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- He Wrote His First Song at The Age of Seven.
- He Used to Be A Bible Salesman.
- He Ran Into A Burning House (To Save His Pot).
- He Retired in 1972.
- He Has Been Playing The Same Guitar For 50 years.
- He Recorded The IRS Tapes to Pay Off His Tax debt.
- He Wrote "On The Road Again" on A Barf Bag.
- He Performed "Up Against The Wall, Redneck Mother" with Rosalynn Carter.
- His Album Stardust Spent Years on The Country Music Charts.
- He's A Pot-Repreneur.
While other kids were still struggling to keep inside the lines of their coloring books, Nelson was composing music. He recalled the experience of his songwriting debut to Rolling Stonein 2004: “Back when we used to take music lessons from our grandmother, we'd go through lessons, and if we'd get the lesson right that day she'd take a gold star—a l...
Before he became a full-time musician in the mid-1950s, Nelson worked as a cotton picker (a gig he began as a child, working alongside his grandmother), disc jockey, and a Bible salesman.
While living in Nashville, Nelson arrived home one evening to discover that his house was burning to the ground. “By the time I got there, it was burning real good,” he told Peoplein 1980. “But I had this pound of Colombian grass inside. I wasn't being brave running in there to get my dope—I was trying to keep the firemen from finding it and turnin...
In 1972, Nelson paid $14,000 to buy out his contract so that he could retire to Austin, Texas. But his withdrawal from the music business didn’t last long. Especially considering how vibrant the music scene was happening all around him in Austin. Within a year, he was back on the charts with the album Shotgun Willie. By the mid-1970s he scored some...
Nelson has been playing Trigger, his beloved guitar (which he named after Roy Rogers’ horse), since 1969. “I’ve got to take good care of Trigger,” Nelson told UncutMagazine in 2014. “He’s had a couple of problems. We’ve had to go in and do some work on the inside, build up the woodwork in there a little bit over the years. But Trigger’s holding up ...
In 1990, the IRS raided Nelson’s house and seized his assets (everything except Trigger) for non-payment of taxes. The $32 million bill, one of the largest in IRS history, was eventually negotiated down and settled in a creative way: Nelson would record a new album with the IRS receiving at least 15 cents of every dollar made. The result was the li...
Nelson’s 1980 hit, “On The Road Again,” was written aboard an airplane—on a barf bag. “I was on an aeroplane with Sydney Pollack and Jerry Schatzberg, who was the director of the movie Honeysuckle Rose,” Nelson told Uncutin 2014. “They were looking for songs for the movie and they started asking me if I had any ideas. I said, ‘I don’t know, what do...
Former President Jimmy Carter has never made a secret of his admiration of Willie Nelson. And the two have shared a long friendship. On September 13, 1980, Nelson performed for Carter and guests at the White House—which included a duet of Ray Wylie Hubbard’s “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother” with then-First Lady Rosalynn Carter. (On various occ...
The 1978 album Stardust, which features Nelson-ized renditions of pop standards like "Georgia on My Mind" and "Unchained Melody" spent two years on the Billboard 200, and a total of 540 weeks (a total of more than 10 years) on various country music charts.
Nelson has hardly made a secret of regular marijuana use, or his support for its legalization. (His rap sheet of pot-related arrests certainly backs up those claims.) As more and more states are legalizing the once-outlawed weed, Nelson has put his expertise on the topic to good use, and launched his very own brand of pot: Willie’s Reserve.
Continue reading. Maybe I didn’t love you. Quite as often as I could have. Maybe I didn’t treat you. Quite as good as I should have. If I made you feel, oh, second best (you did, you did) Girl ...
May 16, 2015 · One cold night in Nashville, the young Willie Nelson lay down in the road. Would anyone give him a break? In this exclusive extract from his new book, he describes the moment his luck turned
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- Willie Nelson
Down Every Road by Merle Haggard released in 1996. Find album reviews, track lists, credits, awards and more at AllMusic.
Boasting a voluminous 100 songs, Down Every Road 1962-94 delivers a weighty four volumes of Merle Haggard. It's easily the best one-stop-shop representation of his musical arc's great depth (you'd have to be a Haggard completist to pine for those obscure tunes that didn't make the cut).
