Willie Nelson (5 page)

“He was a salesman, not a musician,” explained Willie. He was enough of a promoter to get the band booked and draw a crowd, and enough of a con to hustle a piano or organ from a church or tent revival so the band could play a booking.

In 1947, Bud booked the band into the Avalon Club, a spacious beer joint in Waco owned by the father of a friend named Nolan Flowers, and they made enough from the cover charge at the door to pay for the sound equipment they’d rented and to pay themselves. They also performed on Mary Holliday’s talent show on WACO, the radio station where Hank Thompson first became famous, and hustled dates at the Plantation and the Scenic Wonderland in Waco (though they drew so poorly at the Wonderland that they were not asked back), Bill Drake’s and Scotty’s in West, and Albert’s, the Nite Owl, and the First and Last Chance at the county line.

“W
HEN
Willie was just getting started, me and Eldon Stafford would go down there to Albert’s place and listen to him,” Morris Russell said. “We’d eat one of ol’ Black Cat’s cheeseburgers down there—nobody made cheeseburgers like ol’ Black Cat. He was the cook, a black guy, and famous for his cooking.” Black Cat cooked the very first steak that Bobbie Nelson ever ate.

The Texans got their own fifteen-minute radio show every Saturday on KHBR 1560 AM in Hillsboro. Sandwiched between the Rhythm Wranglers and the Lone Star Playboys, the Texans would entertain the listeners in Hill County and plug any upcoming dates. The redhead who strummed the electric F-hole guitar, his newest possession, won the attention of a group of high school girls from Hillsboro and West, including Barbara Jean McDearmon, Floy Belcher, and Laura Gilmore, who formed the Willie Nelson Fan Club to support him and his playing.

Barbara Jean was Willie’s biggest booster and, after he and Faye Dell Brown broke up, his girlfriend. The Willie Nelson Fan Club showed up at all Bud Fletcher and the Texans shows at the Nite Owl and even at out-of-town bookings. Barbara Jean and all the girls knew every song and danced to the requests. The fan club also showed up to cheer Willie on at school football, track, basketball, and baseball games that he participated in. To show their appreciation, they bought him a nice western suit, which he wore with pride. “I thought Barbara Jean was the greatest chick in the world,” Willie said. They were sweethearts until the night Barbara Jean was driving back to Hillsboro from the Nite Owl and her car missed a turn and sailed off an overpass, and she was killed.

Her death hit him hard. But it did not stop him from contemplating life beyond Abbott. His favorite song was “Far Away Places with Strange-Sounding Names,” made popular in 1949 by Bing Crosby and later by Margaret Whiting. Willie sang it all the time, wondering what the rest of the world was like.

B
UD’S
parents thought Bobbie Lee and her brother were no-count music gypsies leading Bud astray. Playing music was no way to make a living. They were corrupting their Bud. And “Mamma Nelson worried about us going into a beer joint and traveling so far from home, meaning the six miles to West,” Bobbie said. “But she never condemned us for playing at a beer joint. She knew we were into this music. That’s all we’re doing. We’re playing music and learning music. And she’s music. Then I started having babies, she took care of my babies while we’d go to play. She was proud that we could play that well and sounded good. The minister, Brother Dunston, he was very inspirational to me. He knew I was this sweet little girl going to the beer joints. He didn’t really like it. He’d tell me, ‘There’s one thing for sure. If you’re going to play for the Devil, you have to play for God the next morning.’ So I’d go play for the Devil and then I’d go play for God.” Sometimes it was the same audience. “If we saw someone we knew from the night before, we didn’t talk about it,” she said. It was all music to her and her brother.

Bobbie was philosophical about the leap of faith. “I’ve always thought about the teachings of Jesus because I’d been raised in the church all my life. I lived in this church. I learned all my life you never go along with the crowd if you’re a true Christian because of the decisions that you make. I thought, What would Jesus do? Maybe Jesus wants me to go play here. And I’m going to play good. And that’s what I did.”

B
OBBIE,
Bud, Willie, and the whole band idolized Bob Wills. On weekends when the Texans weren’t booked, Bobbie and Bud would go to Fort Worth with Ira and Lorraine to hear the Texas Playboys live.

