May 01
Willie Nelson Store
Hey, so we’ve launched a Willie Neslon store, powered by Amazon Webstore, which is an Amazon Services Product.
Check it out!
May 01
Exclusive Podcast Downloads Available now at USA Today/ Pop Candy
Happy birthday, Willie Nelson!
The legendary performer turned 76 years young April 30th. But just because he’s getting older, that doesn’t mean he’s slowing down at all — in fact, it seems like Willie is working harder than ever.
Last month the singer-songwriter released Naked Willie, a collection of songs written and recorded between 1965 and 1974. The recordings are dubbed Naked because they spotlight Nelson’s vocals, guitar, drums, bass and piano … and that’s it.
In making the album, producer Mickey Raphael took special care in stripping the original RCA recordings of backing vocals and orchestral arrangements that, at times, “conflict(ed) with the actual mood or message or meaning of the composition itself.”
Nelson has been touring in support of the record with Billy Bob Thornton. Recently, Thornton chatted with Raphael on the tour bus about working with Willie … and they decided to turn the talks into a podcast series.
You can download the first three episodes of the series exclusively. In them, you’ll hear snippets from Naked Willie and get a sense of Thornton’s enthusiasm for the Nashville scene. (Despite what often makes headlines, he really does have an impressive musical knowledge.)
Check ‘em out, then send Willie a belated birthday card
Mar 18
Willie Writes Forward for Kitchen Sisters’ New Book
National Public Radio's Kitchen Sisters, Nikki Silva and Davia Nelson, recently announced the launch of their new book Hidden Kitchens Texas, which features a forward written by Willie. The book takes a look at the Lone Star State through the eyes of those who grow, cook, sell, and eat its food, and Willie’s contribution to it details his own childhood experience of the homemade Texan cuisine he grew up on. Hidden Kitchens Texas is available for purchase now on Blurb.com.
Be sure to check out Willie Nelson’s channel GoAnimate.com. For more information about it read the “Go Animate with Willie Nelson at GoAnimate.com” posting.
GoAnimate.com: Willie’s Photos
Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It’s free and fun!
Mar 17
Go Animate with Willie Nelson at GoAnimate.com
New York, NY — March 17, 2009 — GoAnimate.com, the online platform that enables everyone to create their own customizable animations, today announced that it has entered into a strategic partnership with Legacy Recordings (a Sony Music Entertainment’s catalog division) to provide Willie Nelson fans the ability to create their own animated Willie adventures. This functionality is launched in tandem with today’s release of Willie Nelson’s album, NAKED WILLIE, and enables users to include tracks from the new album – as well as Willie classics — in their animations. GoAnimate.com also launched its new slideshow offering today, enabling users to upload their own photos into an automatically generated animated slideshow featuring cartoon Willie and his music.
GoAnimate.com: Willie’s Photos
Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It’s free and fun!
NAKED WILLIE, which is available at all physical and digital retail outlets today, is a 17-track collection of songs recorded by Willie Nelson between1966-1970. In this collection, Willie and his longtime sidekick, harmonica player Mickey Raphael, set out to “un-produce” a series of tracks to retrieve the original sound and get back to their unmasked essence – to hear them naked. As a result, NAKED WILLIE lays bare Willie’s original vision of these songs for the first time. In honor of Willie achieving his creative vision, GoAnimate.com is now enabling everyone to express their own Willie-inspired creativity with Willie Nelson characters, scenes and music.
“Willie Nelson is one of the most prolific country artists of all times, and throughout his career he has remained extremely dedicated to his fans,” said JJ Rosen, EVP Business Development, Commercial Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment. “NAKED WILLIE enables Willie’s fans to experience his original vision for this collection of songs, and GoAnimate.com enables Willie’s fans to celebrate that vision by pairing these songs with their own creative animations.”
You Love Willie, But You Can’t Draw – No Problem!
Historically, the creation of animation required specific skills, limiting those who can express their creativity. GoAnimate.com’s online application allows you to create animations without any drawing talent or the need for a technical understanding of advanced software programs. As a result, you can quickly and easily turn your love for Willie – with no need for drawing or technical ability – into your own customized Willie Nelson animations with just a few clicks.
To see how easy it is to GoAnimate your own Willie Nelson story, check out these quick video tutorials and get started: http://press.GoAnimate.com.
With the GoAnimate platform, Willie Nelson fans will be able to animate several characters including Willie, Naked Willie, Super Willie, Mickey Raphael and a Talking Horse. With just a few clicks, these characters can be made to talk, sing, play the guitar or harmonica, dance, shoot pool, drink beer and much, much more. You can then pair these animations with your choice of classic or NAKED WILLIE songs, including:
- On the Road Again
- Always on My Mind
- Mama, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys
- I’m a Memory
- If You Could See What’s Going Through My Mind
- The Local Memory
Once you’ve created your animation, GoAnimate’s platform makes it simple to save and share your creations right from the site, including integration of both Gmail and Yahoo! Mail contacts, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and Reddit.
