Willie Nelson's Letters to America Read online

  Last night, Lukas, Micah, and I played and sang “Family Bible,” their Nelson voices harmonizing with mine, and I guess with yours too. What more could I ask for?

  And it all started from you.

  Love from Luck, lucky in love,

  Your boy Willie

  FAMILY BIBLE

  by Willie Nelson

  There’s a family Bible on the table

  Its pages worn and hard to read

  But the family Bible on the table

  Will ever be my key to memories

  At the end of day when work was over

  And when the evening meal was done

  Dad would read to us from the family Bible

  And we’d count our many blessings one by one

  I can see us sittin’ round the table

  When from the family Bible Dad would read

  And I can hear my mother softly singing

  Rock of ages, rock of ages cleft for me

  Now this old world of ours is full of trouble

  This old world would also better be

  If we’d find more Bibles on the tables

  And mothers singing rock of ages cleft for me

  I can see us sittin’ round the table

  When from the family Bible Dad would read

  And I can hear my mother softly singing

  Rock of ages, rock of ages cleft for me

  DEAR SISTER,

  Everyone calls you Bobbie, but only I get to call you Sister.

  I never loved you more than when we sat in the yard of our house in Abbott and you ate the mud pies I made for you. We were little then, and man we ate a lot of mud, you and me, so some of our love came right out of that American prairie soil.

  I never loved you more than when you held my hand when we were walking to the cotton fields to work, knowing that our fingers would be bleeding by the time we came home. We were too young to be there, but we both knew we needed those few dollars a day. I liked the music from the Black, Mexican, and Czech farmworkers, but I wanted out of those fields, and I wanted you out of them too. We didn’t even know we were poor back then. And maybe we weren’t that poor after all, for we always had each other.

  I never loved you more than when you played that first piano Mama bought, and I sat close as you told me what chord and what key you were playing in. Or later when I got to sit beside you and play along on my Stella guitar. You were a natural musician from the beginning, and I never would have become the musician I am without you.

  I never loved you more than when you finally joined my band, and we truly became the Willie Nelson Family Band. You were part of the reason that everyone who’s played in the band are truly family. We are living proof of the unforeseeable and guaranteed value of families holding their bonds to each other.

  I never loved you more than the thousands of times in front of millions of people when you play your beautiful piano version of “Down Yonder.” Your syncopated fingers tickle the ivories and lift every one of our audience members while I catch my breath, wipe my brow, and decide what song we’ll play to kick us into high gear for the second half of the show.

  It hasn’t been that long since you and I returned to Abbott, Texas, to rededicate the Methodist church where we used to sing. That old steepled church, built way back in 1883, had fallen into disrepair, and the old rugged cross was looking a little too rugged.

  I never loved you more than that Sunday afternoon when you and our Oklahoma pal, Leon Russell, played the first service in the newly restored church. You had pitched in with me to help put it right, and every pew and every heart was full that day. I can still hear you and Leon joining me on “Precious Memories,” “I’ll Fly Away,” and “Amazing Grace.” When we play “Amazing Grace” together, I’m reminded that all songs are, in their own way, gospel songs.

  I never loved you more than all those times I showed up at your door with musicians I’d recorded with all night, or golf pals I’d played with all day. There was always a gang of us, and your kitchen smelled of pots of fresh coffee and plates of sausage and homemade biscuits and gravy. You always had a platter of fresh-sliced watermelon waiting for us too. You didn’t have to, but you always looked after your little brother. And whenever you need me, I’ll always look after you.

  I never loved you more than when we needed each other. We always have. And we always will.

  With love, your baby brother and big brother all at once,

  Willie

  HEALING HANDS OF TIME

  by Willie Nelson

  They’re working while I’m missing you

  Those healing hands of time

  And soon they’ll be dismissing you

  From this heart of mine

  They’ll lead me safely through the night

  And I’ll follow as though blind

  My future tightly clutched within

  Those healing hands of time

  They let me close my eyes just then

  Those healing hands of time

  And soon they’ll let me sleep again

  Those healing hands of time

  So already I’ve reached mountain peaks

  And I’ve just begun to climb

  I’ll get over you by clinging to

  Those healing hands of time

  I’ll get over you by clinging to

  Those healing hands of time

  BOOGER RED GETS WITH IT

  Before I get my letter-writing muscles fully warmed up, I’d better tell you a bit more about where I came from and why I still go back to my little hometown. I guess I’m giving you the skinny on when I really was skinny.

  Some people might’ve said the Nelson family was dirt poor, but I know that being born in Abbott in a family that believed in music was the best possible start for Willie Hugh Nelson. When I wasn’t making music or trying to make some money, me and my pals roamed the streets and fields of Abbott looking for adventures and usually finding misadventures. We’d tie a string to a purse and leave it on the highway till a driver stopped to pick it up, and then we’d snatch it back! That was always good for a laugh.

  We made paddles and swatted at swarms of bumblebees till they stung us so much our eyes swelled shut. We’d sneak behind a barn and try to smoke cedar bark, coffee grounds, or corn silk. Maybe we thought we were cool, but I suspect we just wanted to break the rules.

