Whose hippie grandpa is climbing on stage to the colossuses: Cash, Jennings and Kristofferson, laughing into his curly beard? This is Willie Nelson, a tramp, a grass smoker and a regular guy of post-retirement age. However, this broken-down old man was also a chubby baby with cracked vocals and a reputation tarnished by diapers. His birth happened on April 29, 1933. The Nelsons moved to Texas in search of work in 1929. In the town of Abbott, dad got a job as a mechanic, and dad’s dad got a job as an auto mechanic. Little Willie’s mom seemed to be unhappy with the newborn’s lack of swing and baritone voice a la Bing Crosby. Soon she left the family, running away with the owner of a Bing-like timbre, and then her father went in search of a better life in the company of a uncertain Dolly. But grandfather is the best companion in early childhood. He was the one who gave Willie the guitar for his sixth birthday and showed him some of the right chords. When grandson became a little older, he began to avoid summer chores in the cotton fields, preferring to play the repertoire of Hank Williams in eateries, sometimes earning more in an evening than a cotton picker in a week.
In high school, Nelson was fond of “American football,” a stupid parody of rugby, baseball – a stupid parody of Russian lapta, and basketball (explanations are superfluous). Threw his back out, but didn’t tell anyone about it. Being drafted into the US Air Force to fight communism in Korea, he was soon discharged, and problems with his spine made themselves felt. But I managed to enjoy the comfort of the M.A.S.H. hospital.
A dozen superficial articles can be spent on the subsequent odyssey of Willie Nelson, from marrying Martha Matthews and studying at Baylor University to wandering in freight trains like your Jack Kerouac. But the phenomenon of Nelson as an author, a very deep poet and a subtle composer, who gradually pushed many subgenres of country music (and not only) to conception, deserves a separate consideration.
By 1960, Willie had managed to trade his songs for pennies: he sold the “Family Bible” to guitar teacher Paul Baskerk for $50. In the country charts, “Family Bible” took the seventh position and became the main hit of Claude Gray, who bought it from Baskerk for completely different money. “Hello Walls” lifted Faron Young to the first position in the same charts for as many as nine weeks. “Crazy”, which combined big-band grandeur and genuine longing, became a signature song for Patsy Cline.
But it wasn’t without Hank Cochrane, the one who, together with Eddie Cochrane, called the Cochran Brothers duo, melted vinyl with the rockabilly blues “Fool’s Paradise”. Hank discovered Willy in one of Nashville’s pubs (some claim it was Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge). Willie, according to tradition, offered Cochrane a new song for $50, and eventually got a job at the studio. Hank began to push the young talent, who was two years older than him, into all the evil cracks in the neighborhood. As a result, Nelson was sheltered by Liberty Records.
In the fading summer of 1962, Willie Nelson came to the studio to capture something slightly stooped, slightly limping, but definitely fateful. Let’s hobble along, Moon Dogs!
02 Wake Me When It’s Over
03 Hello Walls
04 Funny How Time Slips Away
05 Crazy
06 The Part Where I Cry
07 Mr. Record Man
08 Three Days
09 One Step Beyond
10 Undo the Right
11 Darkness On the Face of the Earth
12 Where My House Lives
Listen online or download Willie Nelson – …And Then I Wrote (1962) (mp3, 36 Mb)
Touch Me will seem like an ordinary country song, except to a complete layman. Nelson’s vocal line doesn’t just slide past the ground beat, it breaks the backbone of the very structure of the arrangement. The vocal group frayed a lot of nerves before a solution was found to write the main and additional voices in different rooms, where they would not be able to interfere with each other. The result was a country shuffle, as if stroking the listener against the wool. You can do that too, John Coltrane.
Wake Me When It’s Over is even funnier in the performance context. Willie mimics jazz phrasing while the rhythm section is slowly throbbing, and the vocal group doesn’t know where to put itself at all. And after all, Nelson doesn’t do anything much, it’s a completely ordinary jazz style, accompanied by the same Nashville guys who played with Elvis at that time, and the recording would have become much more literate and powerful, but the spirit of struggle would have disappeared irrevocably. At some point, the pianist begins to “chop the chip”, dragging the rest of the musicians with him. The vocal group remained in prostration.
Hello Walls repeats the arrangement by Faron Young, the girls on the backup finally know what to do. The text is still existential.
Funny How Time Slips Away really seems to have spawned southern soul. This brilliant song combines blues pulsation, country music and the necessary, almost biblical, wisdom of poetry. Although someone should have mercifully shot these mares in the background.
Crazy in this case can also be read as “immediately”: she immediately catches on. A large jazz orchestra seems to be invisibly registered in harmony. A magnificent piece with great author’s phrasing, perhaps only slightly inferior to Patsy Cline’s version, with one big “but”: two geldings joined the mares.
The Part Where I Cry compares life to a film. And yes, there are certain episodes where you need to be sad.
Mr. Record Man is about the loneliness of a man asking a record dealer to find a recording of a man who sang about loneliness. With this song, a person will not be so lonely.
Three Days seems to reconcile Willie with a herd of chorus girls. But at the end he gives out a long-drawn-out blues.
One Step Beyond is not at all the one that Madness was playing. At times, the guitarist produces beautiful swing passages, after which Willie’s voice seems quite rustic, but this is an illusion that lasts for a couple of seconds. Then Willie’s voice returns to the path of swineherds who dream of becoming crooners.
Undo The Right is good for its arrangement. The one time when Nelson should have stopped making faces and started singing rhythmically.
Darkness On The Face Of The Earth is eschatology in its purest form. The stars are falling, the moon has completely disappeared. An apocalyptic breakup. Under the banal honky tonk.
Where My House Livesabout the painful return to a cold house, abandoned by love.
Perhaps the album “… And Then I Wrote” is the clearest case of “overproduction”, where a scattering of talented lyrics was covered by a crow’s wing of misunderstanding of the material. Great recognition would overtake Willie Nelson already in the 1970s. But Elvis will sing “Funny How Time Slips Away” at many concerts, and Patsy will embroider “Crazy” on a tapestry of country music with gold thread. History would have been enough for that.
