One Of The Greatest Musicians To Grace A Sound Stage.
Places To Go:
Biography - This page contains a biography documenting the life of Willie Nelson.
Music Samples
- Listen to some samples of Willie Nelson music.
Song Lyrics: Across The Borderline - Read the lyrics for Willie Nelson's Across The Borderline
Song Lyrics: On the Road Again - Read the lyrics for On The Road Again.
Song Lyrics: To All The Girls I've Loved Before - Read the lyrics for To All The Girls I've Loved Before.
Other Willie Nelson Related Sites:
The Willie Nelson Picnic - A great new page about Willie Nelson, celebrating his new label, Luck Records.
CD Universe - Artist: Willie Nelson - Visit CD Universe's site where you can buy CDs and Cassettes from Willie Nelson
and many other great artists.
Sony Music: Willie Nelson - Sony Music's Willie Nelson page. Great Biographical information and more.
Great American Country: Willie Nelson - Visit this great page with tons of great information about Willie Nelson. Contains
an excellent table documenting Willie's life.
Wilma Spotlights Willie Nelson - One of Wilma's spotlights, this is one of my favorite Nelson pages, lots of great information.
The I - Willie Nelson - A fairly long page with a whole bunch about Willie.
Luckenbach Texas & 4th of July - Visit the webpage of Luckenbach, Texas; host city (or village) of Willie's 4th of
July pi
Just wanted to let anyone know.
AND the road does go on forever.
As the Outlaw reels off the rest of the year, a schedule that would leave most 30-year-olds examining their boot heels
for holes yet alone a 63-year-old, 172cm, four-times married, scrawny country muso who's just stepped out of the shower a
few hours before yet another show, this one in Louisville Kentucky, history seems to unravel in his voice - as cracked and
weather-beaten as the well-worn leather skin that clings to his frame. There's nothing much to spare.
Willie Nelson is every centimetre the highwayman; the sad, spiritual poet endlessly travelling Americana, truckstop,
pitstop, small town and large, a battered 33-year-old guitar wearing the signatures of his best friends, precisely that. When
he wakes up the first name he sees is Roger Miller. Play it again, Sam.
And he doesn't want to stop. Probably can't. He gets around. "Yeah, really," the latter word intoned deep and low swallows
a vast space. "I'm having a good time doing it. If I wasn't I wouldn't be out here." And today he's proud. There's some news
he's been handed by the self-daubed "the Family", a restless coterie of musicians, stagehands, roadies, technicians, management
and the titleless who trade constant adulation for a job and swing like a gate in a Texas twister around his presence. Mostly
they fall into the Willie factor: long hair - his hangs waist and longer, boots and ankle tight jeans, headbands, leather
jackets and all manner of accessories. Wyatt Earp meets Sonny Barger and the Hells and Angels.
"I was just looking at a new list somebody put together here of the 30 highest selling album sales of all time and I'm
number 25 with 31 million. The Beatles are top with 70-something million and Brooks is second with 60 million. I'm right under
Prince and right over Eric Clapton, so I'm in good shape. And they didn't count the bootlegs." The chuckle is a rattler. "For
every one that's sold there's another one copied so there's 60 million people that have records out there."
They call him a national monument - and that's part of the reason why. The other is because he's on that highway, he's
part of the land, seems to breathe the very essence of the dirt and downbeat, is as much part of the folk as he is of folklore.
His press is littered with euphemism and allegory about his presence: Willie Nelson is closer to a spiritual leader, a guru
than a mere truckin' man. Some swear they've seen him heal people; others would die for him. Emmylou Harris, herself a latterday
Earth Mother, once summed it up, "He has this presence that radiates out of him, an aura. You can feel it even when he's not
in the room. If you want to understand what I'm talking about, go to one of his concerts. People act like they're in church,
as if he fills a spiritual void for them."
Alternatively, listen to his new album, "Spirit", the 100 and something Willie Nelson collection of "simple troubadour"
songs; the record he modestly drawls "just might be the best yet". Poignant doesn't do it justice: "Spirit" rips at the heart
and soul with such sad beauty, such a deluge of emotion, that's it's easy to unde
He stayed with it. The '70s brought the crossover of Willie Nelson. When his Nashville home burnt down just before Christmas
1970, Nelson took it as an omen and went home to Texas and found his future. Another simple twist of fate. Signing with Atlantic
Records he recorded two albums, "Shotgun Willie" and "Phases and Stages" that gave him both critical acclaim and his best
sales to date. When he shifted to Columbia and released "Red Headed Stranger" in 1975, a country concept album, stark and
raw, it bore "Blue Eye's Crying In The Rain", an unexpected pop hit that spearheaded a traditional country revival. The following
year, RCA packed previously-issued Nelson-material with songs by Jennings, Colter and Tompall Glaser on one disc "Wanted:
The Outlaws". It became the first million-selling country album and sparked a musical revolution. And the rest as they say
is history.
