Willie Nelson (4 page)

Picking made the boy wish sometimes he was anywhere else. Every time he paused to watch a car go by, headed to Waco or Dallas or Chicago or West, he’d feel the tug. “I want to go with them,” he would think.

The boy had convinced himself he could do anything if he set his mind to it. When he spied a passing train, he’d stare hard at the engineer at the helm of the locomotive to see if he could attract his attention. More often than not, the engineer would turn his head in the boy’s direction.

But he stayed and picked and sang, along with everybody else, accompanied by the rhythm of their labor. Besides stooping down in the field, he always had chores to do, lessons to learn, and things to do to take care of Bobbie and Mamma. In the summers, he would do farmwork at his friend Morris Russell’s family place, two miles east of town, or pick up money baling hay with Morris for Rudolph Kapavik.

There was always music to work on. “His grandma would make him practice guitar every day,” Jerry Frank said. “His sister was a really good piano player. I really enjoyed listening to her. She could play boogie-woogie and make that piano walk.”

The Nelson place was always a reliable place to quench a thirst. “His grandmother always had a bucket of water at the door with a gourd with a handle like a dipper,” said Jerry Frank. “They caught the rain off the roof and it went into a cistern. That’s how they got water.” Mamma Nelson used the water as a motivational tool. If Bobbie Lee or Willie Hugh was slow to rise in the morning, she’d splash them with water. The slower they got up, the more she splashed water. Bobbie Lee figured out the drill and was quick to get out of bed. Willie Hugh got wet a lot.

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ILLIE
Hugh passed a milestone when he got drunk on beer for the first time, at the age of nine. He’d accompanied his father, Ira, to Albert’s Place, a beer joint across the county line toward West. Both sat in with Charlie Brown’s band, and little Willie sang a couple numbers. When nobody was looking, he was also knocking back beer. After two bottles, he felt a buzz and somewhat dizzy. His words slurred, his eyes blurred. “I had to sleep it off in the car before my father would take me home to my grandmother, because she would have kicked the shit out of both of us,” he later said.

He got drunk but did not regret it. Nancy Nelson, charged with raising him, was upset when she found out, and gave both Willie Hugh and his father a tongue-lashing. But it didn’t put the fear of God in him enough to keep him from doing it again and again.

“I was going straight to hell, no doubt about it,” Willie said. “It freaked her out, plus it freaked out my neighbor Miss Brissler. By then, I decided that there was no chance for me to go on to heaven, I had already fucked up more ways than God was going to put up with, and I wasn’t even ten years old yet, so I had in mind, the sky’s the limit from here on, I mean I can’t go to hell twice.”

At least when he was playing music, Willie didn’t have to grapple with the question of whether or not dancing was sinful. He was too busy making the music for dancers to dance to. He may have been baptized and raised Methodist and been just as involved with the church as his sister and their grandparents, but Booger Red was what preachers would deride as a questioning Christian. He believed in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, as did most everyone around him, but also realized that in that big world beyond Abbott were millions and millions of people who followed different faiths. Jerry Frank Ruzicka remembered Willie talking about reincarnation when they were kids. It may have been a reaction to Alfred’s unexpected death, which the Nelsons never got over. Whatever reincarnation was, Jerry Frank and Willie talked about it and went back to playing marbles.

As a ten-year-old, Willie joined Billy Pope, Burl and Merle McMahan, and a bunch of older town kids in building a clubhouse out of pasteboard. They played dominoes, cooked, smoked, and drank coffee in the hangout. The red-haired kid was tolerated. For his part, he liked hanging with guys old enough to have a car, if they had a car. Cars took you places. Like out of Abbott.

The urge for going was almost a birthright of growing up in Abbott. In 1941, the main highway through town, US 81/77, was rerouted one mile west. The new US 81/77 was a paved road and major thoroughfare, making Abbott seem a little sleepier, a portent of the stagnation that would impact most small towns and rural areas in Texas and America once residents began their mass exodus to nearby cities in search of opportunity.

M
USIC
was an opportunity, and it took you places too.

