Inside Music Stories: Buzz Knight and Jeffrey Himes Explore Willie Nelson's Journey from Struggles to Iconic Success

What makes a song resonate deeply with its audience and stand the test of time? Join host Buzz Knight in this captivating episode of "takin' a walk" as he sits down with Jeffrey Himes, the author of "Willie Nelson: All the Albums, the Stories Behind the Music. " This episode is a treasure trove for music lovers and those interested in the rich tapestry of music history, offering an insider's perspective on one of country music's most iconic figures.

As they explore the life and career of Willie Nelson, Buzz and Himes take listeners on a journey through Nelson's evolution from a struggling artist in Nashville to a celebrated country music legend. With a focus on the unique qualities that make Nelson's music so relatable, Himes shares exclusive insights gleaned from his interviews with the man himself. The discussion highlights Nelson's unconventional phrasing, his jazz and blues influences, and the poignant themes of loss and resilience that permeate his songs.

Listeners will discover the significance of the outlaw movement in country music and how Nelson's relocation to Austin was a pivotal moment in his career. Buzz Knight's engaging style brings to life the inspiring music stories that shaped Nelson's path, including his long-standing collaboration with harmonica player Mickey Raphael. This episode also delves into Nelson's activism, shedding light on his efforts to support farmers and advocate for cannabis legalization—a testament to his multifaceted legacy.

The episode is not just about music; it's about the journey of an artist who embodies the spirit of resilience and creativity. Buzz Knight's friendly approach ensures that every listener feels like they are part of the conversation, making this episode a must-listen for anyone interested in the inside stories of musicians. With impactful storytelling and rich anecdotes, this episode of "takin' a walk" is sure to inspire and entertain, offering a deep dive into the artistry and legacy of Willie Nelson, one of the legendary musicians of our time.

So, lace up your walking shoes and tune in to this enlightening episode that promises to enrich your understanding of music history and the stories behind albums that have shaped our lives. Whether you're a fan of classic rock history, indie music journeys, or simply love compelling interviews with musicians, this episode is a perfect fit for your playlist. Don't miss out on this opportunity to walk alongside Buzz Knight and Jeffrey Himes as they uncover the magic behind the music.

Thanks for checking out another of our Inside Music Stories celebrating another chapter in country music and american music history.

Takin’ A Walk: In-depth music interviews exploring the stories and music history behind the songs.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Taking a Walk. I'm buzz night and welcome to the
Taking a Walk Podcast. Now, Willie Nelson is quite a
subject to take on, and Jeffrey Hymes is the author
who has written Willy Nelson all the albums, the stories
behind the music. So for a man like Willie who's
been in perpetual motion, Jeffrey breaks it down the Troubadour,

(00:22):
the tax troubled Guy, the Farmer's Son, a country music icon.
We'll talk to author Jeffrey Himes next on taking a Walk,
Taking a Walk. Jeffrey, Welcome to the Taking a Walk podcast.
Miik you, So I asked this question of everybody, so

(00:43):
it'd be fitting that I ask it of you, sir.
If you could take a walk with somebody living or dead,
who would you take a walk with and where would
you take that walk with them? And I have a
feeling I know the answer, but it's up to you.

Speaker 2 (00:57):
Well, it's to say, I'd like to take a walk
with Willie Nelson along at an Alice River near his
home and just have a chance to get away from
it all and talk about what it's like to write
those songs and how he went about it.

Speaker 1 (01:14):
That would be great. Now, you have interviewed Willy before.

Speaker 2 (01:17):
Yeah, a couple of times. Right, And the book is
you know, I used the material from my interviews. I
use quotes from magazine newspaper stories about him and his autobiographies.
But it's basically trying to bring to life the music
he recorded over his long, long career and what does

(01:38):
that Why does that music enjore? Why does it still
captivate people all these years later?

Speaker 1 (01:47):
What was the interview process like with him? Was it?
Do you feel like it was in a setting where
you were able to get Willie, you know, nice and
relaxed and warmed up before you started.

Speaker 2 (02:00):
Well, I have met them backstage a couple of times,
but the actual interviews were on the phone. And sometimes
interviewing people on the phone I found can be sort
of like a Catholic confessional where you don't see each other,
and somehow you feel it's easier to just say whatever
and confess anything. So sometimes it works for your advantage

(02:24):
to be on the phone.

Speaker 1 (02:25):
Yeah, I remember, I'm sure you remember the late radio
personality don Imus Imus. In his in his later years
of doing a show, he did certainly many interviews in
the studio, but he did a ton of them over
the phone, and I think that was his feeling, the
fact that you're getting more out of them because you know,

(02:49):
some of those inhibitions are kind of scraped away because
it's a phone call.

