Willie Nelson canceled an upcoming concert in April. No explanation was given for the cancellation. Some have speculated that he might not be in stellar health. I can only hope and pray the 88-year-old is okay.
I’m not sure how Willie Nelson got mixed up in my memories, but he is. My brain’s most replayed memories seem to include the music of Willie Hugh Nelson as a soundtrack.
Truthfully, I’m not sure why I liked Willie so much. Maybe it was because I’m a redhead like him. Or maybe it was because he never struck me as a guy who was trying hard to impress you. He was just himself.
I appreciated the meek way he approached music. I loved the gentle touch he had on his Martin N-20. I liked that he used a guitar pick on nylon strings, causing uptight guitar purists to suffer cardiac infarctions. I liked that over the years his pick wore a hole into the spruce top of his instrument.
Moreover, Willie wasn’t a pop star. He is
us. Kenny Rogers and Conway Twitty were great. But they represented were the shiny, star-studded Nashville elite. Willie was like the guy your daddy worked with.
He didn’t have a powerful baritone voice like Jim Reeves. He didn’t wear a bow tie like Ray Price. He sounded like your uncle singing with the VFW band on bingo night.
And Willie’s tunes weren’t anything like the idiocy that passes for modern country music today.
A few days ago, I was in traffic, flipping past songs on the radio when I landed on a new country song by Trace Atkins, featuring Luke Bryant, and rapper Pitbulll. The tune was entitled, “Where the Country Girls At?” I almost wrecked my truck on purpose.
Willie didn’t write stupid songs. He wrote poetry set to music. He wrote sonnets about cowboys, unrequited love, and angels who flew too close to the…
Willie finished the concert by welcoming Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter onto the stage.
Last week, my wife surprised me with tickets to a Willie Nelson concert, saying, "Pack your bags, Miss Daisy."
The next thing I knew, we were sitting four hundred feet away from the redheaded stranger himself.
He played all the classics. One by one. And when he sang, "Mamas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys," I cried. Since my mama decidedly failed in this regard.
Willie finished the concert by welcoming Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter onto the stage. Seven thousand of us rose to our feet and nearly tore the place apart. The ninety-one year-old president hugged the eighty-three-year-old cowboy. I couldn't have been happier if I'd seen Bear
Bryant and Jesus shake hands.
Then, Willie sang, "Amazing Grace."
So did Jimmy and Rosalynn.
So did I.
Seven thousand folks set their beers down—since this is what you do while singing hymns. The woman next to me sat down and just stared into the night sky, listening to all the voices.
Willie sang the second verse.
I closed my eyes.
We sang this song at my grandmama's funeral, at my grandaddy's, my uncle's, my cousin's, father-in-law's, and Daddy's. To people of my pedigree, this song is sacred.
…I finished college by age thirty-something. Also I have seen Willie Nelson in concert. And, not to brag, but I hold the regional record for eating the most consecutive slices of blueberry pie at last year’s Fourth of July dinner on the grounds.
I am fishing. Hogtown Bayou couldn’t be any prettier if it tried. The clouds over this bay are nothing short of American poetry
The air is salty. The crickets are out. The water is calmer than a monk on Miller Lite.
The Choctawhatchee Bay is the best part of my youth. When I was sixteen, I took Wendy Benton to the shores of Hogtown Bayou. It was a poor-man’s date.
Hogtown Bayou resembles Beulah Land. Not that long ago, forests still stretched for miles. You could find longleaf pines with catfaces the turpentiners once carved on them, long before the invention of cable television.
And, if you fished the right spots, you had to carry a baseball bat to swat the fish away.
Wendy was from Mountain Brook. She was repulsed by this place.
“Fishing?” she said. “Gross. You brought me FISHING?”
“No,” I said. “I brought you to see a magnificent sunset.”
“But, you have a fishing pole in your hands.”
“I do? Well, would you look
at that? How’d that get there?”