For downloadable images of the Willie Nelson characters and backgrounds that can be animated, please visit: http://press.goanimate.com.
“Willie Nelson is an icon in and of himself, so it was a blast to create an animated version of Willie and his world,” said Alvin Hung, Founder and CEO, GoAnimate. “We hope that Willie’s fans have a great time expressing themselves by creating their own stories, music videos and animations – and we can’t wait to see what they create.”
Let Willie and His Music Present Your Photos with the New Slideshow Feature
With the launch of the Willie Nelson functionality, GoAnimate is also introducing a completely new feature for its users – the ability to upload their own photos and automatically generate an animated slideshow with music. This is the industry’s first ever photo slideshow to utilize character animations. Unlike existing photo slideshows that simply utilize motion graphics, GoAnimate’s slideshow enables users to place their photos within a professionally-made short animated film, creating an entirely unique and fresh way to present your photos!
Users can upload photos from their Facebook, Flickr and other sites in a snap. Once a user uploads their photos, they can simply select the Willie Nelson song they would like to play along with the slideshow, then GoAnimate does the rest. The end result is an auto-generated animated slideshow where the animated Willie characters present each of your photos along with the featured song — without any requirement for the user to create the accompanying animation. Once you’re done, you can easily send and share your slideshow with your friends and social networks.
To create your own photo slideshow, visit: http://goanimate.com/go/slideshow
Want to Send Some Quick Willie?
In addition to GoAnimate’s full animation platform that enables the creation of full-fledged animations, GoAnimate also gives you the option to create quick animated “eMessages”. eMessages are pre-defined templates that already include different characters and scenes, enabling you to simply add dialogue and then send a quick animated note to your friends. With the launch of the new Willie Nelson content, GoAnimate will also launch new Willie Nelson eMessage templates, allowing you to quickly and easily send a little Willie to your friends!
To see how easy it is to send your friends a quick animated Willie Nelson eMessage today, visit http://goanimate.com/go/emessage.
Legacy Recordings
The multiple Grammy-winning Legacy Recordings, Sony Music Entertainment’s catalog division, produces and maintains the world’s foremost catalog of historic reissues, an unparalleled compendium of thousands of digitally remastered archival titles representing virtually every musical genre including popular, rock, jazz, blues, R&B, hip-hop, folk, country, gospel, Broadway musicals, movie soundtracks, ethnic, world music, classical, comedy and more.
Founded in 1990 by CBS Records (rebranded Sony Music in 1991), Legacy’s original mission was to preserve and reissue recordings from the extensive catalogs of Columbia Records (including ARC, Brunswick, OKeh and Vocalion), Epic Records (including Philadelphia International Records) and associated CBS labels. Following the creation of Sony BMG Music Entertainment in 2005, Legacy assumed responsibility for the preservation and ongoing availability of recordings from the archives of the BMG family of labels including RCA Records, Arista, J Records, Jive, Profile, Silvertone, Sony BMG Nashville and Windham Hill, as well as imprints including American, Bang!, CTI, Mainstream, Monument, Ode, and others.
About GoAnimate, Inc.
GoAnimate, Inc. is an entertainment website that enables everyone to simply and easily create their own animations. GoAnimate was created by a bunch of guys who love animation, and who wanted to enable everyone to share in the joy of animation without any need for previous training. We believe the world is made up of great stories, and we want to empower you to creatively tell yours and then share them with your world. To get started, please visit http://goanimate.com/.
Mar 16
“Naked Willie” Finally the Willie Way
To get these songs re-released, Willie had to pull a few strings
Naked Willie Nelson
Available everywhere March 17, 2009
After establishing himself as a major Nashville songwriter (he wrote “Crazy” for Patsy Cline, among others), Willie Nelson signed his first serious artist contract at RCA in 1964. At that time, the producers and A&R men like Chet Atkins were boss. Singers weren’t allowed to select arrangements, musicians, studios – any of the key factors in making the records the artist has in mind. Willie was constantly frustrated by the syrupy strings, vocal group choruses and generally “slick” final product.
Fast forward to 2008. Willie and long-time harmonica player Mickey Raphael are casually wondering what those records would or could sound like if only the multi-track tapes could be tracked down and the songs re-mixed with the original intent in mind. Gone are the strings and gangs of back-up singers. Gone, in fact, is most of the production that always enveloped the songs.
