Willie Nelson (3 page)

When Alfred saved up enough money to buy the family a Philco radio, the box of wire and tubes brought music from far outside the church into their house.

The Philco was placed atop the marble washstand that had been brought from Arkansas. Booger Red was exposed to recordings of songs performed by Jimmie Rodgers, the Blue Yodeler from Mississippi and the biggest record star of his time; by the Carter Family, whose harmonies provided the foundations of what would be called country music; and by Roy Acuff, Minnie Pearl, and all the entertainers on the Grand Ole Opry from Nashville. Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys filled their living room courtesy of KVOO, a powerful 50,000-watt station broadcasting from Tulsa, where Wills held forth at Cain’s Academy. Ernest Tubb and his warm Texan friendliness came in every weekday from KGKO 570 in Fort Worth and held a special place in the young Nelson boy’s heart. “He was my first singing hero,” he said. “He was the first guy that I had a songbook of. ‘Jimmie Dale,’ which was about his son that died, was one of the saddest songs I ever heard.” Hank Thompson had a show just down the road in Waco on WACO and later on KWTX. But it was hardly just country coming out of the radio. Boogie-woogie piano man Freddie Slack was no farther than a twist of the dial. And jazz from New Orleans drifted in late at night, thanks to the 50,000-watt clear-channel signal of WWL.

If not for the radio, the boy almost certainly would never have contemplated the superior vocal skills of a skinny young Italian crooner from Hoboken, New Jersey, named Frank Sinatra or discovered Hank Williams’s spiritual alter ego, Luke the Drifter, who intoned about the wisdom of seeing things “From Life’s Other Side.” Neither jukeboxes nor churches considered Luke the Drifter particularly significant. The radio took Willie farther than an automobile, a bus, or the Interurban ever could.

After supper, Willie and Bobbie would mimic Cousin Mildred—“Meemee”—and Daddy and Mamma Nelson when they sat down and composed song lyrics together. Watching them made him want to write lyrics too. “You can study music always and never learn it all,” Mamma Nelson liked to say.

F
ROM
the outside looking in, the Nelsons lived in poverty. “They were pretty poor,” one neighbor said. “They were hardworking people. His grandma gave piano lessons. His grandpa was always sharpening plows, designing and building machinery for tractors and hay balers, doing something.” The truth was, everyone was poor back in those days. The Nelsons were just a whole lot poorer.

“If we didn’t grow it, we didn’t eat it,” Bobbie remembered. “Ol’ Reddy, our first cow, was part of the family. We kept one of her calves. We had another cow and hogs. Those were my grandfather’s. I saw him butcher a hog one time and that just ended it for me. I wasn’t going to help with that sort of thing. My grandmother and grandfather, they had to be their own butchers. That’s one reason we didn’t eat any of our chickens. Our chickens had names. We raised them from eggs. We ate the eggs and sold the eggs for money to buy our groceries. That’s the way we survived.”

To kids in Abbott, far removed from world events careening toward a global war, money didn’t mean much, anyhow. They went crawfishing, hiking down to Dr. Blair’s swimming hole while dodging water moccasins, exploring Hooker’s cave south of town, or scrounging a ride to Mountain Springs, where white kids could swim—no blacks or Mexicans allowed. They rode horses when they could get hold of one and even tried to ride cows. On Saturday mornings they would observe the exotic customs of the colored folks when they came to town and ordered bologna and crackers and a strawberry soda at the grocery for a nickel, or poured peanuts into their Dr Pepper.

Kids would play marbles, pitch washers, or spin tops under the roof of the open-air tabernacle at the corner of Chestnut and Border, attend sing-ins at the church or the tabernacle, fight, or hang around school for the Thursday skate nights in the high school gymnasium, when girls from Hillsboro and West would show up. The sports-minded were doubtless inspired by the banner that hung from the gym’s ceiling, “Losers Never Win, Winners Never Quit.”

In summer, there were games of Hide and Seek, Annie Over, Follow the Leader, and Piggy Wants a Signal, with ghost stories told in the dark. Every Halloween, the mischief makers would drag an outhouse and leave it on the front steps of Pope’s Grocery.

When all else failed, there was the sport of Foolin’ Cars, as explained by Jerry Frank Ruzicka: “We’d tie a string to a purse and leave it in the road and hide behind a sign. If a car would stop, the kids would pull the string and the purse and run off. One time somebody with a running board got the purse before we could pull the string,” he remembered. When the boys were feeling especially mischievous, they’d fill the purse with excrement. “You’d see a car stop and the driver pick up the purse, then go a few hundred feet before the purse went flying out the window,” recalled Jimmy Graves.

