Willie Nelson's Letters to America Page 12
So when someone says, “Willie for President,” I generally remind them that my first official act would be to make “bull shit” one word. That usually shuts ’em up.
I’ve been blessed to meet quite a few presidents, including Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, a couple of guys named George Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. In every case, I was impressed by their knowledge and their graciousness and came away with a deeper appreciation of how tough the job must be.
American voters may think that someone being famous means they’re smart. When you live in your own reality TV show, for instance, it’s easy to think everything will work out. We’ve seen how good that approach was.
Let’s own up to it. The job is hard. The majority of Americans I talk to already think there’s something wrong with the way things are going. There have always been differences, but the differences seem more bitter now. There’s a great divide between these thinkers and those thinkers. Everyone thinks they’re the ones who are right. But they’re not all right, not by a long shot.
“Divide and conquer” has long been a political strategy. If you’re the one doing the dividing, you may get to be the conqueror for a while. If you manage to keep dividing, then you’re the king. That may feel good, but all would-be kings should remember that this whole glorious American experiment started with us telling a king to fuck off.
There’s one thing we can all do, and that’s vote. Whether it’s in person, absentee, by mail, or online, it needs to be easier to cast a legal ballot. One goal of democracy should be for every legal voter to cast their ballot. Many parents have to work two jobs to make ends meet, so why not make Election Day a national holiday?
The biggest gun we’ve got is called the ballot box. Vote for the candidates you think will be good for America. And when there are people who’ve been there too long, or they’re doing a terrible job, that’s when we have to vote ’em out.
Speaking of which, here’s my song on that very subject.
VOTE ’EM OUT
by Willie Nelson and Buddy Cannon
If you don’t like who’s in there, vote ‘em out
That’s what Election Day is all about
The biggest gun we’ve got
Is called “the ballot box”
So if you don’t like who’s in there, vote ’em out
Vote ’em out (Vote ’em out)
Vote ’em out (Vote ’em out)
And when they’re gone we’ll sing and dance and shout
Bring some new ones in
And we’ll start that show again
And if you don’t like who’s in there, vote ‘em out
If it’s a bunch of clowns you voted in
Election Day is comin’ ’round again
If you don’t like it now
If it’s more than you’ll allow
If you don’t like who’s in there, vote ’em out
Vote ’em out (Vote ’em out)
Vote ’em out (Vote ’em out)
And when they’re gone we’ll sing and dance and shout
Bring some new ones in
And we’ll start the show again
And if you don’t like who’s in there, vote ’em out
DEAR JIMMY CARTER,
I’m writing to say thank you, Mr. President. Thank you for a lifetime of service to your community, your state, our country, and our world. Thank you for showing us the value of staying true to who you are. Fifty years of teaching Sunday school is a great accomplishment on its own. Being governor of Georgia and president of the United States didn’t lessen that commitment. Neither did your battles with cancer.
I don’t think great things happen by accident. Your work for civil rights in the ’60s propelled you to higher office, but you never forgot what took you there, and your commitment to helping others never wavered.
Those of us who grew up in small towns in America know that every person deserves a decent place to live. Your support of Habitat for Humanity, and your willingness to show up on a job site with a carpenter’s apron and start banging nails, has inspired millions to join or support that work. The collective effort from you and all those volunteers has built thousands of much-needed houses in all fifty states and all over the world.
It’s been an honor to be your friend. It was a thrill to sing at the White House. Likewise in Stockholm, Sweden, when you were honored with the Nobel Peace Prize.
I’ve always loved it when my tour takes me to Georgia, and I get the opportunity to sing Hoagy Carmichael’s beautiful song, “Georgia on My Mind,” to the people who love it most. For five decades, when your schedule allowed during one of my Georgia concerts, you and Rosalynn have been joining me onstage, and we’ve been singing “Georgia on My Mind” and “Amazing Grace.” For half a century, the crowd has been singing with us, young and old, Republicans and Democrats, brought together by music and the love of a place and faith, and the appreciation of a man who gives his all.
I’ve always admired a good farmer. I figure that if Jesus’ stepfather, Joseph, had been a farmer instead of a carpenter, then Jesus would have been a farmer too. Considering his miracles of the loaves and fishes, think what he could have done with an entire farm!
Sunday school teacher and civil rights activist, husband and father, governor and president, carpenter and farmer—you represent the best that America can be. We could use a lot more like you, but for now I’m just happy we have you.
Give my love to Rosalynn.