NAKED WILLIE is a new collection of 17 vintage RCA sides – spanning 1966-1970 – FINALLY the Willie way.
Feb 19
All Music Guide Praises “One Hell Of A Ride”
All Music Guide recently gave One Hell Of A Ride, Willie’s new box set, an outstanding review. ”Nothing offers such a complete, useful overview of his entire career as Columbia/Legacy’s four-disc 2008 box One Hell of A Ride…Willie will continue to build upon the legacy offered within this box, but that will not change the fact that this is the best place to learn and appreciate that legacy, and to learn to love it.” Read the full review from All Music Guide.
Feb 19
Willie Nelson’s “One Hell Of A Ride”
For the truly multi-dimensional Willie Nelson (b. 1933) - singer, songwriter, Gypsy jazz guitarist, producer, bandleader, family man, perennially touring musician, Hollywood actor, entrepreneur, rancher, golfer, proud Texan, and godfather of music’s Outlaw Country movement - it has really been ONE HELL OF A RIDE. Shotgun Willie, whose 75th birthday is celebrated on April 30, 2008, has been making music over the course of eight distinct decades - from the 1930s to the ’00s - and has been a recording artist for more than five of those decades.
For the first time, in honor of his big seven-five, the appropriately titled box set ONE HELL OF A RIDE draws together the entire span of Willie’s recording career, with tracks representing a dozen different record labels. To underscore the scope of this unprecedented project, the box set opens with Willie’s first single recording under his own name, “When I’ve Sang My Last Hillbilly Song” (cut in 1954 or ‘55 for a small Texas label, but not released by the owner for another two decades) - and closes with a brand new version of the song recorded by Willie in 2007.
The largest U.S. box set compendium of his work to date weighs in with 100 of Willie’s personal favorite tracks — and a magnificent 100-page full-color book with dozens of never-before seen photographs, and full discographical information. Liner notes include an introduction by long-time harmonica player Mickey Raphael and an 8,000-word liner notes essay by Texas musician and music journalist Joe Nick Patoski (author of the upcoming biography Willie Nelson: An Epic Life, Little, Brown & Co., April 2008). ONE HELL OF A RIDE will arrive in stores April 1st on Columbia/ Legacy, a division of SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT.
Also arriving in stores April 1st will be The Very Best Of Outlaw Country (Legacy Recordings), a 20-song collection spanning the 1970s to the ’00s, gathering the roots and branches of one of the most influential genres in country music history. Along with seminal Outlaw Country tracks by Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash, Charlie Daniels, David Allan Coe, Billy Joe Shaver, Johnny Paycheck and others, as well as the Allman Brothers Band, Marshall Tucker, and Lynyrd Skynyrd, the music is brought ahead into the new millennium with tracks from Travis Tritt, Gretchen Wilson, and Shooter Jennings.
ONE HELL OF A RIDE and The Very Best Of Outlaw Country mark the kick-off of Legacy’s year-long celebration of Willie’s 75th birthday.
“It has been an amazing education,” Mickey Raphael writes in the introduction to ONE HELL OF A RIDE. “Willie’s drummer, Paul English taught me the subtleties of music, and Willie taught me the mysteries. When the band is cookin’ it becomes a living, breathing organism that unites with itself and the audience.”
Willie’s relationship with his audience has been honed virtually since childhood. He and his older sister Bobbie Lee were born in Abbott, Texas, off Route 35 about half-way between Waco and Dallas. Their parents Ira and Myrtle were itinerant traveling guitarists who mostly left the kids to be raised by their paternal grandparents, who were Shape Note singing teachers and songwriters themselves. The musical DNA passed to both children, as “Willie Hugh was writing and reciting poetry by the time he was four,” Patoski writes, “and after he got his first guitar two years later, began emulating his grandmother and his cousin by writing songs by lantern light after supper.” They sang in church and school, and young Willie even sat in with Rejcek’s Bohemian Polka Band; by the time he was 11, he completed his first hand-printed songbook of originals.
Influenced mightily by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, Willie’s travels took him far and wide, from his first stint at age 13 in Bud Fletcher and the Texans (led by 16-year old Bobbie Lee’s first husband), to a brief stay in the Air Force, stationed in Korea, to a sideman gig in San Antonio’s Dave Isbell and the Mission City Playboys.
During one of his first gigs as a disc jockey, Willie used the station facilities to record a couple of tunes, including “When I’ve Sang My Last Hillbilly Song,” which he sent to Sarg Records. The owner never responded, but when Willie became a star 20 years later, the tunes were released as a 45 rpm single on Sarg - with the A side now the opening track of ONE HELL OF A RIDE. When Willie and his first wife and their kids moved cross-country to Oregon to join Myrtle, Willie continued to work as a DJ and play in local bands. He financed his own self-released single in 1957, “No Place For Me,” and it is track two on this collection.