There were bumblebee wars too. “The farmers would run into bumblebees and they’d come here and tell the guys at the [Abbott Cash Grocery] store,” Morris Russell said. Billy Pope, the son of the owner of the grocery, was ringleader, being two years older than Morris and about five years older than Willie, Jerry Frank, Gene Crocker, Jimmy Bruce, and Eldon Stafford. “Billy Pope had a horse and wagon and on Sundays he’d round up all the boys in town,” Jerry Frank Ruzicka said. Morris remembered it like this: “We made us some paddles out of shingles. We’d drill holes in them. We’d fan them and get them stirred up. Once they get stirred up, they’ll chase you. It was kinda fun to get at them. If we missed, we’d start running.”

“We’d stick together,” said Jerry Frank. “One time when it snowed, the train pulled into town and we snowballed that train, so the engineer turned steam on us.” When no one was looking, they’d sneak off and smoke cedar bark, corn silk, coffee grounds, and grapevine like it was tobacco. “Willie and I smoked cedar bark in my dad’s lumberyard,” Jerry Frank said. “We wrapped newspaper around it, and man, that fire went down my throat when we drawed on it. That paper was on fire.”

W
HEN
Willie Hugh turned six, Mamma and Daddy Nelson bought him a Stella guitar out of the Sears catalog. Daddy Nelson taught him how to make the D, A, and G chords (the basic chords in country music), gave him a chord book, and taught him the song “Show Me the Way to Go Home.” “Polly Wolly Doodle” and “She’ll Be Comin’ ’Round the Mountain” followed. He couldn’t read music like Bobbie could. But he was already writing lyrics. The boy’s gift for composing poetry attracted notice from Miss Lawrence, his first-grade teacher, who sought out Mamma Nelson to tell her how special her boy was.

Mamma and Daddy Nelson responded by giving him elocution lessons so he could speak and sing clearly and properly and by teaching him the importance of breathing. “My grandparents were great voice teachers,” the boy would say many years later. “My grandmother taught deep breathing and singing from way down in the diaphragm. These were natural things we were taught growing up, the better your lungs are, the longer you can hold notes.”

Darkness descended upon the family on February 24, 1940, when complications from medication taken for pneumonia unexpectedly took Alfred’s life. He was fifty-six. His six-year-old grandson, Willie Hugh Nelson, was old enough to understand that his family, strong as it was, would never be the same. He was the man of the house now.

The loss of Alfred left a giant hole in all their lives. Nancy, Bobbie Lee, and Willie Hugh moved from the house on the edge of town to a smaller dwelling by the tabernacle. The house had plank floors. Its walls were made of cardboard and pages of the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram,
the newspaper of West Texas, which provided insulated protection from cold drafts in the winter and more fodder for a boy’s imagination. The cracks in the ceiling were big enough for him to stare at the stars at night.

The loss of the grandfather who raised him had a profound impact, inspiring Willie to write a flurry of heartbreak songs about losing in love, betrayal, and cheating, subjects a seven-year-old boy had not experienced himself, although he was working on it—he already had a girlfriend, Ramona Stafford. On a school trip to the State Fair of Texas in Dallas, he sat next to her and took her hand in his. They both looked straight ahead and smiled, their hands clasped together.

Nancy Nelson did her best to get by, teaching music lessons on the pump organ for a quarter or fifty cents and eventually taking a job at the Abbott school cafeteria for $18 a week. Sometimes the boy would help out, mopping floors for a dinner. It was no way to keep up with the prominent families who lived west of the tracks and the highway on the “nice” side of Abbott, but Nancy managed to instill in her family a sense of dignity and the urge to be creative.

Within a couple years of Alfred’s passing, sister and brother were putting their music learning to practice. World War II was raging in the bigger world and three local boys who joined the army—Nookie Holland, Cleo Rafferty, and J. V. Kennedy—were killed in action. But music was more than a call to arms in the small wood-frame house in Abbott; it was the glue that held them together.

T
HE WORDS
flashed on the big screen.