  People didn’t start calling me an outlaw till I was forty years old, but I’m pretty sure that back in Abbott, I was an outlaw in training. That doesn’t mean I broke a bunch of laws, but I wouldn’t say I gave them a lot of thought either.

  When we weren’t causing trouble or playing football or basketball, my pals and I were practicing our joke telling. I became a fan of Reader’s Digest magazine, which had two pages in the middle called “Laughter, the Best Medicine.” Then I’d tell jokes like:

  “It was raining cats and dogs!”

  “How could you tell?”

  “I stepped in a poodle!”

  We joked about the population of Abbott, which never seemed to change. Whenever a baby was born, we said, someone left town.

  Soon we were telling jokes that you’d never hear at school or in church.

  You heard about the sign on the whorehouse door?

  It says, “We’re closed. Beat it.”

  I thought that kind of joke was hilarious. And I guess I haven’t grown up much, ’cause I still think it’s funny. If you don’t like it, I guess you can beat it.

  My nickname was Booger Red, a name I earned at age five for my first stage performance. I was supposed to recite a poem, but I was nervous and picked my nose till it bled all over my white sailor suit. That made me mad, so I made up my own poem for the crowd.

  What are you looking at me for?

  I ain’t got nothin’ to say

  If you don’t likes the looks of me

  You can look some other way

  If a bloody sailor suit didn’t dissuade me from performing, I guess nothing else would.

>   I liked to hang out at the Abbott general store, where the old men played dominoes for fifty cents a game. When one of the men got up to go somewhere, they’d have me sit in and play their dominoes. If I made a mistake, they’d yell and throw shit at me, so I learned to play pretty good.

  I started writing songs in grade school, penning songs about drinking and cheating. One of the songs was called “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 didn’t even know what I was writing about, so it must have been the beginning of my belief in reincarnation. Maybe I came here knowing some things before I even knew what I knew.

  When I was ten years old, I wrote down a dozen of my songs and bound them into a little book and made a cover that said “Songs by Willie Nelson.” I can still remember the words to those songs, so I must have been doing something right, because I can’t remember what I had for breakfast this morning.

  My interest in music expanded greatly when I was out working the fields picking cotton or baling hay, while watching someone drive by in a fancy Cadillac. That’s what I call double motivation.

  Even as a kid, I had a drive to perform, and I played my guitar anywhere they’d let me. Before I was a teenager, I started playing in a Bohemian dance band called the Rejcek Family Polka Band. Like my granddad, John Rejcek had a blacksmith shop in Abbott. I think he had sixteen children himself, all of them musicians. We played dance music—polkas and waltzes. I only had my acoustic guitar, which could hardly be heard, but it felt just right to be on a bandstand, and I knew that was what I wanted to do. The fact that I actually got paid didn’t hurt either.

  One gig led to another. Sister Bobbie started playing piano in a band called Bud Fletcher and the Texans. She later married the band leader, but it was already a family band because I played guitar, and my dad, Ira, would join us and play fiddle, and a guy named Whistle Watson played drums. I was barely a teenager, but I was also doing shows at KHBR Radio in Hillsboro. I didn’t give up on high school or sports, but I already saw myself as a professional musician.

  Seems like I made a lot of friends in all those places. You can’t have too many friends, unless maybe you win the lottery and all your friends call at once to ask for money. But let’s face it: you ain’t gonna win the lottery. That’s not even gambling. Playing the lottery is just giving your money away. But every time you make a dear friend, that’s like winning the lottery anyway.

  My schoolyard pal Jackie Clement took the long vacation this summer. Me and Jackie played basketball and football together, and he married a beautiful girl named Fay Dell, who both Jackie and I once admired. I used to say the only reason Jackie landed her instead of me was that he was driving a pickup and I was afoot. After seventy years of marriage, I’d say she made a good choice.

  The point is, you can’t make old friends. One of my best friends from the old days was Zeke Varnon. The things I learned from Zeke have carried me far, so there’ll be more to come about Zeke, who I dearly loved.

  DEAR ABBOTT,

  I’m not that far away, but I miss you. And I guess I should be fair and say I miss Abbott, Hillsboro, and Hill County, as my home spans the greater Hill County metroplex.

  You’ve always been good to me, and you helped me grow up fast. I learned a lot in my early years on your dirt streets. I wasn’t much taller than a mailbox when my learning specialties were smokin’, drinkin’, and cussin’. But I also learned that a winner never quits, and a quitter never wins. And I ain’t quit yet.

  I’m laying low right now, so I miss having fun with my pals. I miss walking down your little streets and getting a smile and a “hiya” from every person I pass. And I miss singing with Sister in the Methodist church.

  The day we reopened the church, I told the jam-packed crowd, “Sister Bobbie and I have been going to this church since we were born. I don’t know what persuasion y’all were when you entered this door, but now you’re all members of Abbott Methodist Church.”

  After the service, the community spilled out into your summer sun for an organic, farm-to-table Sunday lunch, and everything just felt right with the world.