I caught a one-pound redfish. Wendy swatted mosquitoes. She never returned my calls. I understand she married an attorney and lives in Toledo.
Years later, I took the would-be Mrs. Dietrich to Hogtown Bayou. Her name was Jamie.
Jamie said, “Do you take all your heifers out here?”
The answer was no.
I told her I wanted to live on Hogtown Bayou one day. I wanted to fish here whenever I felt like it. I told her all about myself. She listened.
She caught a fish bigger than the state of Delaware. I asked her to marry me a few weeks later. We bought a small house a stone's throw from Hogtown Bayou.
Tonight, I caught jack squat. A miniature pinfish, one stingray, and one Mountain Dew bottle. My father, had he been alive, would’ve…
I want Willie Nelson to live forever. And I’d like it if the lady who throws my newspaper at three in the morning would inherit a million dollars.
How I got invited to a corporate business convention isn’t the story here. But let’s just say there are lots of people wearing nice suits and finishing sentences with: “Did I already give you a card?”
There is a guest speaker. He is famous. I don’t care for him. His talent: complaining.
He complains about America, religion, the economy, pro-sports. About lukewarm fried eggs.
The people love him. They applaud after each purple-faced rant.
The woman next to me says, “Oh, I watch his show on TV all the time. Don’t you just love him?” She grinned. “By the way, did I already give you a card?”
I do not love him. If you ask me, he needs considerably more fiber in his diet.
I leave the main event and make the long drive back home. The sun is setting. It is a stunning sky.
I don’t know what’s happening to the world. People are angry. TV personalities earn seven-digit incomes by getting peeved.
Well, maybe I am feeling particularly inspired by the guest speaker. Because I have a mind to make a list
of my own complaints.
My first complaint: sunsets.
Sunsets don’t last long enough. They only give a few minutes of sky-painted glory, then it’s goodnight, Gracie.
I know. That’s not a real complaint, but give me time, I’m new to this.
Complaint two: puppies. They grow up too fast. There is nothing half as marvelous as razor-sharp puppy teeth. This, I know.
I’m also complaining that there aren’t more barbecue joints.
I don’t mean the fancy kind where waiters wear all-black and use iPads to email copies of your receipt. I’m talking concrete-block joints with ugly bathrooms, decent service, and food that your doctor warns you about, served in red plastic baskets.
Something else: I wish people gave more compliments for no reason.
Hardback hymnals. I’m not happy about their disappearance. Give me elderly Miss…
She's a little girl with an uncle who looks like me. An uncle who once cried at a Willie Nelson concert when he discovered he had a new niece.
One year ago—Atlanta, Georgia. Willie Nelson stood on stage and sang my childhood. He sang: “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys.”
I rose to my feet in honor of Mama—who expressly failed in this regard.
While Willie played for thousands, my wife handed me her glowing cellphone. There were photos of a pink newborn baby on it.
“That’s your niece!” yelled my wife.
I cried, then smiled for three hundred days.
Though it bears mentioning, life hasn’t always been worth smiling about. Take, for instance, the day we scattered my father’s ashes. That was a particularly bad day.
I had hoped his remains would catch the wind and fly away like angel dust. They dropped like a brick.
That following year, I wore out Daddy’s vinyl record collection, trying to remember him.
One of my favorite records: an album bearing portraits of Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings on the cover.
I listened to “Mama’s Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys” until I half-hated the melody.
But, of course, I never could hate that song. I sang it on my very first gig.
And I was god-awful.
At the end of the night, the owner paid me fifteen bucks and said, “Learn some new songs, kid. If I hear that damn Willie song one more time, I’m gonna go crazy.”
I tried to learn as many new songs as I could. After swinging a hammer during the afternoons, I’d practice music until the wee hours.
I peddled my unimpressive songs to rundown places and earned next-to-nothing for my mediocre performances.
They were joints Mama would’ve been ashamed of, with neon signs in windows and sad people at tables.