Advised to pursue his musical career in Nashville, Willie (and family) left the northwest, but settled back in Fort Worth where Bobbie Lee and Ira lived. Willie cut the one-track “Man With The Blues” for Pappy Daley’s D Records in Houston - rarity number three on ONE HELL OF A RIDE. Ironically, Pappy turned down Willie’s next offering, the all-time classic “Nite Life,” so it was released (writes Patoski) “on the sly on the Rx label under the name of Paul Buskirk and His Little Men, featuring Hugh Nelson” - rarity number four.
A cornerstone of Willie lore has him ‘giving away’ rights to his song “Family Bible” for $100 to Claude Gray, which established his career as a Top 10 country hit. The experience finally spurred Willie’s move to Nashville in 1960, where he was befriended by Hank Cochran, who got him signed to Pamper Music, the publishing company owned by Ray Price. Willie’s breakthrough came in 1961, the year Faron Young cut the #1 hit “Hello Walls,” Billy Walker cut “Funny How Time Slips Away,” and Patsy Cline recorded “Crazy.” The ‘trifecta’ earned Willie his first real label deal at Liberty Records, which issued his debut LP in 1962, And Then I Wrote (with his versions of “Hello Walls,” “Crazy,” and “Funny How Time Slips Away”).
After a second Liberty album in ‘63 and a short stay at Fred Foster’s Monument Records in ‘64, Willie was signed to RCA Records in 1965. He cut some 14 LPs for the label over the next seven years, some 33 tracks heard on ONE HELL OF A RIDE, nearly all of them under the production aegis of Chet Atkins or Felton Jarvis. Though much maligned, Willie’s RCA Victor output yielded a fair share of mid-chart sides, all produced with the Nashville studio system.
Willie’s RCA years afforded him a platform for his originals, which poured out like wildfire, and also enabled him to delve into such genres as folk music, jazz, honky tonk, Western swing, and gospel. But RCA’s efforts to shoehorn Willie into the conventional C&W mold never quite let his true nature surface. In 1970, after his farmhouse burned down in Ridgetop, Tennessee, Willie moved his family back to Texas. He soon became the kingpin of Austin’s hotbed of honky tonk, psychedelic country, and ’70s rock, populated by hillbilly hippies, folk singers, ‘ropers & dopers’ and dominated by the Armadillo World Headquarters concert stage.
By the time his RCA deal ended in 1972, Willie had come to the attention of Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records. The label’s first country music signing, Willie cut two groundbreaking LPs on Atlantic, 1973’s Shotgun Willie (”Shotgun Willie,” “Sad Songs And Waltzes”) and 1974’s Phases & Stages (”Bloody Mary Morning,” “I Still Can’t Believe You’re Gone”). A third LP Atlantic went unreleased, the gospel-rooted The Troublemaker, shelved when the label abruptly shuttered its Nashville division in ‘74; the album was subsequently issued on Columbia in 1976. Though not commercial successes, the Atlantic LPs were critically hailed and signaled the onset of a new musical genre that would overtake the music for decades to come: Outlaw Country.
The turning point was Willie’s self-produced Columbia debut LP of 1975, the concept album Red Headed Stranger, #1 for 5 weeks of its 120-week stay, his first RIAA double-platinum record on the strength of its centerpiece, “Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain.” Capitalizing on the new genre, RCA repackaged an LP’s worth of left-of-center tracks by Willie, Waylon Jennings, Jessi Colter, and Tompall Glaser as Wanted: The Outlaws. It went to #1 and its first single, “Good Hearted Woman,” a duet by Waylon & Willie also hit #1. The project swept the annual CMA (Country Music Association) Awards for Vocal Duo Of the Year, Single Of the Year, and Album Of the Year; while “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” won Willie his first Grammy Award, for Best Male Country Vocal.
Eighteen years at Columbia (1975 to 1993) was a long time - they encompassed five U.S. Presidents, to put it in perspective, and more than 30 album releases. He charted 12 #1 country albums for the label, and another 12 reached top 5; at the same time, there were 16 #1 country singles on Columbia, and another 30 that reached the Top 40.
