One-time dishwasher. Former encyclopedia, Bible and vacuum-cleaner salesman. Marijuana activist. Country-music renegade. One of the most successful country-roots acts in the world. It's safe to say the life of Willie Nelson is indeed a long story; the 82-year-old has been down the autobiographical route before – Willie: An Autobiography, written with Bud Shrake, appeared in 1988 – but his cowriter this time is David Ritz, a New York music journalist who specialises in collaborative autobiographies – a genre that requires channelling the voice of the subject without losing sight of form and structure. So it proves with My Life.
Born in the small town of Abbott, Texas – “You might say I was born in the middle of nowhere, but I feel that I was born in the middle of everywhere” – then left by unconventional parents to be raised by his grandparents, Willie Nelson has been on an unorthodox path from the start. When he was a toddler his grandmother Mama Nelson had to tie him to a pole to stop him wandering away (“I had the itch early on – the itch to look beyond the bend in the road”).
Such a spirit of adventure points to what has made Nelson so attuned to following his instincts. Factor in, also, the multicultural substance of music that surged out of Texas like oil from the ground: country, blues, mariachi, European polka, gospel, pop, jazz and hillbilly. The range of music makes sense of Nelson’s back catalogue.
He was six when his beloved grandfather Daddy Nelson died; he started playing guitar to offset (or perhaps complement) his introduction to suffering and loss. There was no going back, and so began the life of a troubadour, which to Nelson seemed like the best job in the world. Sorties to Nashville, Portland and other cities were learning curves along which he honed his craft, and as the 1960s beckoned he dragged himself into the big time.
Songs such as Hello Walls and Crazy were covered, respectively, by Faron Young and Patsy Cline, but as the 1970s approached Nelson was singing his own material, smoking jazz woodbines, and becoming entranced by the hippy movement. Goodbye conservatism, hello counterculture.
“It felt good to let my hair grow,” he writes. “Felt good to get onstage wearing the same jeans I’d been wearing all damn day. Felt good to tie a red bandana around my forehead to keep the sweat from getting in my eyes. Felt good to no longer give a flying f**k about making a proper appearance. I liked being improper.”
In a relatively short period of time Nelson became a totem within country music for personal integrity and creative freedom, and these qualities – and a few more – inform the book. The tone throughout is one of relaxed conversation; you can imagine listening to these tales on a porch while a calmly inhaling Nelson holds court. And it is to Ritz’s credit that the joins are seamless.
My Life: It's a Long Story is also about Nelson's heroes, his fellow country outlaws Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard and Waylon Jennings, and his villains, including an unscrupulous manager or two, and the US revenue service.
Unusually, no dirt is dished, but then Nelson isn’t that kind of troublemaker. One might argue that his continued use of marijuana has blunted his edges – “weed calmed me . . . slowed me down . . . kept my head in my music . . . kept my head filled with poetry” – but it’s a pleasure to read the well-written story of a renowned musician that isn’t ruptured by bitterness, jealousy, rivalry and score settling. Tony Clayton-Lea writes about pop culture and the arts