“Bud tried to be just like Bob Wills,” Bobbie said. “He’d be talking while Willie was singing, calling out leads. I’d do ‘Under the Double Eagle,’ all the boogies, and the other music that we had learned. Our crowds started picking up because we were energetic. We had quite a swing band going with the trombone and piano.” Bobbie tried to teach music to Bud, like Mamma Nelson had taught her. “He had great rhythm. I tried to show him the strings on the bass fiddle, help him learn how they worked, which notes to hit right. He didn’t care which ones he hit. He just kept the best rhythm in the world.”

Bob Wills was Willie Hugh Nelson’s hero, and Bud Fletcher resembled Bob in more ways than one. So Willie was an easy mark when Bud talked him into copromoting a Bob Wills dance in a town on the Brazos River near Hillsboro. Being a promoter meant Willie helped put up some of the money to bring Wills to town and helped advertise the booking with posters, on the radio, and by word of mouth. If the show drew enough people, Willie and Bud would make more money for promoting the event than they would for the Texans’ being the opening act. They hauled the family piano in the back of a borrowed pickup truck from Abbott to the gig.

The gamble paid off. Twelve hundred people showed up.

Willie was starstruck by Wills. “He would hit the bandstand at eight and never leave it for four hours,” he said. “He would play continually, there was no time wasted between songs. You keep the people moving and dancing and you don’t lose their attention. The more you keep the music going, the smoother the evening’s going to go. His band watched him all the time, and he only had to nod or point the bow of his fiddle to cue band members to play a solo. He was the greatest dance hall bandleader ever. That man had the magnetism or whatever a man has, which is every eye in the house glued on them all night long.”

The gamble bit back after the show. According to Bobbie Nelson, the wife of the club owner had run off with the money taken at the door. The band got paid and nobody got hurt or killed, but the Nelson kids and the Fletcher boy were left holding the bag. “We kept going back to her husband,” Bobbie said, but to no avail. “It kind of put the squelch on us promoting,” she said. “But it didn’t take Bud long to recover. He was into promoting this band.” The Texans, as far as he was concerned, were the Next Big Thing.

Several other players drifted in and out of the band, including George Uptmor on steel and fiddle, guitarist Ken Frazier, Pete Nemecek on saxophone, Lawrence Ducas on violin and jazz fiddle, and Cosett Holland and Ridley Dixon on country fiddles. “We were playing whatever Bob Wills was playing,” Willie said. “The fiddle players were trying to do the twin fiddles with three fiddles.”

Bob Wills was an inspiring role model, and he ably demonstrated who ran his show several years later, when his Texas Playboys were finally invited to perform at the Grand Ole Opry, the cradle of country music in Nashville, Tennessee. The Opry didn’t allow drums, but Wills convinced the Opry staff to compromise by letting him bring his drums and keep them behind a curtain. The ploy worked fine until Wills got particularly worked up on a song and with his bow pulled back the curtain, revealing to one and all a drum kit on the sacred stage of the Grand Ole Opry. The Opry staff went pale. The Opry audience went wild. Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys were not asked back to the program, reflecting the great divide between Tennessee and Texas when it came to music. Johnny Gimble of the Texas Playboys always said WSM, the Nashville radio station that broadcast the Grand Ole Opry, stood for “Wrong Side of the Mississippi.” Every Texas musician worth their salt who’d made the pilgrimage to Nashville knew that.

More revealing were the comments Wills had uttered to producer Art Satherley during the Texas Playboys’ first recording session, on September 23, 1935. In his liner notes for a Bob Wills compilation, music historian Rich Kienzle wrote:

“Satherley, expecting a string band like the many others he recorded, questioned the need for horns. Bob responded testily that they came with the package. Rehearsing ‘Osage Stomp,’ an adaptation of the Memphis Jug Band’s ‘Rukus Juice and Chitlin’,’ Bob maintained his usual running commentary until Satherley stopped the band and chastised Bob for hollering. Leon McAuliffe never forgot what happened next.

“‘Is that right? Okay!’ Turning to the Playboys, Bob angrily declared, ‘Pack up! We’re going home!’

“‘No, Bob, I don’t want you to go home. I want you to make records for us!’

“‘You hired Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys and Bob Wills hollers anytime he feels like it and says whatever he wants to say! Now if you want to accept that, Mr. Satherley, we’ll do it. But if you don’t, we’re goin’ home!’”

I
N
the eyes of Willie Nelson, Bud Fletcher was Bob Wills, and the Texans were the hottest Western Swing band this side of the Texas Playboys.