Among Willie’s top ranking #1 C&W albums (many of which crossed-over to the pop chart) on Columbia were:
* The Sound in Your Mind (1976, “I’d Have To Be Crazy,” “If You’ve Got the Money I’ve Got the Time”);
* The Troublemaker (1976, “Uncloudy Day”);
* Stardust (1978, “Stardust,” “Georgia On My Mind”), its 551 weeks on the C&W chart ranks second only (on any Billboard chart ranking) to Pink Floyd’s 741 weeks for Dark Side Of the Moon;
* Willie & Family Live (1978, “A Song For You,” “Whiskey River,” “Till I Gain Control Again,” “Stay a Little Longer”);
* Honeysuckle Rose soundtrack (1980, “On the Road Again,” “Angel Flying Too Close To the Ground”);
* Always On My Mind (1982, named for the #1 title tune);
* Pancho & Lefty with Merle Haggard (1982, “Pancho & Lefty,” “Reasons To Quit,” originally on Epic, reissued in 2003 on Columbia/Legacy);
* City Of New Orleans (1984, named for the Steve Goodman title tune);
* Highwayman (1984, named for the Jimmy Webb title tune); and
* The Promiseland (1986, “Living in the Promiseland”).
In presenting nearly 50 tracks from Willie Nelson’s tenure at Columbia Records, ONE HELL OF A RIDE draws on many other LPs:
- To Lefty From Willie (1977, “Always Late (With Your Kisses),’ “She’s Gone, Gone, Gone,” “I Never Go Around Mirrors”);
- One For The Road (1979, “Heartbreak Hotel” and “One For My Baby (And One More For The Road)” both with Leon Russell);
- Willie Nelson Sings Kristofferson (1979, “Help Me Make It Through The Night”);
- Electric Horseman soundtrack (1979, “Midnight Rider,” “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys”);
- San Antonio Rose (1980, “Crazy Arms”);
- Somewhere Over The Rainbow (1980, “Mona Lisa,” “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down And Write Myself A Letter”);
- Old Friends (1981, “Old Friends” with Roger Miller and Ray Price);
- In The Jailhouse Now with Webb Pierce (1982, “In The Jailhouse Now”);
- Take It To The Limit (1982, “Why Do I Have To Choose” with Waylon Jennings);
- Funny How Time Slips Away with Faron Young (1985, “Three Days,” “Touch Me”);
- Songwriter soundtrack (1984, “Write Your Own Songs”);
- Partners (1986, “Heart Of Gold”);
- Brand On My Heart (1985, “I’m Movin’ On” with Hank Snow);
- What A Wonderful World (1988, named for the Louis Armstrong standard);
- Who’ll Buy My Memories: The IRS Tapes (1992, “Country Willie”); and
- Across The Borderline (1992, “Graceland,” “Valentine,” “What Was It You Wanted,” “Still Is Still Movin’ To Me”).
In addition to his duets and (often) full-album collaborations on Columbia with
Leon Russell, Roger Miller, Ray Price, Merle Haggard, Webb Pierce, Faron Young, Hank Snow, Highwaymen (Waylon, Johnny Cash, Kristofferson), there are also two other important associations documented on this collection, both from 1984: “To All The Girls I’ve Loved Before,” a #1 Country/pop/AC crossover smash with Julio Iglesias on his Columbia LP 1100 Bel Air Place; and “Seven Spanish Angels,” a #1 Country hit with Ray Charles on his Columbia LP Friendship.
Willie received the Academy of Country Music’s Pioneer Award in 1991, was inducted into the Country Music Hall Of Fame in 1993, and was fêted at the Kennedy Center Honors in 1998. In 1995, Revolutions Of Time: The Journey 1975-1993 was released by Columbia/Legacy, a 60-song boxed set divided onto three thematic CDs: Pilgrimage, Sojourns, and Exodus.
In 1996, he began a 5-year non-exclusive deal as the first Country artist ever signed to Island Records, which resulted in four albums: 1996’s Spirit (”Too Sick To Pray”); 1998’s Teatro (”Everywhere I Go” with Emmylou Harris, and “My Own Peculiar Way”); 2001’s Rainbow Connection (named for the Muppets’ song); and 2002’s The Great Divide (”Mendocino County Line” with Lee Ann Womack). (In between, he cut a smooth jazz instrumental album, Night And Day, for the Free Falls label in 1999, which finally gave him a chance to record a long-time favorite, Django Reinhardt’s “Nuages.”)
Willie then moved to Nashville’s Lost Highway Records, another label in the Def Jam Island group, for whom he has recorded nearly a dozen albums since 2003. Among them have been 2006’s Countryman, recorded in Los Angeles and Jamaica with producer Don Was, featuring a version of Jimmy Cliff’s “The Harder They Come”; and also from 2006, You Don’t Know Me-The Songs Of Cindy Walker, originally intended as a multi-artist production, but regrooved as Willie’s tribute to the Texas songwriter, who passed away at age 87 just one week after the album’s release.
ONE HELL OF A RIDE ends up where it began, with “When I’ve Sang My Last Hillbilly Song,” newly recorded by Willie Nelson in 2007.