Willie had started writing songs and now he became a performer too, strumming acoustic guitar in John Rejcek’s orchestra, a family ensemble of brass instruments and drums that played polkas, waltzes, and schottisches at Czech dances. Mr. Rejcek sired sixteen children in all, but he took a shine to little Red and his musical aspirations. The night Mr. Rejcek paid the ten-year-old $6 for doing what came naturally was a revelation to Willie Hugh. It didn’t take him long to realize that was as much money as he could make on a good day in the cotton fields. Only, playing music felt good and didn’t leave him wasted and hurting, and strumming a guitar didn’t make his fingers throb the way the thorny cotton burrs did.

The stage was where Willie was meant to be. “I felt right at home up there,” he said. “That was what I wanted to do. It seemed normal for me to be on a bandstand.”

He also played on the courthouse steps in Hillsboro and at Frank Clements’s barbershop in Abbott, where he shined shoes and sang a song for fifty cents a pair. By his twelfth birthday, Willie had finished his first songbook. Written on manila paper by hand in cursive script that resembled a lariat, “Songs by Willie Nelson, Waco Texas” featured an index and the lyrics—some handwritten, some typed—of fifteen original songs, including “The Moon-Was-Your-Helper,” “Sweethearts Forever,” “I’ll Wonder Alone,” “Only True Love Lingers On,” “You Still Belong to Me,” “Long Ago,” “Faded Love and Wasted Dream,” “The Storm Has Just Begun,” “Hangover Blues” (“You can keep yo rotgut whiskey / you can keep yo gin and rye / I’ll quit waking up with headaches and a wishing I could die / Don’t want no hangover blues / You can keep yo hangover blues”), “I Guess I Was Born to Be Blue,” “So Hard to Say Goodby,” “Teach Me to Sing a Long Song,” “Whenever,” “Gold Star,” and “Starting Tonight.” At the end of each lyric, he wrote “THE END” and “WILLIE NELSON,” the
W
and
N
done with a practiced flourish. On the last page, he wrote “HOWDY PARD” in lariat script and drew small cowboy hats on the borders.

At the invitation of his friend and classmate Roy Gene Urbanovsky, he also joined the Urbanovsky family’s jam sessions out at their farm near Brooken, and when Bernard Urbanovsky got married, he hired thirteen-year-old Willie to play at his wedding, along with the dance band Bernard fronted, the Czech Mates. Willie promised Mamma Nelson he’d be home by eleven, played the gig, and was paid $5 for his services.

By then the kid was old enough to have figured out that if there was money to be made in music, it was in the beer joints and dance halls, two of the few places where people spent money freely even though America was at war. He knew he was already condemned to hellfire and damnation by loitering in beer joints, and Nancy Nelson let him know she was not happy her boy worked in places like that. But she allowed it, since he went into such places out of a desire to help provide for the family.

The dens of temptation were a short bicycle ride away, clustered three miles south of town just across the line separating Hill County and McLennan County on Abest Road. The beer joints that became Willie’s training ground for performing and for learning songs were Albert’s, Frank Clements’s place, known as the First and Last Chance, and, a few hundred yards up the hill, Margie Lundy’s Nite Owl, the hardest of the honky-tonks hugging the line.

The jukeboxes in those joints helped form his musical tastes. He could feed nickels into the record machine and play the same song over and over to figure out the chords and lyrics. He wasn’t the only one. Others poured nickels in for more personal reasons, which usually involved heartbreak, misery, or love lost. The honky-tonk was where you went to find somebody or to forget somebody. “I learned everything on the jukebox,” Willie said, including the words and musical structure of every song.

Jukeboxes were programmed with records that would inspire beer drinking, the kind of music that amounted to white man’s blues, whether it was sob songs such as Floyd Tillman’s scandalous “Slipping Around,” one of the first widely popular cheatin’ songs, Hank Williams’s “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” or “Walking the Floor over You,” by Ernest Tubb and His Texas Troubadours (“Ernest personified what I thought someone from Texas should sound like,” Willie later recalled), or “Always Late,” “If You’ve Got the Money (I’ve Got the Time),” or “I Love You a Thousand Ways,” by Lefty Frizzell, a hard-core honky-tonker from Corsicana, just northeast of Hill County, or anything by Bob Wills.

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ILLIE
Hugh, a cute red-haired fellow with big brown eyes and a ready smile, and Bobbie Lee, a slim, attractive blonde with sparkling eyes and pouting lips, were popular kids at school. Both brimmed with confidence and were happy to perform in classes, study halls, and graduation exercises. They were accustomed to winning talent shows at school and in town. They were best friends. They both sang, and she played the piano at any event that called for a piano player. “We always had an assembly at the school on Friday, and usually they would play, sing, just about every week,” Morris Russell said. “Bobbie, she was good.” Fran Pope liked it too. “When she played ‘In the Mood’ on the piano, we’d just go wild.” Schoolmate Donald Reed was a fan as well. “I always thought she would be a star,” he said.

