Willie Nelson Read Free

would have a major impact on the development of towns in southeastern Hill County such as Mertens, Penelope, and Abbott, and on the local culture, including the nightlife.
    Seed and steel were no match for the boll weevil either. The infestation of the pernicious insect that feasted on cotton sapped Hill County’s upward spiral. What the weevil didn’t waste, the Great Depression destroyed. Three-quarters of the farmers in the county were working land they did not own, and with the economic downturn, the train didn’t stop in Abbott anymore. Riders had to flag it down.
    By 1929, Abbott was little more than a scattering of three hundred people in houses and barns, churches for Methodists, Baptists, and Disciples of Christ (the Catholic Church for the Czechs moving into town would come later), a Baptist church for the colored folks, a tabernacle for singing conventions and revivals, three cotton gins, and the three transportation routes bisecting town—Highway 81/77, the north-south border-to-border routes connecting Canada and Mexico, the Missouri-Kansas-Texas railroad, aka the Katy, which also ran north-south, and the Interurban trolley, which ran from Waco, twenty-four miles south, to Fort Worth and Dallas, sixty-three and seventy-three miles north, respectively. For those who lived there, Abbott was something to be proud of. As native son Leo Ruzicka pointed out, “Abbott is the first town in Texas, alphabetically.”
    Abbott, 1933
    B OBBIE LEE AND Willie Hugh were the first Nelsons born on Texas soil. She arrived on the first day of 1931. He came two years later a few minutes before midnight, during the last hour of April 29, 1933. Doc Simms, who delivered both Nelson children at his home, recorded the boy’s birth on the first hour of April 30. He was a healthy baby with big brown eyes and flaming red hair. “He had beautiful hair,” his sister, Bobbie, said. “He was like a strawberry blond, kind of like Aunt Rosa’s hair.” Cousin Mildred, who was thirteen years older than Bobbie Lee, named him Willie Hugh—Hugh because that was the middle name of her dear departed little brother, Wallace Hugh, and Willie because she just liked the sound of it. Bobbie called him Hughty and so did his grandmother Nancy Nelson—whom the boy knew as Mamma—when she shouted his name on the back porch at suppertime.
    Three days after Willie was born, his father, Ira, and mother, Myrle, went out to play music with a band, leaving the baby in the care of his grandparents and his cousin. Ira and Myrle had been sixteen when they married—still kids in many respects but old enough to work in the fields and bear children and old enough to know better. Myrle hated Texas. All her people were back in Arkansas or moving west across Oklahoma to the Pacific Northwest. Some folks said that maybe it was Myrle’s Indian blood that made her want to ramble.
    But rather than stick around to fight the inevitable fight or submit to her man, like they taught in church, and continue living with Ira’s parents, and as much as she loved them and her kids, Myrle couldn’t be true to herself if she stayed. She left Abbott six months after giving birth to Willie and went to Oklahoma, then points west, working as a waitress, a dancer, and a card dealer in San Francisco, Oregon, and Washington, where she caught up with her kinfolk. The divorce became final when Willie Hugh was two.
    Ira Nelson remained in Abbott after Myrle left, but for all practical purposes, he left his children to be raised by his parents, Alfred and Nancy. He picked up occasional work farming “on the halves”—splitting the proceeds of a crop with a landowner who provided the dirt and tools to raise a crop—and with a little determination and a lot of patience learned how to fix engines for the living it provided. But mostly he liked picking his guitar, staying out late, and hanging in honky-tonks. There wasn’t much in life more fun than picking and singing. That’s how he