“Motivated by the desire to do good for those who did good by him, he is still playing music for all the right reasons,” Patoski concludes, “for the sake of music, and for the people who created that music. That drive and desire have rewarded him with a well-spent musical life, documented by these recordings that show a man in full, always changing, always moving, forever on the road again.”
Feb 19
Willie Nelson’s “One Hell Of A Ride”
For the truly multi-dimensional Willie Nelson (b. 1933) - singer, songwriter, Gypsy jazz guitarist, producer, bandleader, family man, perennially touring musician, Hollywood actor, entrepreneur, rancher, golfer, proud Texan, and godfather of music’s Outlaw Country movement - it has really been ONE HELL OF A RIDE. Shotgun Willie, whose 75th birthday is celebrated on April 30, 2008, has been making music over the course of eight distinct decades - from the 1930s to the ’00s - and has been a recording artist for more than five of those decades.
For the first time, in honor of his big seven-five, the appropriately titled box set ONE HELL OF A RIDE draws together the entire span of Willie’s recording career, with tracks representing a dozen different record labels. To underscore the scope of this unprecedented project, the box set opens with Willie’s first single recording under his own name, “When I’ve Sang My Last Hillbilly Song” (cut in 1954 or ‘55 for a small Texas label, but not released by the owner for another two decades) - and closes with a brand new version of the song recorded by Willie in 2007.
The largest U.S. box set compendium of his work to date weighs in with 100 of Willie’s personal favorite tracks — and a magnificent 100-page full-color book with dozens of never-before seen photographs, and full discographical information. Liner notes include an introduction by long-time harmonica player Mickey Raphael and an 8,000-word liner notes essay by Texas musician and music journalist Joe Nick Patoski (author of the upcoming biography Willie Nelson: An Epic Life, Little, Brown & Co., April 2008). ONE HELL OF A RIDE will arrive in stores April 1st on Columbia/ Legacy, a division of SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT.
Also arriving in stores April 1st will be The Very Best Of Outlaw Country (Legacy Recordings), a 20-song collection spanning the 1970s to the ’00s, gathering the roots and branches of one of the most influential genres in country music history. Along with seminal Outlaw Country tracks by Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash, Charlie Daniels, David Allan Coe, Billy Joe Shaver, Johnny Paycheck and others, as well as the Allman Brothers Band, Marshall Tucker, and Lynyrd Skynyrd, the music is brought ahead into the new millennium with tracks from Travis Tritt, Gretchen Wilson, and Shooter Jennings.
ONE HELL OF A RIDE and The Very Best Of Outlaw Country mark the kick-off of Legacy’s year-long celebration of Willie’s 75th birthday.
“It has been an amazing education,” Mickey Raphael writes in the introduction to ONE HELL OF A RIDE. “Willie’s drummer, Paul English taught me the subtleties of music, and Willie taught me the mysteries. When the band is cookin’ it becomes a living, breathing organism that unites with itself and the audience.”
Willie’s relationship with his audience has been honed virtually since childhood. He and his older sister Bobbie Lee were born in Abbott, Texas, off Route 35 about half-way between Waco and Dallas. Their parents Ira and Myrtle were itinerant traveling guitarists who mostly left the kids to be raised by their paternal grandparents, who were Shape Note singing teachers and songwriters themselves. The musical DNA passed to both children, as “Willie Hugh was writing and reciting poetry by the time he was four,” Patoski writes, “and after he got his first guitar two years later, began emulating his grandmother and his cousin by writing songs by lantern light after supper.” They sang in church and school, and young Willie even sat in with Rejcek’s Bohemian Polka Band; by the time he was 11, he completed his first hand-printed songbook of originals.
Influenced mightily by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, Willie’s travels took him far and wide, from his first stint at age 13 in Bud Fletcher and the Texans (led by 16-year old Bobbie Lee’s first husband), to a brief stay in the Air Force, stationed in Korea, to a sideman gig in San Antonio’s Dave Isbell and the Mission City Playboys.
During one of his first gigs as a disc jockey, Willie used the station facilities to record a couple of tunes, including “When I’ve Sang My Last Hillbilly Song,” which he sent to Sarg Records. The owner never responded, but when Willie became a star 20 years later, the tunes were released as a 45 rpm single on Sarg - with the A side now the opening track of ONE HELL OF A RIDE. When Willie and his first wife and their kids moved cross-country to Oregon to join Myrtle, Willie continued to work as a DJ and play in local bands. He financed his own self-released single in 1957, “No Place For Me,” and it is track two on this collection.