Speaker 2 (02:54):
Right, That's true, that's counterintuitive, but I think it works
out that way. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (03:00):
I didn't understand it at first, but then I began to,
and then when you said it, it reminded me of that.
So do you remember the first point in your life
where you were musically connected to Willie Nelson?

Speaker 2 (03:15):
Yeah, So as a kid, when I was in high school,
in college, I was a real rock and roll fan,
like a lot of us. But when Bob Dylan and
the Birds started doing country music, it made me curious
and more investigated, the more fascinated I became by the
same thing happened for me with jazz and blues in

(03:37):
much the same way. Like somebody who's big star in
your own time, and then you realize that all their
influenced by this person, in that person's influence by that person,
you learn musical history backwards. I've always felt that was true,
and so I inevitably discovered Willie and he was so
fascinated because you know, he has. As I write in

(03:58):
the book, one of the things that's it's strange about
him is he has this way of presenting himself as,
you know, a sort of traditional country singer. He has
that sort of East Texas twang in his voice. He
tells these stories, these sort of short songs about uh,
troubled marriages or troubled financial times, or people who die,

(04:22):
and and so you can sort of accept it on
that level, but as you listen, you realize that, you know,
behind that foreground there's all these are jazz influences, there's
these blues influences, there's just sort of you know, Frank
Sinatra phrasing that he has, and and so it's it's

(04:43):
a very rich kind of country music, I think as
a result. And the other thing I discovered when I
really started looking at these songs and trying to explain
to myself and multiply to the reader why they work
so well. So I think that really has this way
of talking about personal loss or setbacks or betrayals where

(05:06):
he talks about how much it hurts and what a
devastating blow it can be, but he always sort of
maintains this sort of dignity. He always maintains this sort
of belief that he's going to emerge from it and
keep going. That's not going to knock him down for good.
Dozens hundreds of songs like that. You know, he could

(05:27):
be talking to the walls and Hello Walls. He can
beat his old ex lover and funny how time slips away.
You know, he can fly into the Los Angeles to
get away from somebody and Bloody Mary Morning. But it's
the same theme and he never gets tired of it.
We never get tired of it because that's one of

(05:47):
the sort of central challenges we all face in life,
is how do you deal with loss? How do you
deal with setbacks? And really doesn't tell us what to do.
He demonstrates what to do.

Speaker 1 (06:00):
Is unconventional phrasing and timing certainly sets him apart. And
you made reference to it. When did he discover that
signature style.

Speaker 2 (06:10):
Well, he told me in one interview, he said, you know,
my favorite country singer is George Jones. My favorite singer
of all time is Frank Sinatra, And I think it
comes out of that sort of Sinatra era of pop
singers had a strong jazz and flaus and they went
north hit the expected beat. You know, they would like

(06:31):
maybe anticipate it or you know, let it lag a
little bit. And what that does is it you know,
if you do it correctly, it builds tension in a
song and then releases it and makes the song that
much more dramatic. And you know, I think that when
you're singing old songs, whether it's the songs of Cindy

(06:53):
Walker or star Dust or these old Bob Will songs,
it's all from that era when he's growing up in
the little town of Abbot, Texas, and it's what he's
hearing on the radio. He's absorbing that, and it's in
his DNA. When he plays the guitar, it's the same thing.
It's always the sort of pushing delay in the phrasing.

(07:15):
And this especially obvious when you see him live in concert.
You know, when he's playing these songs he's sung hundreds
of thousands of time, whether it's on the road again
or funny, how time slips away. He's got he's always
looking for a way to keep it interesting for himself
as much as for the audience, and so he's always

(07:36):
like tinkering with it. It's always shifting things around, and
you know, and so it keeps his vocals fresh, and
it makes the song sound new to us, even though
we've heard them hundreds of times.

Speaker 1 (07:50):
We had you on our new podcast, Taking a Walk
Nashville with Sarah Harrilson, So folks should check that out.
But can you talk about Willie's early struggles in Nashville.
Why didn't that establishment really get him initially?

Speaker 2 (08:06):
I think it has a lot to do with what
we were just talking about. His unusual phrasing. In Nashville,
especially there in the early sixties, there was these there'd
be these session musicians. They would come in, they learned
the song, and you try to record three songs in
three hours, you know, and boom boom boom, and you know,

(08:28):
these are great musicians, there's no question about that. But
they weren't really given time to get used to Willie's
unconventional phrasing, and so there was always this sort of uncertainty,
you know, should they try to imitate his phrasing, should
he try to imitate their phrasing? And there's always these
bix results. It's so awkwardness sometimes we result. If you

(08:52):
hear live recordings from that era. There's an album called
a Country Music concert, which was that Panther Hall in
Fort Worth in mid sixties. He's playing with his own
Texas band who knows how to play with him? You
can hear how you know, that sort of unusual approach

(09:12):
is already there. He's already thinking that way. It's just
that it wasn't translating to the Nationville studios because he
wasn't playing with his musicians. He was playing with people
who were unfamiliar. Not bad musicians, but unfamiliar. One of
the things I write about in the book is that
during his long tenure at RCA Records, chat Atkins was

(09:36):
his producer. And chet is a great musician, very influential
country music history, but he had a way of doing
things that he knew would create country radio hits. Really
wanted to have hits. He was shy about that, but
he had this when he started singing, there was this

(09:58):
instinct datumnsard. It took over and it was very sort
of awkward for both men because they genuinely respected each other,
but they just had completely different visions of what Willie
Nelson album should sound like.