In one such…
There is a little girl in my house. She is 11. She is currently playing piano in my office. She is blind, so she plays by feel. She has no idea what she’s doing on the instrument. But she actually sounds pretty good.
I do not have kids. I’m not a smart man, but I am sharp enough to know I’d make a bad dad. So this is unique, having a kid in my house.
Today is a flawless November day. Leaves are falling. The air is dry. My windows are open. Thanksgiving is just around the corner. And it feels like it.
Becca has been staying at our house for a few lazy days this weekend. My wife and I are sort of like Becca’s crazy aunt and uncle. I don’t know how this happened.
I never thought I’d be the crazy uncle who perpetually smelled like Tiger Balm and was always telling children to pull his finger. But there you are.
In her time here this weekend, we’ve gone for lots of walks,
Becca and I. Becca usually holds my hand and does all the talking. Somehow, she knows that I have no idea what I’m doing with kids. She can sense that I am not paternal material. But she doesn’t hold this against me.
I was a bar musician whose youth lasted way too long. I grew up in dim lit rooms, filled with smoke, clinking glasses, and Willie Nelson ballads. I used to have a ponytail, for crying out loud.
But Becca doesn’t seem to care. She treats me like I’m a real adult. Which is her first mistake.
Consequently, Becca has done a lot of adultish talking since she’s been here. She has talked about everything from moon rocks to the Battle of Gettysburg. From the invasion of Pearl Harbor to Zacchaeus who—come to find out—was a wee little man and a wee little man…
ATLANTA—I don’t do big cities. But if you were to force me to pick my favorite American city, I wouldn’t pick one because I don’t like being forced to do anything.
My mother used to “force” me to eat tapioca pudding as a kid, the texture reminded me of snot and I refused to eat it because I couldn’t understand how the same advanced civilization that gave us Willie Nelson came up with mucus pudding.
But if you were to ask me nicely to pick a favorite major American city, maybe I would pick Atlanta. Because I have history here.
Right now I am thinking warm fuzzy thoughts about this city because I am standing in a 32-mile long line in Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, awaiting airport security to strip search me.
We in the crowd of air passengers have been dutifully removing our belts, earrings, shoes, dentures, and insulin pumps, waiting to get past the Transportation Security checkpoint and board the plane. But I just tripped the metal detector for the second time,
which is a lot like winning the lottery.
A friendly veteran TSA representative informs me that she is eager to help me through the frisking process. So I have plenty of time to remember things during this moment. Things like, for instance, gag-inducing tapioca.
And while I’m being fondled by TSA agents, I’m also thinking about the days when the Atlanta Journal Constitution was the highlight of my life, back when newspapers were still newspapers.
We lived in Atlanta for a hot minute when I was a boy, and I loved the AJC newspaper. Each morning I would be the first to retrieve the news. My uncle thought this was hysterical, a kid fetching the paper.
“That’s a pretty good trick, Fido,” he’d say. “How about I teach you to pee in the yard on command?”
But, of course, I already knew how to do those…
Willie Nelson is on my radio. He is singing one of my favorite songs.
“In the twilight glow I see her,
“Blue eyes crying in the rain,
“When we kissed goodbye and parted,
“I knew we’d never meet again…”
I turn it up because I am a sucker for this tune. Though, I’m not sure why. When I was a boy, the lyrics never made sense to me.
After all, nobody with blue eyes ever cried in the rain for me. And I certainly didn’t have blue eyes. My eyes are gray. My mother used to say my eyes were the color of our pump shed.
Even so, there’s something about this tune that moves me. I can close my gray eyes and go back in time.
And I see my father’s work bench in the garage. A radio sits beside a chest of mini-drawers that is filled with bolts, nuts, screws, washers, and rubber grommets.
Crystal Gayle is singing “Don’t it Make my Brown Eyes Blue?”
Then Willie begins playing over the speaker.
