When common ground is hard to find, the longhaired, bearded hippie flies the American flag high and preaches love — just like he’s always done.
Words by Joe Samuel Starnes | Photos by David McClister
November 19, 2024
he full-size American-made van with plush captain’s chairs rolls south down I-75, packed with me and five other kids and two adults from Cedartown, Georgia. It’s summer circa 1979, and The Hustlers — a dynasty of Cedartown’s 12-and-under basketball league that finished second in the state championship (still the most heartbreaking athletic loss of my life) — are traveling in a caravan bound for Disney World. The van’s driver, Jack Kirkpatrick, a 28-year-old city police officer who six years later would be elected county sheriff, is at the wheel. In his eight-track player is a Willie Nelson tape, the live version of “Whiskey River” blaring from the speakers. It’s a song Johnny Bush wrote but Willie made his own, opening every show with it since the early 1970s. I’ve never heard the song before and only once drank liquor when my dad gave me a sip of his whiskey sour to show me how bad it tasted. It would be years before my heart would be broken by a woman in a way that requires an “amber current” of solace (those days are coming), but Willie’s distinctive guitar and his powerful yet wistful voice strikes a chord with me. The mournful lyrics in Willie’s delivery are full of spirit and energy that resonate with the live crowd. It’s a song I’ll one day pay a $200 copyright fee to Full Nelson Music out of my own pocket to quote in my first novel. Unlike my sprawling book, the song consists of a mere 56 words — all Willie needs to tell a universal story of heartbreak and loss that connects with my sixth grade soul.
That van ride when I heard Willie’s opening anthem is a moment I remember with great clarity 45 years later, when Willie — who is nine years and seven months older than President Joe Biden — walks onto the stage of the painfully named Freedom Mortgage Pavilion in Camden, New Jersey, a cannon shot across the Delaware River from Independence Hall in Philadelphia. He raises his arms to wave to a crowd of 20,000 packed into the amphitheater and on the lawn for his annual Fourth of July Picnic, a tradition dating back to 1972 in Dripping Springs, Texas.
Willie — whose nicknames include the Redheaded Stranger, Shotgun Willie, and the Hillbilly Dalai Lama — straps on his old guitar and sits on a stool for the last set of the day; his openers have included Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin legend Robert Plant, and gospel icon Mavis Staples. His son Lukas, who stays close while Willie gets settled, takes a stool to his left once his dad is seated. Waylon Payne, son of his late guitar player Jody Payne named for Waylon Jennings, takes the one to Willie’s right. Willie does another quick wave and says, “How’s it going?” and then his pick strikes the top strings of the G chord on his guitar that looks like it’s about to fall to a mess of splinters and kindling. “Whiskey River” has begun.
This is his first show after what news stories have called an “unspecified illness,” but which everyone knows is the result of living with the lungs of a super-senior stoner. When I bought these tickets earlier in the year near the occasion of his 91st birthday, I thought, This might be it — might be the last time I see him.
But I’ve been thinking that for almost 20 years, as have many other writers who have written a decade’s worth of postmortem-sounding tributes published long before he is gone. Joe Nick Patoski, who first interviewed and wrote about Willie in 1973, penned the excellent biography Willie Nelson: An Epic Life in 2008. “When I wrote that book,” Patoski tells me, “I basically timed it for when he was turning 75. I thought, ‘Well, that’s kind of a nice little feather in the cap punctuating a great career.’”
Patoski says he didn’t expect that 16 years later Willie would still be cranking out new music and going on the road again and again. “This is what he’s going to do until he can’t.”
Willie has kept playing while those around him move onto the next realm: His pianist and older sister, Bobbie, whom he always called “my little sister Bobbie,” died in March 2022; Paul English, his drummer memorialized in one of the great friendship songs of all time, “Me and Paul,” February 2020; Jody Payne, who lives on in the band through his son, 2013; bassist Bee Spears, 2011.
