Willie Nelson Read Free Page A

had met Myrle. His boy and his girl were like that too. It ran in the family blood.
    “W HEN my father began playing beer joints and started drinking, my grandfather and grandmother gave him holy hell,” Bobbie said. “One night they found a whiskey bottle in his car. That was the beginning of the end of the family thing.”
    Ira remarried and lived for a while in the blacksmith shop with his second wife, Lorraine, and pumped gas. Then he drifted to the oil fields of New Mexico, to Lorraine’s hometown of Covington, in Hill County, and eventually found work up in Fort Worth.
    “Ira didn’t like to work, I don’t think,” said neighbor Leo Ruzicka, who used to play marbles for keeps with Ira. “I never saw him working. Living off his daddy is what it amounted to. He’d rather play music.”
    “Our grandfather didn’t want us to visit either Mother or Daddy,” Bobbie Nelson said. “They had to come see us. My grandfather totally looked out for me and Willie.” Myrle came back when she could, riding the bus or catching the train, but she never stayed long. Once, she came back to tell the kids she was dying of cancer and wanted them to learn a song to remember her by, the Rex Griffin composition “The Last Letter” (“I’ll be gone when you read this last letter from me”).
    “I remember one time she hitchhiked to come see us,” Bobbie said. “It cost money to ride the bus or train. She took the bus back. We did not want her to be hitchhiking. My mother was very independent.” Myrle liked moving around, and so did her boy. Willie developed a tendency to wander early on, most often heading to Jimmy Bruce’s house next door. Nancy Nelson quickly figured out if she didn’t want to spend all afternoon searching for a lost child, she’d have to keep Willie tethered close to home, so she put a leash on him and staked it to a post, like she did with the family cow. It didn’t keep Willie from getting loose—Bobbie kept untying the leash—but it slowed him down enough for Mamma Nelson to keep an eye on him.
    When they first moved to Abbott, Nancy and Alfred did farm labor for a lady until Alfred went to work for John Rejcek, a blacksmith with the biggest family in Abbott, who also led a polka band in his spare time. Alfred eventually opened his own shop, doing his smithing with a motor, a fire, an anvil, and a hammer. The kids in Abbott gravitated to his shop, where he let them help turn the forge, play marbles and dominoes, and hang out. Occasionally, he would gather them around the potbellied stove and treat them to real-life stories with a parable at the end.
    Religion played a major part in the Nelson family’s life, the same way it did for most other families throughout the South, where church was the all-purpose community center. Shortly after they arrived in Texas, the Nelsons joined the Abbott Methodist Church, a simple white clapboard building with a burnt-orange composite-shingle roof topped by a humble steeple that had been raised in 1899. Alfred became the church’s music director, and both Alfred and Nancy taught Sunday school.
    Mamma Nelson used a Methodist hymnal to teach her granddaughter to read music and play piano. “It made sense to me right away,” Bobbie Lee said. The first song she played on the upright piano after her grandparents traded away a pump organ was “Jesus, Lover of My Soul.”
    The church was one of the most important institutions in the community, perhaps the most important institution. But church wasn’t all there was to life in Abbott. And church wasn’t the only place for making music.
    H ILLSBORO, the county seat, was a larger version of Abbott, its eight thousand residents mostly white folks and mostly Methodist and Baptist, with some colored folks who lived on the edge of town. Hillsboro was where you went to sell your eggs on the courthouse square on Saturdays and sing at singing conventions inside the gingerbread county courthouse on Sundays. If you had