Advised to pursue his musical career in Nashville, Willie (and family) left the northwest, but settled back in Fort Worth where Bobbie Lee and Ira lived. Willie cut the one-track “Man With The Blues” for Pappy Daley’s D Records in Houston - rarity number three on ONE HELL OF A RIDE. Ironically, Pappy turned down Willie’s next offering, the all-time classic “Nite Life,” so it was released (writes Patoski) “on the sly on the Rx label under the name of Paul Buskirk and His Little Men, featuring Hugh Nelson” - rarity number four.
A cornerstone of Willie lore has him ‘giving away’ rights to his song “Family Bible” for $100 to Claude Gray, which established his career as a Top 10 country hit. The experience finally spurred Willie’s move to Nashville in 1960, where he was befriended by Hank Cochran, who got him signed to Pamper Music, the publishing company owned by Ray Price. Willie’s breakthrough came in 1961, the year Faron Young cut the #1 hit “Hello Walls,” Billy Walker cut “Funny How Time Slips Away,” and Patsy Cline recorded “Crazy.” The ‘trifecta’ earned Willie his first real label deal at Liberty Records, which issued his debut LP in 1962, And Then I Wrote (with his versions of “Hello Walls,” “Crazy,” and “Funny How Time Slips Away”).
After a second Liberty album in ‘63 and a short stay at Fred Foster’s Monument Records in ‘64, Willie was signed to RCA Records in 1965. He cut some 14 LPs for the label over the next seven years, some 33 tracks heard on ONE HELL OF A RIDE, nearly all of them under the production aegis of Chet Atkins or Felton Jarvis. Though much maligned, Willie’s RCA Victor output yielded a fair share of mid-chart sides, all produced with the Nashville studio system.
Willie’s RCA years afforded him a platform for his originals, which poured out like wildfire, and also enabled him to delve into such genres as folk music, jazz, honky tonk, Western swing, and gospel. But RCA’s efforts to shoehorn Willie into the conventional C&W mold never quite let his true nature surface. In 1970, after his farmhouse burned down in Ridgetop, Tennessee, Willie moved his family back to Texas. He soon became the kingpin of Austin’s hotbed of honky tonk, psychedelic country, and ’70s rock, populated by hillbilly hippies, folk singers, ‘ropers & dopers’ and dominated by the Armadillo World Headquarters concert stage.
By the time his RCA deal ended in 1972, Willie had come to the attention of Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records. The label’s first country music signing, Willie cut two groundbreaking LPs on Atlantic, 1973’s Shotgun Willie (”Shotgun Willie,” “Sad Songs And Waltzes”) and 1974’s Phases & Stages (”Bloody Mary Morning,” “I Still Can’t Believe You’re Gone”). A third LP Atlantic went unreleased, the gospel-rooted The Troublemaker, shelved when the label abruptly shuttered its Nashville division in ‘74; the album was subsequently issued on Columbia in 1976. Though not commercial successes, the Atlantic LPs were critically hailed and signaled the onset of a new musical genre that would overtake the music for decades to come: Outlaw Country.
The turning point was Willie’s self-produced Columbia debut LP of 1975, the concept album Red Headed Stranger, #1 for 5 weeks of its 120-week stay, his first RIAA double-platinum record on the strength of its centerpiece, “Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain.” Capitalizing on the new genre, RCA repackaged an LP’s worth of left-of-center tracks by Willie, Waylon Jennings, Jessi Colter, and Tompall Glaser as Wanted: The Outlaws. It went to #1 and its first single, “Good Hearted Woman,” a duet by Waylon & Willie also hit #1. The project swept the annual CMA (Country Music Association) Awards for Vocal Duo Of the Year, Single Of the Year, and Album Of the Year; while “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” won Willie his first Grammy Award, for Best Male Country Vocal.
Eighteen years at Columbia (1975 to 1993) was a long time - they encompassed five U.S. Presidents, to put it in perspective, and more than 30 album releases. He charted 12 #1 country albums for the label, and another 12 reached top 5; at the same time, there were 16 #1 country singles on Columbia, and another 30 that reached the Top 40.
Among Willie’s top ranking #1 C&W albums (many of which crossed-over to the pop chart) on Columbia were:
* The Sound in Your Mind (1976, “I’d Have To Be Crazy,” “If You’ve Got the Money I’ve Got the Time”);
* The Troublemaker (1976, “Uncloudy Day”);
* Stardust (1978, “Stardust,” “Georgia On My Mind”), its 551 weeks on the C&W chart ranks second only (on any Billboard chart ranking) to Pink Floyd’s 741 weeks for Dark Side Of the Moon;
* Willie & Family Live (1978, “A Song For You,” “Whiskey River,” “Till I Gain Control Again,” “Stay a Little Longer”);
* Honeysuckle Rose soundtrack (1980, “On the Road Again,” “Angel Flying Too Close To the Ground”);
* Always On My Mind (1982, named for the #1 title tune);
* Pancho & Lefty with Merle Haggard (1982, “Pancho & Lefty,” “Reasons To Quit,” originally on Epic, reissued in 2003 on Columbia/Legacy);
* City Of New Orleans (1984, named for the Steve Goodman title tune);
* Highwayman (1984, named for the Jimmy Webb title tune); and
* The Promiseland (1986, “Living in the Promiseland”).