And beyond Willie’s musical family, the new millennium has brought two-and-a-half decades of obituaries of many he collaborated with and loved: Waylon Jennings, 2002; Johnny Cash, 2003; Ray Charles, 2004; Merle Haggard and Leon Russell, both 2016; and Billy Joe Shaver, 2020. His good friend Kinky Friedman, who coined the Hillbilly Dalai Lama nickname, died exactly one week before the July 4 show in Camden.
For more context, consider that if Elvis Presley were still alive, he’d be two years younger than Nelson. “It’s hard to compare Willie to anyone anymore because he’s outlived them all,” Patoski says.
With Kris Kristofferson’s recent passing, only Ray Benson of Asleep at the Wheel, at 73 a child in comparison, survives from his closest peer group of songwriting and singing friends. Willie outlasted country icon Loretta Lynn, who died at the age of 90 in October 2022, Tammy Wynette, who died at 55 in 1998, and, of course, Patsy Cline, who died in a plane crash at the age of 30 in 1965. One might think that Dolly Parton, a dynamo at 13 years his junior at 78, might one day surpass his longevity. She, Willie, and Brenda Lee are the only living performers who have been inducted into both the Rock & Roll and the Country Music halls of fame.
• • •
Photo by David MCClister
It’s a joy to see Willie again. He looks slightly pale and gaunt, not as strong as he did when I saw him put on a great show last September, but he’s pushing through, the spirit still there, gasping a little, talking out a few lines of the songs, blowing his nose occasionally on breaks, and wiping his face on hand towels set out for him, but he’s making a connection with the crowd.
His set rolls through songs familiar to those who have seen him before and who listen to Willie and Family Live from 1978, but then transitions into newer material, including songs that speak directly to the moment. He plays “Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die,” which was the title of both a song and a book published in 2012, when he was only 79, and then “Still Not Dead,” which includes the lines “Don’t bury me, I’ve got a show to play / I woke up still not dead again today.”
“Still Not Dead” has been out seven years. Even Willie’s musings on death are getting some age on them.
Soon after, he and Lukas perform a touching rendition of “Just Breathe,” originally a 2009 Pearl Jam song that Willie covered on an album in 2012. The song paints a portrait of seeing someone in their last moments on Earth. Its final lines: “Hold me ’til I die / Meet you on the other side.”
He and Lukas lean toward one another, their eye contact unbreaking as they strum and pick and take turns singing. On the video screens I can see that both are emotional, even though the song is one they have been playing together for a dozen years.
• • •
Although I became a Willie fan at age 12, I didn’t get around to seeing him in concert until I lived in Texas in my early 30s. He was in his mid-60s. My first show, which I described for The New York Times, was epic: Willie’s Fourth of July picnic in an open field in Luckenbach, a town not much more than an intersection, made famous by his song with Waylon. I wrote the piece about Willie when he was 74, thinking, as Patoski did, that he wouldn’t keep going much longer.
I went on to see him numerous times in my three years living in Texas, and then in New Jersey and New York, when life brought me north (including a 2004 show with Dylan at Doubleday Field in Cooperstown, New York), and then Philadelphia, when I moved a little bit south. The past six years I’ve seen him four times on his area stops.
Attending each of the recent shows has felt like going to see an aging relative I love dearly. I get a little nervous each time before seeing him, and then there he is, maybe a little more tired than the last time, needing a little more help. It’s both thrilling to be in his presence and a bit painful. I wonder each time if it will be the last.
I’ve noticed gradual changes — he has given up standing through the show and now sits on a stool. He is getting closer and closer attention from his two performing sons, Lukas and Micah, who have joined him and take a lot of the heavy lifting of the songs, allowing him to rest during some numbers.
The agony of aging is on display, but I can tell without a doubt that he’s flat-out happy to be here tonight. He’s still excited to see me in my seat near the back. He’s looking for me and smiles when he makes eye contact. (In truth, I know he’s focusing on a young woman sitting in the front row, a move he’s been doing for more than 70 years now — and when you are 91, everyone is young — but it feels like he’s looking at me.)