Speaker 1 (10:13):
What was happening in country music that made the outlaw
movement so necessary?

Speaker 2 (10:19):
Well part of us is what we're talking about is
that the artists did not have a lot of say
in the studios. The producers who had a formula that
they knew this formula works. You know, if you follow this,
you know you're going to be rewarded with hit records.
Willie was sort of chafing against those restraints. It's you know, Waylon, Jennings,

(10:43):
Merle hagget these all people who weren't comfortable in that
kind of situation. And you know, I think, you know,
any formula, no matter how good it is, gets stale
after a while, and I think that people were hungry
for something new. You know, these people, well, Chris Gustofferson,
Willie Nelson, Wayale and Jennings, Merle Haggard, Jessic Coulter, you

(11:06):
know who became known as the Outlaws. It was a
new sound. It was it was brilliant music. It was
sort of filled with emotion. It was unlike what people
have been hearing on the radio, and there was this
immense response to it. Redheaded Stranger. It was Willie's breakthrough album,
one of the first country albums called platinum. Wanted the Outlaws,
which is the multi artist album the RCA put together.

(11:29):
It went platinum, and so they were not only breaking through,
but they were like raising the expectations for what a
country album could do.

Speaker 1 (11:39):
And talk about how Williams moved to Austin transformed him
both personally and artistically.

Speaker 2 (11:47):
During the during this the RCA years, when he was
sort of butting heads up against the system. You know,
he would come to Nashville. He was living outside of Nashville,
this place called Ridgetop. You know, he was recording in Nashville,
his label was there, as producer was there, but he
was always driving down to Texas every weekend to play

(12:09):
live because that's where he had a big following. She
didn't have anywhere else, and he had musicians that knew
how to play with him. And his house enriched up,
burned down. He moved down to Texas temporarily and this
house got rebuilt. He moved back to Tennessee and he realized, no, no,
this is not making sense. You know, I'm to be

(12:31):
spending most of my time in Texas playing live, and
I'm on be spending occasional weekend in Nashville recording an album.

Speaker 1 (12:39):
It makes more sense to.

Speaker 2 (12:40):
Be in Texas. So and and then to Armadillo, which
is an old National Guard armory in Austin. It became
a place where rock and roll in the same way

(13:07):
that sort of reticipated reactions to those records he had
the SUC seventies.

Speaker 1 (13:15):
So did that bridge welcome back to the past enhanced
his zen like quality despite such a chaotic life. Is
that where it comes from.

Speaker 2 (13:26):
I'm taking this from what I've read, not from my
I didn't know him back then, but people say that
really was not a good drinker. You know, he would
get angry and start vi and stuff like that, and
he was much more agreeable to be around when he
was started to stop drinking so much and start smoking
or dope. So I think that's part of it. But

(13:49):
I think also what we were talking about earlier about
the way he posted these songs and how he would
sort of talk about how things could go raw in
your life and you still need to like keep it
together and keep going. That's that's that's the sense quality
to that. And so even in those early singles back

(14:10):
when he was drinking, you could see that that was
part of his personality, and it became it flowered more
and more once he especially once he had enough success
that he wasn't like worried all the time about feeding
his family, paying all u ex wives.

Speaker 1 (14:26):
When did activism sort of become the foreground of his personality?
You know, his work for farmers, cannabis legalization. You know,
how did this connect to his music?

Speaker 2 (14:38):
I think that you know, the first the first sign
of it is when Charlie Pride was first courting as
a singer and one of the few African American artists
to be on a major label of country music and
really went out of his way to bring Trialie onto

(15:00):
his shows and to you know, make sure that that
the promoters treated him fairly and audience has treated him fairly.
He had those instincts all along. He grew up during
the Depression when everybody was having a hard time, so
he sympathized with people who were on the outs of things.

(15:21):
And the other part of it is he was always
sort of had sympathy for the renegade, the outsider, the
outlaw as they say that in the outlaw music movement,
and so you know, he was likely to support people
who were in that category.

Speaker 1 (15:39):
So he's most recently been out with Bob Dylan. Can
you talk about that relationship, where it first began, how
it has sort of manifested itself over the years, and
how they're in their own way Kindred Spirits.