“The music was danceable even when we were little,” Bobbie Nelson said. “We had a great audience when we were just very small. Our audience kept building until we’d fill these places up where we played. After a while, we had no trouble booking a job, because we’d bring the people and they danced. We knew how to get them on the floor.”

Bud Fletcher and the Texans were good enough to travel.

“Bud got us a booking to play Llano [160 miles southwest of Abbott] once,” Bobbie related. “We had to take my piano, so Bud loaded it into this little-bitty Ford pickup. The piano was really too heavy for the pickup. So we had to strap the piano to the pickup. It was me, Bud, and Willie going there. We drove to Llano. It was a longer way than we thought. Willie and I had never been around. We didn’t know where Llano is. We go through miles of roads with no one or anything. I’m thinking, There’s not going to be anybody when we get there. Before we got there, this horse crossed the road and with the load we were carrying, we just avoided catastrophe. It was frightening. But we made it. It was like the SPJST hall in West where I used to go to dances with all my Catholic friends. There were church benches in this big hall, no tables or chairs, with this big bandstand in the middle of the floor. We had to put the piano up on the bandstand. It was really high.

“We got our equipment set up. It was four in the afternoon. We didn’t think anybody would be there. We’d driven all this way, we’re not going to make enough money to pay for our equipment, even. But, you know what? Just about sundown, dark, people started coming from where-I-do-not-know. They filled that place up. It was the best performance we had ever done. We played ‘There’s a Big Rock in the Road,’ ‘Blues Stay Away from Me.’ It was a rocking night. We went home feeling pretty good. We drove over by Buchanan Dam and pulled over and slept by the side of the road so we could rest enough to get home. The only problem was my grandmother trying to get Willie up to go to school after we’d been up half the night,” Bobbie said.

Music was just one aspect of the teenager’s life. Willie Hugh was a well-rounded individual. He managed to make good grades, encouraged by teachers like Mrs. McCamey, who saw a bright kid in Willie, and Mr. McCamey, the principal, who impressed Willie with his dynamic oratory whenever he made a speech in the school gymnasium.

Sports kept him in school as much as anything. He was good enough to make all the teams and felt needed. “I felt like they had to have me over here, they had to have me over there,” he said. Math, English, geography, and classroom teaching were things to be tolerated so he could compete for the Abbott Panthers as the scampering halfback for the football team, a guard for the basketball team, and shortshop on the baseball team. The kid may have been small, no taller than five foot seven, but he was a scrapper and a fighter who relished competition. “I never did think losing was a lot of fun,” he said.

“The simplest thing that I learned was to believe that you could do anything you wanted to do. That was instilled in us in Abbott at the house, in the school, in the field. ‘You’re a Texan.’ They all throw that at you. It’s pride. You take that and go with it.”

When he showed up a little bit drunk at a basketball tournament in 1949, his teammates covered for him, and Coach Bartlett never had a clue, even if one shot he took from the free-throw line flew all the way over the backboard.

Outside of class and sports, Willie wore the distinctive blue Future Farmers of America jacket with pride. Twice he won the FFA Sweetheart contest. During his freshman year in high school, a group of farmers donated $60 to buy him a calf. He went to Whitney to fetch it and brought it home to the pen where the milk cow was. It wasn’t two minutes before the calf found an opening in the pen and ran off, never to be seen again.

He helped publish the high school annual. He and Bobbie were consistently voted class favorites, Duke and Duchess, King and Queen, and the main entertainment on Friday assemblies in the cafetorium. And he excelled in the role of Uncle Billy Babcock, the Hated Old Bachelor Next Door, in the senior class production of
Oh, Aunt Jerusha,
performed in the Abbott gym on Thursday, March 30, 1950, then held over a second night by popular demand.

Acting onstage was no big deal. Mamma Nelson had brought up Willie not to be afraid to look a man or a lady in the eye when he talked to them. “There is, I think, a power there that you lose when you don’t do that,” he said.

Confidence came naturally to him. “I always instinctively felt like I was sort of in control with what was going on,” he said. He realized that when he stared at trains and got the engineer to look over his way. “I started thinking along the line that if you put your mind to something, you could do those things. When you think positive about those things, you have a better chance of getting them done. If you think you can’t do it, you won’t do it. If you want something to happen, pretend it has already happened.”