Even though his face is as wrinkly and weathered as an old saddle left out in the sun and the rain, his eyes sparkle. “When you look into my eyes, I want you to see how glad I am to be with you,” he wrote in his 2021 book, Willie Nelson’s Letters to America. “I want you to listen to my voice and feel my love for music, for my songs, and for you.”
I certainly do.
• • •
Mario Vargas Llosa, a prolific native Peruvian writer who, like Dylan, holds a Nobel Prize for Literature, has described the French writer Victor Hugo as being as vast as the ocean. (If you think there could be no connection between Llosa and Willie, consider that for eight years Llosa was married to Isabel Preysler, the first wife of Julio Iglesias, with whom Willie sang “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before,” which in 1984 went platinum and won Grammys and country music awards by the handful. Like a story in a Willie song, Preysler, who was one of those “girls” that the song is about, left Llosa two years ago, when he was 86 and she 71.)
I digress, but such is the Willie World. The description of one man as the ocean applies to Willie, who has put out more than 150 albums, has appeared in more than 100 movies and TV shows, and has written more than a dozen books. He has played so many live shows that his lifetime count must be north of 10,000.
Pause to think of how many times he has picked guitar strings since his grandfather gave him, as his friend Kinky Friedman wrote in 2012, “a cheap Stella guitar from the Sears catalog.” That guitar found his hands when Willie was 6 in 1939 — the year Hitler invaded Poland and Gone With the Wind beat out a quirky little film called The Wizard of Oz for Best Picture of the Year.
Think of how many notes, how many billions of sounds, have come out of the guitars that have hung from his neck, including Trigger, the old Martin classical guitar he acquired in 1969 and plugged into an amp to make sounds as distinctive as any sound my ears have ever heard. It seems like he was born with Trigger in his hand, but in truth he’d been playing guitar 30 years before it came along.
It’s possible he has picked more notes than there are stars in the sky.
• • •
Willie has never shied away from a duet. He has recorded with seemingly everybody, including Ray Charles, Keith Richards, Norah Jones, and Wynton Marsalis, and with performers as diverse as the late commercial country star Toby Keith, with whom he sang “Beer for My Horses,” and Snoop Dogg, who joined him for “Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die.”
Willie’s most successful collaborations came with Waylon Jennings, his friend, fellow Texan, and unofficial co-founder of the outlaw country music movement. Their alliterative names are linked for all time and fun to say in either order: “Waylon and Willie,” or “Willie and Waylon.” Their contrasting voices complemented one another magically on country classics like “Luckenbach, Texas,” “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” and “Good Hearted Woman.”
Jennings, however, didn’t always want to collaborate with Willie. In 1989, Jennings fought his producer’s suggestion to bring the Redheaded Stranger into his sessions. “The minute Willie gets here he’s gonna get on that bus,” Jennings told the producer, according to his 1996 autobiography co-written by Lenny Kaye, “and here comes some of his old smoking and drinking buddies and they’re going to have a good time out there. They’re all songwriters … the next thing you know here is Willie coming around a corner and there’ll be somebody behind him wailing and Willie will say, ‘He wrote this song and we’re going to do it.’ It’ll be a dumb fuckin’ song, and we’re stuck with it. …Willie’s got a big heart, and if a guy starts crying in the right tune, he’ll do it.”
• • •
That big heart is at the core of what makes him beloved by so many across a wide range, enough that swag supporting him as president has sold well for years. When I saw Willie 20 years ago in Cooperstown during the presidential campaign pitting George W. Bush and John Kerry, I bought a Willie Nelson for President poster, the funniest part of which says, “Paul English for Vice.” It hangs proudly framed in my home office.
At this year’s picnic, I see a Willie Nelson for President bumper sticker for sale, but the concert logo depicts Willie not as president, but as Uncle Sam with pigtails. (I drop $10 for a beer koozie with the image.) Despite many in the audience wearing patriotic hats and shirts emblazoned with stars and stripes that could be worn at this summer’s political conventions, I don’t see a single sign supporting a presidential candidate or party. Even the crowd has left partisan politics behind for this picnic.