In presenting nearly 50 tracks from Willie Nelson’s tenure at Columbia Records, ONE HELL OF A RIDE draws on many other LPs:
- To Lefty From Willie (1977, “Always Late (With Your Kisses),’ “She’s Gone, Gone, Gone,” “I Never Go Around Mirrors”);
- One For The Road (1979, “Heartbreak Hotel” and “One For My Baby (And One More For The Road)” both with Leon Russell);
- Willie Nelson Sings Kristofferson (1979, “Help Me Make It Through The Night”);
- Electric Horseman soundtrack (1979, “Midnight Rider,” “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys”);
- San Antonio Rose (1980, “Crazy Arms”);
- Somewhere Over The Rainbow (1980, “Mona Lisa,” “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down And Write Myself A Letter”);
- Old Friends (1981, “Old Friends” with Roger Miller and Ray Price);
- In The Jailhouse Now with Webb Pierce (1982, “In The Jailhouse Now”);
- Take It To The Limit (1982, “Why Do I Have To Choose” with Waylon Jennings);
- Funny How Time Slips Away with Faron Young (1985, “Three Days,” “Touch Me”);
- Songwriter soundtrack (1984, “Write Your Own Songs”);
- Partners (1986, “Heart Of Gold”);
- Brand On My Heart (1985, “I’m Movin’ On” with Hank Snow);
- What A Wonderful World (1988, named for the Louis Armstrong standard);
- Who’ll Buy My Memories: The IRS Tapes (1992, “Country Willie”); and
- Across The Borderline (1992, “Graceland,” “Valentine,” “What Was It You Wanted,” “Still Is Still Movin’ To Me”).
In addition to his duets and (often) full-album collaborations on Columbia with
Leon Russell, Roger Miller, Ray Price, Merle Haggard, Webb Pierce, Faron Young, Hank Snow, Highwaymen (Waylon, Johnny Cash, Kristofferson), there are also two other important associations documented on this collection, both from 1984: “To All The Girls I’ve Loved Before,” a #1 Country/pop/AC crossover smash with Julio Iglesias on his Columbia LP 1100 Bel Air Place; and “Seven Spanish Angels,” a #1 Country hit with Ray Charles on his Columbia LP Friendship.
Willie received the Academy of Country Music’s Pioneer Award in 1991, was inducted into the Country Music Hall Of Fame in 1993, and was fêted at the Kennedy Center Honors in 1998. In 1995, Revolutions Of Time: The Journey 1975-1993 was released by Columbia/Legacy, a 60-song boxed set divided onto three thematic CDs: Pilgrimage, Sojourns, and Exodus.
In 1996, he began a 5-year non-exclusive deal as the first Country artist ever signed to Island Records, which resulted in four albums: 1996’s Spirit (”Too Sick To Pray”); 1998’s Teatro (”Everywhere I Go” with Emmylou Harris, and “My Own Peculiar Way”); 2001’s Rainbow Connection (named for the Muppets’ song); and 2002’s The Great Divide (”Mendocino County Line” with Lee Ann Womack). (In between, he cut a smooth jazz instrumental album, Night And Day, for the Free Falls label in 1999, which finally gave him a chance to record a long-time favorite, Django Reinhardt’s “Nuages.”)
Willie then moved to Nashville’s Lost Highway Records, another label in the Def Jam Island group, for whom he has recorded nearly a dozen albums since 2003. Among them have been 2006’s Countryman, recorded in Los Angeles and Jamaica with producer Don Was, featuring a version of Jimmy Cliff’s “The Harder They Come”; and also from 2006, You Don’t Know Me-The Songs Of Cindy Walker, originally intended as a multi-artist production, but regrooved as Willie’s tribute to the Texas songwriter, who passed away at age 87 just one week after the album’s release.
ONE HELL OF A RIDE ends up where it began, with “When I’ve Sang My Last Hillbilly Song,” newly recorded by Willie Nelson in 2007.
“Motivated by the desire to do good for those who did good by him, he is still playing music for all the right reasons,” Patoski concludes, “for the sake of music, and for the people who created that music. That drive and desire have rewarded him with a well-spent musical life, documented by these recordings that show a man in full, always changing, always moving, forever on the road again.”