  We’ve grown old together, you and me, but we haven’t grown apart, and we haven’t changed that much either. The original Nelson family house didn’t survive the decades, so my Abbott home is Doc Sims’s old house. He delivered me into this world, and it feels good to keep his home looking sharp the way we all like it.

  I was touched when you put up a billboard to commemorate our long relationship, but I don’t need a billboard in my honor (and I hope you weren’t offended when me and Zeke tried to burn it down). Naming the unpaved road to Hillsboro as Willie Nelson Road turned out to be a better fit, even if there’s no sign because people keep stealing it!

  We don’t need signs and billboards to know we love each other. You’re in my heart—both the town and the people in it. So until I’m able to spend another night in Doc’s old house, keep being good to one another, hold your faith in America, and raise a little hell on Saturday night in my honor.

  I’ll be there as quick as I can,

  Willie

  THE WILLIE HUSTLE

  Let’s talk about hustling! I learned early that there are lots of ways to make a few bucks. And a lot of ways to lose a few. A hustler is the one who ends up on the right side of the equation. The money is always there—it’s just a matter of whose pockets it’s in.

  I mentioned my pal Zeke Varnon. Zeke was a hustler. He also was the best domino player I ever saw. Dominoes is one of the greatest games in gambling. The game is just numbers. There are only twenty-eight dominoes, and most of them are right in front of you while you’re playing.

  “Take all counts and kill all doubles,” Zeke taught me, which means score when you can, and if you don’t have one of the seven doubles, assume the other players do, then block out those plays.

  Over the years, me and Zeke played partners dominoes against the best in the world. That included a casino show match in Vegas against showboat gambler Amarillo Slim and his partner, at my friend Benny Binion’s Horseshoe Casino. I lost $10,000 because Slim had someone looking over my shoulder who was silently signaling which dominoes I had. The funny thing is, I figured they’d try to cheat, but I also thought me and Zeke were so good, we’d win anyway.

  Zeke also was great at poker, pool—you name it, he played it and played it well. We met when I was just a teenager playing music at the bars and clubs between Hillsboro and Waco. The Nite Owl in the town of West was a great club. Likewise the Scenic Wonderland in Waco was a huge club where Bob Wills sometimes played. Even when there was no band, you could learn a lot of music in nightclubs. I’d put a nickel in the jukebox and listen closely to learn the words and the chords of songs by Lefty Frizzell, Ernest Tubb, or Hank Williams.

  Zeke became a fan of my music, and we became lifelong pals. We raised a lot of hell together, and there were plenty of times that he got me out of some kind of mess. I played gigs mostly on weekends, and I’d always run out of money during the week. So I’d hock my guitar at a pawn shop in Waco. When the next weekend’s gigs rolled around, Zeke would help me get it out of hock. I pawned my guitar so often that the guy in the pawn shop played my guitar better than me!

  Zeke wasn’t afraid to run a hustle when one was needed. One time, he was the night manager of a truck stop south of Hillsboro. It was two in the morning, and there was only one couple in the place. Zeke was sitting on a stool, and he thought, I’ll fall off this stool and pretend to hurt my back. That couple will be the witnesses, and I’ll collect the insurance money.

  So he fell off the stool, but the couple didn’t see him fall. So he got back on the stool and fell off again. This time he actually hurt his back and really needed the insurance money.
r />   Besides being good at dominoes and bad at insurance fraud, Zeke was really funny. The two of us used to trim trees together for a company in Waco. We were always late to work, and we would give one excuse, then another. Zeke told them his grandmother had died three times!

  Later on, we had a weekly poker game in Zeke’s trailer house in Hillsboro. All the hustlers in Hill County played. It was me, Zeke, Steve Gilcrease (my poker buddy to this day), and a World Word II vet named Albert, who remained a terrific poker player till he was ninety years old. If you wanted to go home with your shirt, you needed to be a good player.

  Rounding out the regular winners was another Texas hustler, Carl Cornelius. Carl was always pulling some kind of shenanigan. Years later, he bought a truck stop on Interstate 35, incorporated a town there called Carl’s Corner, and voted himself the mayor. I was driving down I-35 when I saw this huge billboard that said, “Carl’s Corner Truck Stop and Restaurant.” And it had a big picture of Zeke with me and Carl. I thought, Well, old Zeke did it again.

  Carl’s Corner is right down the road from Abbott, where I still own a home. We were playing poker at Carl’s one night, and the game got bigger and bigger, and the next thing I knew, I’d won the truck stop from Carl. The next day, a buddy said, “What are you gonna do with it?” And I said, “Try to lose it back as fast as I can.”

  Instead of losing it back, I built a concert hall, and a lot of great performers played there. We did one of my Fourth of July picnics there as well. I never made a dollar, but I had a lot of fun. Like I said before, you can’t make more old friends.

  Booger Red eventually grew up to be Willie Nelson, then Shotgun Willie, the Red Headed Stranger, and a few less-complimentary names I’ve been called along the way. But it all started in Abbott, and after eighty-plus years, the adventures continue.