While Willie wears his patriotism proudly, with a giant American flag as a backdrop to most shows, he doesn’t wear his politics on his sleeve in the July 4 concert. It’s clear from a new song he performs — a cover of Rodney Crowell’s “The Border” — that the plight of Mexican immigrants weighs on his heart in the subtle, complex song from the point of view of a guard who works on the border in a bulletproof vest.
From the shacks and the shanties
Come the hungry and poor
Some to drown at the crossing
Some to suffer no more
His acceptance and love for all and his desire to share his music, which is not proscriptive, feels healing on this night celebrating America’s 248th year of independence. In his book of Letters to America in 2021, he wrote that “we need to get our shit together and remember the way we are alike rather than focusing on the ways we are different.”
Willie’s rare charisma bridges many gaps, Patoski says. “Every politician wants to have this ability that whatever you want to telegraph onto them, they are that. They mean so many different things to so many different people. Willie has that, and it’s innate. So who do people come to see — the living legend? Did they come to see the Cosmic Cowboy? Did they come to see the Nashville songwriter? Did they come to see the Farm Aid guy, the friend of family farmers and the guy who is probably the biggest champion of cannabis in the United States? Whatever you want to telegraph onto Willie, you can do that. And you’re probably right. He is that person. He’s lived so many lives and represents so many different things to so many different people.”
I agree with Patoski, and I believe that a line Kris Kristofferson wrote in “The Pilgrim: Chapter 33,” makes a perfect description of Willie: “He’s a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction.”
Consider, if you will, the paradoxes and positions: He’s a longhaired bearded hippie who wears the mantle of outlaw proudly; he’s an avid golfer who owns his own course; a true believer in Christ who sings hymns in each set; a womanizer (married four times and once in love with actress Amy Irving before she married Steven Spielberg); a devoted family man, with eight children by three of his wives and one girlfriend; a football fan who was a very close friend of the legendary Texas Longhorns coach Darrell Royal; a supporter of gay rights who sang “cowboys are frequently, secretly fond of each other”; an advocate of exercise who has practiced martial arts extensively; and perhaps most notably, a vocal advocate for legalizing marijuana (he wears a shirt that says Legalize at the July 4 show).
He’s a Texan through and through, who loves his state and his nation in spite of laws administered with which he might disagree. His roots run deep into the past, all the way back to the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl days into which he was born. “He’s a man who came out of Texas at a hard time,” Patoski says. “He’s part of that great rural-to-urban migration that’s common throughout our part of the United States. At a time when it’s not easy being a Texan, he embodies all the great qualities of what’s good about Texas and Texans, and it’s just not limited to Texas. He’s that man of music. He’s that human that has shared so much music and continues to share it and has made all of our lives a little bit better for it.”
I don’t think Willie would want to be president. And unlike his friend Kinky Friedman, who ran for governor of Texas, he wouldn’t want that job, either. What he wants to do is what he is best at, which is perform, to make people — all people — happy with his songs.
• • •
For the final numbers on July 4, many of the performers who played earlier come out to join the singalong. He finishes the show — as he has most shows I’ve seen — with the hymns “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” and “I’ll Fly Away.” The always cheerful old hymns are not about death but about moving on beyond it, confirming a belief in the afterlife, which there’s no doubt Willie believes in 100 percent.
It seems that the show might be over, and I’ve seen his shows end on “I’ll Fly Away” many times before, but Willie and Lukas stand and wave but don’t leave. After soaking in the cheers of the crowd, they sit down and do one more number, “Living in the Promiseland,” a song from 1986.
Echoing the sonnet that is inscribed on the Statue of Liberty¸ father and son trade off the opening lines.
Give us your tired and weak
And we will make them strong
Bring us your foreign songs
And we will sing along
Leave us your broken dreams
We’ll give them time to mend
There’s still a lot of love
Living in the promiseland
After the final chord is strummed, Willie stands and waves and smiles to the crowd before he says, “Y’all have a good evening. We love you.”
I leave feeling purified. I’m happy to know that in this America of 2024 there is still love, the kind Willie is sharing.
We all need a little Willie now. ◊