My father turns it up.
“Love is but a dying ember,
“Only memories remain,
“Through the ages, I’ll remember,
“Blue eyes crying in the rain…”
And I am holding a GI Joe doll, watching a tall, skinny man work on something beneath a shop lamp, holding a screwdriver.
He does all his own repairs, this man. Because he believes it is wasteful to hire people to do work you could do yourself. Just like it’s disgraceful, and even unforgivable, to throw away refrigerator leftovers.
The people I come from are proud and self-sufficient, and they are not above eating ten-week old meatloaf that has turned Sea Foam Green. They cut their own hair. And their own lawns.
When I started travelling a lot for work, I hired a yardman to cut my grass. It only made sense. But it felt…
I was a kid. The “Grand Ole Opry” had recently moved to Opryland. My old man was working in Spring Hill, Tennessee, building the GM plant. We were living nearby. It was a July evening and my father was young. Younger than I am now.
My father came home from work one evening, covered in soot and sweat. His red hair was a mess from wearing a welding helmet all day. He had raccoon eyes and the artificial sunburn that come from wearing goggles and holding an oxyacetylene torch.
He announced that we were going to the Opry. Just me and him. To see Ernest Tubb.
Mama dressed me in red Dennis-the-Menace overalls, a Willie Nelson T-shirt, and teeny Converse Chuck Taylors. Then she combed my hair with one of those black nylon hairbrushes that shredded your scalp and gave you a subdural hematoma.
We piled into my father’s truck. It was an F-100, forest green, with a welding-machine trailer attached to the back.
It was a 40-minute drive into Nashville
proper. We entered the city. It was magnificent. The lights. The people wearing cowboy hats. The scent of French fries and pork fat in the air.
My father took me to get ice cream before the show. We sat outside on the curb and I spilled my vanilla on my Willie shirt. So he took my shirt off. I was bare chested beneath my little red overalls.
We pulled into the Opryland parking lot before showtime. We were walking into the building when a man approached my father. He had white hair. He was dressed in rags. He asked my father for money.
My old man never carried much money, for his own protection. Not protection against thieves, but protection against himself. “If I have money I’ll spend it,” he always said.
So he never carried much more than a few tens. He was a notorious tightwad. He was…
Danny and the band arrived late to the nursing home. They were running behind schedule because of traffic. But they were here, and that’s all that mattered.
And they brought their instruments.
“We’re all waiting for you, Danny,” said the nurse, leading the band toward the rec room.
Residents filled the day-use room, wall to wall. There were dozens of wheelchairs, O2 canisters, and a corral of roller-walkers stabled near the door like Appaloosas on the open range.
Residents had donned their Sunday best. Old men wore ballcaps with KOREA and VIETNAM embroidered on the fronts. Old ladies sported oversized tennis shoes and hairdos which hadn’t changed since the Johnson administration. Everyone’s hearing aids were cranked up.
The musicians set up near the spinet piano. Then Danny introduced the band over the mic.
There was Roger on the drums. Roger is no spring zucchini, he’s been playing the skins since Buddy Holly was a household name.
Albert was on double bass. I asked how long Albert has been playing the upright. His only response was,
“I have underpants that are older than you.”
And of course, there’s Danny, playing his collector’s item candy-apple-red Country Gentleman guitar, which is worth about as much as an amphibious aircraft carrier. Danny’s mother bought him this guitar in 1960. “My mom gave me this guitar for my thirteenth birthday,” he said.
The band opened with a few easy numbers. Just the classics. “Summertime,” by Gershwin. That always gets the collective heart rate up. Then “Fly Me to the Moon,” the older crowd loves that one.
One man in the front row became so excited that he began to shout, “I have to pee!” Whereupon the rowdy stood and attempted to demonstrate this for his fans just before the nurse escorted him from the room.
The band followed this with “You’re Not Mine Anymore,” by Willie Nelson. A song which debuted in 1954, when many…