Your pal,
Willie
GEORGIA ON MY MIND
by Hoagy Carmichael
Georgia, Georgia
The whole day through
Just an old sweet song keeps Georgia on my mind
Georgia
Georgia
A song of you
Comes sweet and clear as moonlight through the pines
Other arms reach out to me
Other eyes smile tenderly
Still, in peaceful dreams I see
The road leads back to you, Georgia
Georgia, no peace I find
Just an old sweet song keeps Georgia on my mind
Georgia, Georgia, no peace, no peace I find
Just an old sweet song keeps Georgia on my mind
DEAR MOTHER EARTH,
You’ve given us all that we need to sustain ourselves. We have what we need to thrive. But somehow, all your bounty is still not enough. There’s no part of you that hasn’t suffered under our dominion, and the damage we do will affect our children and grandchildren for generations to come.
We could do better. We have science on our side. And our own common sense. But instead, we’re distracted by arguments about people over nature, and whether corporations are people.
“Preservation of our environment,” said Ronald Reagan in his 1984 State of the Union address, “is not a liberal or conservative challenge; it’s common sense.”
It’s not that complicated. We know people can’t thrive unless nature does, but we accept short-term losses for some imagined gains. If we really are stuck with the decision that corporations are people, then it’s up to America’s and the world’s corporate CEOs to start acting like it.
I recently joined with my friends Paul Simon and Edie Brickell (like me, both residents of the Texas Hill Country), to speak out against a natural gas pipeline that was about to be buried beneath the pristine Blanco River. Thousands of voices had been raised, but Paul and I hoped that ours would help persuade the pipeline company to reroute it. With Edie’s help, we penned a letter for the pages of the Houston Chronicle:
Must we wait until the water is poisoned, the grasslands are gone, the local wildlife extinct and communities ruined before common sense and the love of our land prevails? When will we stop swapping the environment for a profit? To quote a native Hill Country boy, the thirty-sixth president of the United States:
“All my life I have drawn sustenance from the rivers and from the hills of my native state. I want no less for all the children of Am
erica what I was privileged to have as a boy,” said Lyndon B. Johnson.
It may have been LBJ’s words rather than ours that were heard, but the company did respond and shift the path of the pipeline out of the riverbed. There will be more battles to protect our environment, and they will not always be easy. In the words of the late, great John Lewis, that work is “good trouble, necessary trouble.”
So, my dear and beautiful Mother Earth, I don’t know what to say except that many of us are trying. We know better than to poke our mother in the eye when she’s nursing us. We know that it can’t be left to others to fight for you. We know a good fight is good for all of us.
We really are trying to get our shit together. And we hope you’ll give us enough time.
PO’d in Texas,
Willie Nelson
AMERICAN TUNE
by Paul Simon
(performed by Paul on his album There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, and performed by Willie on his album Across the Borderline)
Many’s the time I’ve been mistaken
And many times confused
Yes, and I’ve often felt forsaken
And certainly misused
Oh, but I’m all right, I’m all right
I’m just weary to my bones
Still, you don’t expect to be
Bright and bon vivant
So far away from home, so far away from home
I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered
I don’t have a friend who feels at ease
I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered
Or driven to its knees
Oh, but it’s all right, it’s all right
For lived so well so long
Still, when I think of the road
We’re traveling on
I wonder what went wrong
I can’t help it, I wonder what’s gone wrong
And I dreamed I was dying
And I dreamed that my soul rose unexpectedly
And looking back down at me
Smiled reassuringly
And I dreamed I was flying
And high above my eyes could clearly see
The Statue of Liberty
Sailing away to sea
And I dreamed I was flying
Oh, we come on the ship they call the Mayflower
We come on the ship that sailed the moon
We come in the age’s most uncertain hour
And sing an American tune
Oh, it’s all right, it’s all right
It’s all right, it’s all right
You can’t be forever blessed
Still, tomorrow’s going to be another working day
And I’m trying to get some rest
That’s all I’m trying to get some rest
THE POWER OF POSITIVE THINKING
That’s enough politics. Let’s look at something more real. I’m talking about the healing powers of positive thinking, of music, and of time. Look at anything you’ve ever done, positive or negative, and you’ll realize that energy follows thought. Every thought you’ve ever had is still going around, with some kind of energy behind it. What you say and do in your life are real and have real impacts, both good and bad. So the question is: How do you want to see yourself?
Earlier in the book, I said I’d learned that “a quitter never wins, and a winner never quits.” That philosophy was our school motto and was written on the basketball backboard at the Abbott High gym. It may sound corny to you, but to me, it is the ultimate optimism. Early on, it had me thinking, I can do anything, anywhere. And all these years later, I feel like I have.
That is visualization and positive thinking. Remember the old song by Johnny Mercer, about accentuating the positive?
My own version of that is “Don’t think no negative thoughts.” When you put a negative thought into your mind and body, it poisons your system. Worry will make you sick. But I’ve never seen worrying about something change it. Instead of always having a worried mind, I decided not to worry.