Boogie-woogie was a distraction for America at war, and in war’s aftermath, music was comfort food. Willie began sitting in with Charlie Brown and the Brownies, the biggest country band in West, and took a liking to Charlie’s daughter Faye Dell Brown, who sang with the band. “We kind of fell for each other,” said Faye Dell Brown Clements. “I really cared about him and he cared about me. I’d sing with him when we’d go on a date to watch the cowboy movies, and I’d sing with him when he came to the house. He used to pick me up Sunday mornings and we’d go to his house and just sing. He really thought we were going to travel and sing. We talked about getting married, but we were just kids.”

By the time they were high school juniors, Faye Dell had broken up with Willie and was going with Jackie Clements, Willie’s friend, who happened to drive a ’46 Ford convertible, one of the few cars any teenager had in Abbott.

A
RLYN
“Bud” Fletcher was a charmer and a con, a smooth-talking hustler and, without a doubt, the handsomest man she’d ever met. Bobbie Nelson was the most popular girl in her class at Abbott High, and easily the prettiest, he thought. He was a soldier back from World War II, the son of a prominent family in the area, and his father was the county commissioner from Aquilla, near Hillsboro. He hung out in all the wrong places. She played organ in church.

Bud Fletcher was not the kind of fellow Miss Bobbie Lee Nelson could easily ignore, even if she’d wanted to. She couldn’t resist his request to take her out on a date. She didn’t turn around and go back when he took her to Shadowland in West, although it was not the kind of place a good Christian girl frequented.

Shadowland “had a very small room with a great jukebox,” she recalled. “This jukebox had all these great songs that I’d listened to on the radio. I never went to a beer joint in my whole life until I was dating Bud. Bud knew where they were.”

Bud swept Bobbie off her feet, even if she knew what she was doing was wrong in many people’s eyes. “I’d been in church and playing revival meetings with ministers and evangelists. That was a very emotional thing for me. Bud asked me to dance. I’d never danced, because I was forbidden to do anything. I felt guilty. But this is Bud. And I’m dancing with Bud. I felt very awkward because he was a fabulous dancer.” When she came home, she didn’t tell Mamma Nelson where she’d been.

“It wasn’t very long between my meeting him and marrying him,” she said. Bobbie was in love, and they tied the knot on April 29, 1947. Ira Nelson and his wife, Lorraine, attended the wedding ceremony. Myrle Greenhaw Nelson had a fit when she heard about her daughter’s pending marriage but was too far away and too far removed from the family to do anything about it. Despite her misgivings, Nancy Nelson gave her blessings.

The marriage was not without a tinge of scandal. Bobbie was determined to finish high school. She had one year to go and wanted badly to play basketball, her favorite sport, although no married student had attended Abbott High. With hair headed skyward in a towering beehive, the preferred style among Texas women at that time, she stayed in school, played basketball, and graduated with pride as Bobbie Fletcher. “Everybody treated me pretty much the same,” she said.

Not long after the honeymoon, Bud Fletcher organized Hill County’s version of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys—Bud Fletcher and the Texans. Ira Nelson played rhythm guitar with the group and sometimes fiddled. Glen Ellison, an Abbott High School teacher and the football coach, played trombone. Whistle Watson was drummer. Joe Andrews played bass. Bobbie Nelson played piano. Willie Hugh Nelson sang and played lead guitar. Bud Fletcher was...Bud Fletcher.

“We were excited,” Bobbie said. “Willie and I had been playing together all our lives. Willie already played with the Rejcek polka band, but he’d only played rhythm guitar. He was just starting to play lead and sing vocals when he joined Bud. Bud fronted the band, and, Lord, what a front man.”

But Bud Fletcher couldn’t sing worth a hoot, and he didn’t really play an instrument. Sometimes he feigned playing a washtub bass fashioned with a broomstick, or thumped an upright bass. For a stretch he allegedly drummed. Mostly, though, he conducted, calling out leads, orchestrating the band, throwing out commentary, and keeping the crowd moving—doing pretty much what Bob Wills did.