Speaker 2 (15:56):
I can't remember the exact year they first connected. I
think goes on one of those early eighties albums. Anyways,
you know they're obviously the Kindred Spirits, the boat songwriters.
Kimber who was I think, really recorded a song that
Dylan had written for him. There's one hundred and fifty

(16:18):
two albums. I can't remember what songs from which albums necessarily,
but periodically they would they would cross paths and collaborate
on something. I think that were the key things that
brought them together was Farm Made. When Dylan performed at
the We're the We Are the World concert Philadelphia, they said,

(16:39):
you know, this is nice that we're doing this for
the people in Africa, but what about the family farmers
in the United States. Why aren't we doing something for them?
And Willie sort of picked up on that and you know,
organized Farm Made, and then Dylan said, well, yeah, of
course I will perform. It's the first few of them.
And I think that that was a connection that brought

(17:01):
them together and moved forward Dylan's like a reclusive guy,
so he's not the guy who's going to sort of
hang around Willy's golf coursing. Uh pick so, And for
all we.

Speaker 1 (17:15):
Know, when they're on the road, they really probably don't
even connect that much, right, I mean, it's not like
they're doing jam sessions by the campfire till midnight, right
exactly exactly. There's one collaborator that has been with Willy
for a long time, the great harmonica player Mickey Raphael.
Can you talk about that collaboration and what you think

(17:37):
that means to Willie's legacy?

Speaker 2 (17:39):
I can as it so happens. I just interviewed Vicky
for one of my podcasts on a Hard Rain and
Pink Cadillacs on Substack. Has it aired yet, It'll be
coming out later this month. Yeah, Vicky was not a
real country fan when he first met Willie. He played

(18:02):
up because he loved the Blues, the Chicago Blues players
like Little Walter. He ended up playing with B. W.
Stevenson and Dallas if you remember that name. Darryl Royal,
the University of Texas football coach, was a fan of
Mickey's from those Steve Stevenson shows. And he invited Mickey

(18:23):
to come to one of the picking parties that Willie
was going to play in, and there was a private
party in the coach's house. Nicky brought his harmonicas and
Willi plays his songs and Micky played along, and the
end of the night he said, yeah, Billy said, you know,
anytime you want to come sit in with us, we'd
love to have you. So whenever Willy was playing in

(18:45):
the Reasonable Drive of Dallas, Mickey would show up at
the Harmacra's play and play. And after several weeks of this,
Willy asked his drummer and road manager, Paul English, so
how much we paying Mickey? And Paul said, oh, we're
not paying him anything. He's just just sitting in. And
Willi says, double his salary. But they started paying him

(19:11):
and he just, you know, he says, I was never
actually hired. I just you know, start getting paid fifty
years later, you know, here I am. So the other
side of this story is that Willie's Texas band, trying
a lot of great musicians, had a steel guitar player
named Jimmy Day, who's like a country music legend. You know,

(19:34):
it's just a genius on the steal. He was not.
He drank a lot. He was not easy to get
along with, and so Willie would fire him and hire him,
and fire him and hire him. And this went on
for a while and finally, you know, Billy had enough
and he said, now what am I going to do?
I can't hire another steel player that says good as
Jimmy Day, but I need to have something to fill

(19:56):
that hole in the songs. That's when he met Mickey,
and he said, well, you know, actually this works because
it's like it has a you know, that sort of
sustaining quality that a steel has, a sort of you know,
logottal lines, and so it actually fit better than you
would expect. You know, harmonica, Uh, there's been harmonica uh

(20:19):
and country music. Charlie McCoy was the great harmonica player
that played on a lot of songs, a lot of albums,
including a couple of Dylan albums. And and so Mickey
was sort of in that bold he was, you know,
he can improvise, he can you know, play the blues,
you can play country and uh it's sort of fit

(20:39):
the role of the still guitar player but sounded different.
So it was one more thing that sort of set
Willy apart from everybody else in Nashville. And Matt Rawlings
is a keyboardist producer who's worked with Willy. He told
me that, you know, there are three things that make
a Willy record a Willie record. That's Willie's boy. Is

(21:01):
this acoustic guitar trigger which is a nylon string with
a big hole in it. And Nicky Rafael's harmonica. If
you have those three things, that's going to sound like
what else?

Speaker 1 (21:12):
That's so awesome? That is great. Well, everybody check out
the great book from Jeffrey Hims Willie Nelson, all the albums,
the stories behind the music. It is beautiful. It is
so detailed. It is a wonderful piece of work, just
like Willie, a wonderful piece of work. Now, so ye right,

(21:34):
very fitting. But Jeffrey, thank you so much for your
generosity of being on Taking a Walk. Really appreciate it.

Speaker 2 (21:39):
Wow, glad to be here. Thanks for listening to this
episode of the Taking a Walk Podcast.

Speaker 1 (21:46):
Share this and other episodes with your friends and follow
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