Willie Nelson & Family takes a four-part bus ride through sweaty honky-tonks and music festivals and features interviews with performers as varied as Brenda Lee, Wynton Marsalis, Booker T. Jones and Dolly Parton.
Fans only familiar with Nelson’s long-haired hippie-cowboy image may be surprised by the clean-cut suit-and-tie square who sang along nervously to backing tracks on 1950s television. I, for one, grew up thinking of singer-songwriter as the most at-one mothersucker on the planet, and was amazed to learn just how frustrating it was for him to find mainstream success. Although he always did well in Texas, and RCA labelmate Bobby Bare Sr. acknowledged “songwriters wanted to be Willie,” DJs weren’t spinning his early records, nor did they sell.
Nelson could have easily settled for penning songs for others. After all, he wrote the classic “Crazy” that Patsy Cline made famous, and there certainly would have been no shame in trying to be the next Porter Wagoner or Conway Twitty.
“Back in my drinking days, I tried to commit suicide a couple of times,” Nelson says in the documentary, describing his initial travails. “One time in the dead of winter, I was so down on myself I laid down in the
middle of the street, half-hoping a car would run over me.”
And had a car come along, there would have been no Red-Headed Stranger, no Stardust, no Farm Aid, no Highwaymen, no “Blues Eyes Crying in the Rain.”
But Willie found his way, in no small part thanks to the cannabis plant that helped him leave booze and
cigarettes behind. Again and again, he defied Nashville industry executives’ expectations and genre stereotypes.
“Like Bing Crosby or Frank Sinatra or Judy Garland,” Nelson remains “a great interpreter of the American songbook,” said David Ritz, who co-wrote Nelson’s 2015 autobiography. And, it turns out, an irreplaceable contributor to that songbook.
“We’re going to be singing ‘On The Road Again’ 400 years from now,” Ritz predicted.
But solo notoriety was never enough for Nelson either. Throughout his career, he’s insisted on bringing others into the family. San Antonio singer-songwriter Nicky Diamonds, who knows a thing or two about distinctive vocal phrasing, shared the stage with Nelson at Luck Ranch and intends to record at his private studio soon.
An underappreciated fact explored in Willie Nelson & Family is the influence Romani jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt had on Nelson’s style on the instrument. The film also showcases forgotten Nelson gems, such as “Still Is Still Moving to Me” and “Write Your Own Songs.” Though for my money, his best remains one of his first, “Funny How Time Slips Away.”
Nelson has survived both the DEA and the IRS, he knows a card trick or two and he just celebrated his 90th birthday. Next up, he might consider a run for president, but perhaps he’s still a little young.
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This article appears in Dec 27, 2023 – Jan 9, 2024.