The letters were superimposed over black-and-white images of singing cowboy and radio star Gene Autry, riding his stallion, Champ. It was a dramatic introduction to a story about a cowboy named Gene Autry who discovers copper on his ranch only to have evil miners pollute the water supply and poison his cattle. Along with his loyal but hapless sidekick Frog Millhouse (played by Smiley Burnette), Gene retrieves the jailed son of a neighboring ranch owner and cures him of his big-city ways to fight the bad guys and prevail in a climactic gunfight. The saga concludes back at the corral, with Gene and his beloved gal, Patsy (played by his “Little Darlin’,” Mary Lee), and all the ranch hands singing together.

The whole concept of good over evil had never made so much sense. Not even the most inspiring preacher had explained the whole cosmic reason for being as fully and eloquently as Gene had. All of Willie’s friends wanted to be like Gene, who grew up in Tioga, northeast of Dallas. Willie just wanted it a little bit more.

“Willie liked them ol’ western movies,” his friend Morris Russell said, citing films starring cowboy actors and recording artists such as Gene, Roy Rogers, Bill Boyd, Ken Maynard, and Tex Ritter. “We called them shoot-’em-ups.” “We could spend the whole afternoon on Saturdays at the Ritz in Hillsboro,” Bobbie said. “We loved Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, Johnny Mack Brown, Tom Mix, Sunset Carson,” she said, laughing. “We’d try to reconstruct the movie. I’d try my best to be Mary Lee. Until we went back again, we were into that movie, playing all the parts. We never were bored.”

When Willie was seven, he went to Hillsboro to meet his first real live cowboy-movie star. Johnny Mack Brown was no Gene or Roy, but the former football player who won the 1926 Rose Bowl for the University of Alabama Crimson Tide was certainly prolific, starring in more than 130 movies and serials. He came to Hillsboro in 1941 to do a fund-raiser for war bonds, and although “we didn’t have a hell of a lot of money,” Willie said, the family scraped together $18.75 for a $25 war bond. For doing their patriotic part, young Willie got to meet handsome Johnny Mack, shake his hand, and get an autograph. He came away telling friends that Johnny Mack was “a very good guy with a strong handshake and a winning smile.”

The encounter fanned the flames of his wanting to perform. “Johnny Mack, Gene, Roy, all those guys, made me want to ride my horse [or the family milk cow, the only animal the Nelsons had to ride], play the guitar, sing, shoot my gun, and win all the fights,” he said. “I wanted to do that.”

Willie and Bobbie fantasized about cowboys and cowgirls, horses and singing. Their play acting did not include cotton.

Few places on earth are hotter than the blackland prairie of North Central Texas in late August and early September. At least that’s the way it felt when you were stooped over from sunup to sundown, trying to separate the soft white fluffs of cotton from their thorny dead plant stems with your bloody fingers while dragging a nine-yard cotton sack behind your feet. The heat was wicked, with temperatures soaring well past one hundred degrees during the day and rarely dipping under eighty degrees at night.

Picking cotton under such conditions may have struck outsiders as exceptionally strenuous labor. But to poor white folks, poor black folks, and poor brown folks scattered around the southern edge of the Grand Prairie, picking cotton was one of the few sure ways to earn a few dollars in late summer. The voices of colored people were a constant across the cotton patch, and the freckle-faced redheaded kid took it all in.

“One guy would start a line over to my right and then another guy would answer him a quarter mile away on the way down the field,” Willie remembered as a man. “Next thing you knew, you’d have a whole opera going on. They sounded good to me.”

The boy picked cotton, baled hay, whatever it took. “It was sort of expected that I went and make the money, because we needed it,” he said. “I just went out and earned wherever I could.” There wasn’t much choice.

“When school started in September, they’d have half a day, then let the children go to help pick cotton,” explained Leo Ruzicka, who was a few years older than the red-haired boy. “We’d make seventy-five cents a hundred [$.75 per 100 pounds]. If a kid going to school could make that much, he’d help his mom and dad. All the farm kids did it. So did the town kids. I’d run, trying to get out there in the fields. Before school started, you picked all day. Bending over, or getting on your knees without knee pads, was the worst, one hundred degrees eating you up. You’d be glad when a cloud comes over you.”

Willie used cardboard or a piece of tire as pads for his knees to ease the pain that came from doing stoop labor. While lifting one-hundred-pound hay bales on his friend Morris’s family farm, he hurt his back. But he kept at it, and Mamma Nelson, Daddy Nelson, cousin Mildred, and sister Bobbie all picked at one time or another.