The "Fourth Of July" picnics, which have become the stuff of legend; his annual Farm Aid shows that have called attention
to the horrific and largely ignored plight of the American farmer since 1985; an acting career that includes features such
as "Thief", "The Electric Horseman", "Red Headed Stranger", "Honeysuckle Rose", "Barbarosa" and "Songwriter"; and the Highwaymen
- man, it's "Stardust".
Not that having that album on the charts for more than a decade ranks much. "Spirit", the record where Nelson dispensed
of big band backdrops got down to just fiddle, piano and rhythm guitar - and his voice and gut-string picking, that brings
on the some rumbling analysis. The voice as a weapon.
"I think there's a danger of every time you add a musician, of losing the feel of a session. I know for sure that some
of the great recordings were done with just a voice with no instrumentation; some of the cantors in the churches, they had
no instruments. The churches I grew up in Abbott, Texas, particularly a Church of Christ, had no instruments. They just sang
with the voices which is beautiful.
"Then you add a guitar and that's where I started getting interested in hearing and listening to music. I heard guys
like Ernest Tubb and his guitar and Jimmy Rodgers and his guitar, Eddie Arnold and his guitar, Hank Williams ... and I just
started putting things together in a supple way but then I'd listen to Bob Wills who has a big swing band. There is something
lost each time you add a musician.
"To go against that I just did an album with 60 pieces out in LA called "Everything Has A Time" with Jimmy Bowen but
those songs on there they called for that kind of treatment. We did songs like "All The Things You Are", songs I thought needed
a plush lush sound, but for my songs - strictly my songs, I think they sound better the more simple they are. I like the voice.
I think I'm in better health than ever so that's going to effect my lungs and singing. Yeah.
"I really do think this might be the best album. It's so simple and it was so easy to do and there's a lot of new songs
in there that happened at the right time for the album and I put some old ones in that fit the spirit of the album. Some of
them go back 17 years. I guess they finally found a place in life. It sort of came together
Other Willie Nelson Related Sites:
The Willie Nelson Picnic - A great new page about Willie Nelson, celebrating his new label, Luck Records.
CD Universe - Artist: Willie Nelson - Visit CD Universe's site where you can buy CDs and Cassettes from Willie Nelson
and many other great artists.
Sony Music: Willie Nelson - Sony Music's Willie Nelson page. Great Biographical information and more.
Great American Country: Willie Nelson - Visit this great page with tons of great information about Willie Nelson. Contains
an excellent table documenting Willie's life.
Wilma Spotlights Willie Nelson - One of Wilma's spotlights, this is one of my favorite Nelson pages, lots of great information.
The I - Willie Nelson - A fairly long page with a whole bunch about Willie.
Luckenbach Texas & 4th of July - Visit the webpage of Luckenbach, Texas; host city (or village) of Willie's 4th of
J
"The Buick took me as far as downtown Nashville
and then belched smoke and kind of sighed like an
old horse and
laid down and died. But I was in Nashville at last, ready to shoot it out
with the big boys."
And his talent and tenacity as a songwriter was soon rewarded. By the end of 1962 he'd written smash hit singles for
Faron Young, Billy Walker, Patsy Cline, and Ray Price. Still, Willie Nelson's dream of making it big on his own as a country
singer was frustrated from the very beginning. In Texas, Nelson had mastered a conversational, intentionally off-the-beat
style of vocal phrasing that was misunderstood in tradition-loving Nashville. For ten years, he struggled through three labels
and fourteen albums, but Nashville, using session players instead of Willie's own band and often burying his unusual vocal
style behind horns and strings, failed to cut his breakthrough record.
"My demos were always better, I thought, than the records that came out, " says Willie. "After all the voices and the
strings had been put onto the record, it wasn't anything that I could reproduce live onstage anywhere. It sounded beautiful,
but it wasn't me. I wasn't comfortable doing it, and it didn't sell."
