving on. Indians knew better than to establish permanent settlements in a location subject to tornadoes and seasonal drought. The pioneers, who began arriving from the east in the 1830s, thought otherwise.

The country’s Anglo settlers considered themselves Southerners. At the beginning of the Civil War, voters in Hill County overwhelmingly approved secession from the United States by a vote of 376 to 63. But despite allegiance to the Confederacy and the county’s future as farming country, Hill County was western in outlook. The outlaw John Wesley Hardin arrived in 1869 to barter cotton and hides and murdered a citizen. Other outlaws created more serious problems, especially along the Chisholm Trail, the storied cattle route up the middle of Texas to the Kansas railheads that crossed the county’s northwest corner in the early 1870s.

One community’s destiny became intertwined with the rest of the world’s with the arrival of the railroad in 1881. The need for a watering stop inspired a town site, named for Jo Abbott, a lawyer, banker, civic leader, judge, and U.S. congressman from Hill County. The fifteen-block plat of streets and alleys—ten blocks east of the railroad, five blocks west of the railroad—was formally dedicated in April 1891, nine years after Winston Treadwell’s general store opened. A hotel and a drugstore followed.

On September 15, 1896, in the middle of the cotton harvest, many locals dropped everything to join forty thousand spectators a few miles south of the town of West to watch the Crash at Crush, a publicity stunt that was the world’s first planned train wreck, in which two steam locomotives intentionally crashed into each other near the Katy line. Two men and one woman were killed by flying debris, while six others were seriously injured.

The original town of Abbott burned down the next year. Seed and steel were no match for the kind of fire that occasionally swept over the plain. The town was rebuilt, only to burn down again in 1903.

I
N
1910, Hill County produced more cotton than any other county or parish in the nation except Ellis County, the next county north. Sixty percent of the cropland in the county was cotton. By 1913, two hundred miles of rail crisscrossed Hill County, and with the train came Germans and Eastern European farmers—Czech immigrants in particular—who would have a major impact on the development of towns in southeastern Hill County such as Mertens, Penelope, and Abbott, and on the local culture, including the nightlife.

Seed and steel were no match for the boll weevil either. The infestation of the pernicious insect that feasted on cotton sapped Hill County’s upward spiral. What the weevil didn’t waste, the Great Depression destroyed. Three-quarters of the farmers in the county were working land they did not own, and with the economic downturn, the train didn’t stop in Abbott anymore. Riders had to flag it down.

By 1929, Abbott was little more than a scattering of three hundred people in houses and barns, churches for Methodists, Baptists, and Disciples of Christ (the Catholic Church for the Czechs moving into town would come later), a Baptist church for the colored folks, a tabernacle for singing conventions and revivals, three cotton gins, and the three transportation routes bisecting town—Highway 81/77, the north-south border-to-border routes connecting Canada and Mexico, the Missouri-Kansas-Texas railroad, aka the Katy, which also ran north-south, and the Interurban trolley, which ran from Waco, twenty-four miles south, to Fort Worth and Dallas, sixty-three and seventy-three miles north, respectively. For those who lived there, Abbott was something to be proud of. As native son Leo Ruzicka pointed out, “Abbott is the first town in Texas, alphabetically.”