The alternative to worry is to create a peaceful mind. That peacefulness, combined with visualization, has been key to my life and to my work as a songwriter. If I want to write a great song and find the right way or right person to record it, then also create a way for an audience to hear it, I can’t do it through doubt. If I don’t eliminate thinking about the difficulty of achieving all that, I may never even start. But if I use my imagination and see myself doing it, that visualization helps make it possible. It helps me transform something I want to do into something that actually happens.
Writing a new song or having some other success can be a great accomplishment, but you have to ask yourself how those stack up against doing good with your life.
Doing good isn’t that complicated. Right and wrong are easy choices. We know what to do. And if we think of ourselves as someone who chooses right over wrong, good things will follow.
Goodness and happiness aren’t accidental. My friend Bud Shrake was a great pal on and off the golf course. Bud wrote magazine features, wonderful books, and great movies, like our film Songwriter. Sometimes when we played golf, Bud would say, “I stayed up late last night writing my Academy Award acceptance speech.” He was joking, but it was a joke based in positive thinking. And great things happened his whole life, the last twenty years of which he spent as the beau of Texas governor Ann Richards.
The three of us were friends, and we were united by many things, including our belief in positivity. Ann Richards had little chance of winning a governor’s race in Texas, but she ran a positive campaign that cracked open the door, and she kicked it open wide with her great wit.
“Once the shit is out of the bull,” she used to say about hot-air politicians, “it’s hard to put it back again.”
Positive thinking helped Bud and Governor Ann come together at a time in their lives when a lot of people have given up on love. If you believe in the power of positive thinking, then you never have to give up on love.
These aren’t hard lessons to learn, but after all these years, I still have to remind myself to envision and create my own happiness. Since no one else can do that for me, I guess I’m writing letters in my own head.
Good morning, Willie. Today is a day for something good.
THE HEALING POWERS OF MUSIC
There truly is a healing power in music. It’s a fact. Music is vibrations, and those vibrations reach every part of our being. You may not be able to describe the healing that takes place, but you can feel it because it’s real.
Music is our great communicator and our best common denominator. It crosses all boundaries; it brings people together and helps us recognize our common humanity. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat, Republican, or Independent; what color your skin is; or what language you speak—you probably love music.
Each person listens to the type of music that turns them on, the type of music that makes them feel alive. When we share music we love with others, and they respond to it, we are sharing what we found to be healing.
People travel many miles to hear music they love, to feel the same energy exchange that my band and I feel at every show. When they holler and clap and sing along, it’s a great medicine for everyone. The vibrations are all around us, uniting us. That makes music the one thing that can heal us both as individuals and as a people, without any need to become political.
The great power in music can work both ways. And the more people who listen to your music, the more you have to be mindful of that. I loved Leon Russell’s music from the first time I heard it, and when he first became well known, I drove to New Mexico for his show.
It was incredible, a big crowd, and Leon had them yelling and screaming. But then he stopped them cold and said, “Listen. Right now, you’d believe anything I said. I won’t lead you astray. I’ll tell you the truth. But not everyone will do that. You need to be very careful who you let put you in this place. You need to be careful who you give that power to.”
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From Leon I learned about the responsibilities that come with being a performer with a big following. The two of us were bound by the ideas of why we are here and what we can do with our time on earth.
The tradition of people I loved signing my guitar started when Leon asked me to sign his guitar. He handed me a ball-point pen and said I should scratch the signature into the finish. When I was done, I asked him to sign Trigger the same way. Our mutual respect created an important tradition for me.
Leon and I did hundreds of shows together over the years, but one of the highlights was my seventieth-birthday concert at the Beacon Theater in New York City, where Leon, Ray Charles, and I sang Leon’s beautiful “A Song for You.” It doesn’t get much better than lifting your voices in song with people you love.
Because of music’s ability to heal and unite us, my audiences don’t hear me talk politics at my shows. We’ve struck a bargain and have come together to share in the music and the love and the good things that come from it.
That doesn’t mean I don’t have political views or that I don’t express them offstage like any other American is free to do. I believe people are welcome to their opinions, but I also believe in dignity and respect. I believe in people being able to do what they want to do. Not some people—everyone. If people don’t like me supporting some political candidate, I don’t mind them boycotting my music. That’s their call. I might not like their music either.
I find it easy to leave the politics on the bus. I don’t want to have anything between me and my audience. When I sing for them, I sing with love, and the people in the audience throw back all that love and energy. It’s an ever-expanding circle, and it’s been growing since the first time I hit a lick on a guitar onstage as a kid. After all these years, I still don’t know of a better medicine.
And that reminds me to say,
“Dear Willie, keep singing.”
WHEN WILLIE WENT UP TO HEAVEN