Willie Nelson
...start very early doing his first musical performance with his sister, Bobbie, at the age of 10. He played his first dancehall with his older sister on the piano and the local football coach on the trumpet. While still in his teen Nelson started playing dances and honky tonks with Bud Fletcher, who gave the young singer and guitarist his first real stage experience opening for Bob Wills and other redneck bravados. Willie spent a lot of time in beer joints and bars and became fam iar with a lot of the different songs that could be heard through the blaring jukebox. By the time he graduated from high school, he had his own regular radio show. Upon his graduation from high school, Willie performed many various jobs to make a living while dreaming of a far-off success with his musical talents. Immediately after school, he joined the Air Force, but was discharged after nine months when he became plagued by back problems. Following his disenrollment from the service, he sold Bibles and vacuum cleaners door-to-door, worked for the tree-trimming company Asplundh, and even worked as a janitor. After these meaningless part-time jobs, he landed a job as a country DJ at Fort Worth’s KCNC in 1954 where he coined the phrase that was used at the very beginning of the essay. During the time he worked as a DJ, he continued to sing in clubs and wrote songs, which he was very good at doing. wrote a song called “Family Bible” and tried to sell it to a man named Larry Butler for ten dollars. He sang the song and others to Larry and Larry told him, “those songs are worth more than ten dollars, but I’ll loan you the money to pay your rent and ’ll give you a job in my band.” He got a job playing in a band and a job teaching guitar lessons in a music studio. There he learned how to read music and stayed just a couple of lessons ahead of the students that he had to teach. Nelson sold “Family Bi e” and another song he wrote called “Night Life” to three Houston businessmen, bought himself a 10-year-old Buick convertible, and headed off to Nashville to try to make a start on his music career. ”Family Bible” became a big hit for Claude Gray in 196 Willie’s passion for writing songs turned out to be a huge career-starter for him. Arriving in Nashville in 1961, things began to make a turn for the better. After trying to sell the song “Hello Walls” to Faron Young for $500, Faron offered to loan Willie the money. Soon Faron Young took the song to number one on the charts for nine weeks, and the first royalty check earned Willie over $20,000. “Hello Walls” has earned him now well over a million dollars. Billy Walker made Willie’s song “Funny How ime Slips Away” into a top 40 country smash, and “Crazy,” a Top Ten pop crossover hit recorded by Patsy Cline was also written by Willie Nelson. Willie recorded a few songs after this time that became big hits, but his career stalled just as quickly as had began, and Willie was barely making it into the lower regions of the top 40. Leaving Liberty Records in 1964 and heading to RCA, Willie soon became a member of the Grand Ole Opry in 1965. He had a few minor hits through the next seven years until h grew frustrated with RCA. They wanted Willie to give in to the mainstream sounds of the newer country music, but as Willie is known for, he wished to do things his way and on his own terms. One night sitting in his basement, he and a friend named Hank C hran were writing songs, one of them titled “What Can You Do to Me Now?” The very next day, Willie’s house burned to the ground. When Willie received the call that his house was on fire, he asked if everyone was okay. When it was confirmed that they wer he said, “pull the car in the garage and get out.” When Willie got there, his house still ablaze, he walked down the hall to a closet, picked up his guitar and a bag of weed and ran out the back door. They put out the fire before it ever reached the ga ge and Willie says, “too bad, too, it was a piece-of-shit car.” Discouraged at his lack of success, Willie packed his things and moved back to Texas. He decided after his move back to Austin, Texas that he would retire from the music industry, after a brief and disastrous attempt at pig farming. Once he arrived back in Texas he realized that there were much fewer opportunities for success there than there was in Nashville. Nevertheless, he noticed that many young rock fans were listening to country music along with the traditional honky tonk audience. Spotting an opportunity, Willie began performing again, scrapping his pop-oriented Nash lle sound and image for a rock and folk-influenced redneck outlaw image. Soon, he earned a contract with Atlantic Records. Willie had a few hits over the next few years, but didn’t really break through until he left Atlantic and signed with Columbia, wh gave him complete artistic control over his records. Following the release of his first album with Columbia, “The Red Headed Stranger,” outlaw country became a sensation. “Outlaw country”, so named because it worked outside the confines of the Nashville ndustry, was pretty much started with people like Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. In the following few years, Nelson had much success again with songs such as “Uncloudy Day” and “If You’ve Got the Money I’ve Got the Time.” Through the 80s and into the 90s, Nelson still carried on with his success. He has played movies roles in several films such as “Honeysuckle Rose”, “Electric Horseman”, “Stagecoach”, and a more recent cameo in the movie “Half-Baked.” He has performed duets with such great artists as Bob Dylan, Dolly Parton, Merle Haggard, and Neil Young. Until this day, Willie still writes songs and has released numerous albums. One of Willie’s most famous contributions to society would be the annual concert he started back in 1985 called Farm Aid. This concert was designed to provide aid to ailing farmers in a time where the industrial life has anything but taken over. In his book he writes, “we had well over eight million small family farmers, and now we’re down to two million, losing three hundred to five hundred a week. If we don’t get a farm bill, a good one, there will be no more small family farmers left. rm Aid will help all we can, because someone has to repair that bottom rung of the ladder, and time is of the essence. The r...