CRAZY: THE DEMO SESSIONS contains rare, early works recorded by Willie Nelson for Ray Price and Hal Smith's song publishing
company, Pamper Music. The tracks and sparse solo performances were found in 1994 on a large, unmarked 1/4 inch reel of tape
labeled simply "Pamper Demos" in the vaults of Nashville publishing giant Sony/ATV/Tree. Tree International bought the entire
Pamper catalogue in 1969, acquiring all of its copyrights and the demo recordings. In 1989 Sony Music bought Tree, creating
today's vast Sony/ATV/Tree Publishing powerhouse.
Not meant for public release, the tapes were intended only as demonstration recordings, or "demos," for pitching new
songs to artists and producers. Unfortunately, none of the original two-track tapes survive, and due to the unavailability
of Pamper session track sheets or union records, musician, studio and engineering personnel on each song is not known for
certain. (Even today, publishers rarely keep multitrack tapes from demo sessions for long----they are routinely recycled and
recorded over with newer songs.)
The sessions are live, relaxed one-take studio efforts that offer a firsthand look at Nelson's singular artistic vision
and serve as a vital missing link between the era of his polished "Nashville Sound"----his '60s recordings for Liberty, Monument,
and RCA----and his Outlaw country breakthrough, RED HEADED STRANGERr, in 1975.
Pamper Music Publishing
Founded in Goodlettsville, Tennessee, twenty miles north of Nashville, in 1959, the Pamper
Music Publishing Company was home to young songwriters Hank Cochran and later, Harlan Howard. Howard landed a Number One hit
with Charlie Walker's "Pick Me Up On Your Way Down," and Cochran would soon write "She's Got You," and, along with Howard,
"I Fall To Pieces," both huge singles for Patsy Cline.
Listen to the Willie Nelson Music Clips.
Willie Nelson's career spans more than thirty-five years, over a hundred albums, plus gigs, concerts, and benefit performances
all over the globe.
His 2002 album, The Great Divide, has him teamed up with stars such as Kid Rock, Lee Ann Womack, Sheryl Crow, Brian McKnight
and Bonnie Raitt. The album is amove on Willie's part to try sounds he's not often associated with, and has earned him both
praise and rebuke. It is, overall, a positive album with a positive message.
Willie Nelson and Don Cherry recorded a 2002 CD, The Eyes of Texas. It has 12 classic country-western songs and is available
only through the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center and benefits its cause. Check it out at wildflower.org.
In 2000, he teamed up with old pals Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristoferson and Billy Joe Shaver to release Honky Tonk
Heroes. This album was created over a period of several years as the group worked up the Billy Joe Shaver classic tunes used
in the CD.
Also released in 2000, Willie Nelson entered the internet era by releasing an interactive album available exclusively
on the internet from Broadcast.com and Yahoo (Luck Records). Willie Nelson and the Offenders released Me and The Drummer.
He is backed up by such Austin luminaries as Johnny Gimble on the album. Tales Out of Luck was release as a CD at the same
time.
Me and the Drummer includes an interactive extra that, "allows explorers the opportunity to see excerpts of a video about
Willie's early life to discovering why his grandmother was upset about his first road gig . . . almost 8 miles from his hometown.
An interactive collage interface lets explorers rummage through Willie's stuff while learning about different facets of his
life. Just about every item yields a WAV or AVI when clicked. Explorers can listen to Willie talk about Farm-Aid, the July
4th Picnics, his star-studded 60th Birthday party, his personal life, why Willie wanted his car driven INTO a burning house,
and why it is sometimes more important to be last than first."
Teatro, the cover of which is pictured at left, is proof positive that Willie Nelson is as creative and dynamic as he
was back in the early 1950s when he got his start.
Even so, he's come a country mile from 1954, when Willie opened his radio show on KCNC in Fort Worth with, "This is your
ol' cotton pickin', snuff dippin', tobacco chewin', coffee pot dodgin', dumplin' eatin', frog giggin' hillbilly
Columbia/Legacy Present
A New Box Set in our Country Classics Series...
THE MOST COMPREHENSIVE WILLIE NELSON COLLECTION
TO EVER BE ASSEMBLED!
Willie Nelson
Revolutions of time... the journey 1975-1993
On Columbia/Legacy CDs and Cassettes (C3K/C3T 64796)
Willie Nelson is not only a country music hero, he is an American icon.
Throughout his extraordinary career he has
bucked the popular trends and
in the process endeared himself to the hearts and ears of music lovers
the world wide.
The songwriting that first earned him acclaim as a songwriter
in Nashville has mirrored his stormy personal life. Both
the worst of times
and the best of times are turned into Willie's own unique brand of poetry,
tugging at the emotions
of all who listen. "Revolutions Of Time" journeys
through his hit-making career at Columbia Records in a celebration of
this
unique American voice.
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