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running to fetch Dr. Simms, who lived only three houses away. But there was a lot of land between houses in Abbott in 1933.
    I ran as fast as I could. A couple of years earlier, when I was thirteen, Myrle had given birth to Bobbie Lee, and it had scared me to death. Bobbie Lee was born on the first hour of the first week of the first month of the first year—1 A.M ., January 1, 1931. They had made me go upstairs and told me to go to sleep. Myrle was only sixteen herself, and I was frightened and curious what was happening to her.
    Myrle used to iron for Dr. Simms. She ironed his white shirts. Mrs. Simms wouldn’t let her iron anything but the collar and the sleeves, because that’s all that showed when he put on his vest. Myrle wouldstarch and iron his collars and cuffs one day a week. I don’t know what she got paid, but it was a little bit of money.
    Dr. Simms came to the house to handle the birth. Mama and Daddy Nelson were there. Myrle’s husband, Ira, must have been at work. He could have been off playing music someplace—Ira was always playing music—but he wasn’t at the house.
    Because I had enjoyed Bobbie Lee so much, had babysat with her all the time instead of working, Myrle had told me, “You’ve loved my first baby dearly, so when my next one is born, whatever it is, you can name it.”
    I gave the new baby my daddy’s name, Hugh. Then to go with Hugh I chose the name Willie. It sounded kind of musical—Willie Hugh Nelson. I wasn’t old enough to realize that Willie wouldn’t be a mature, grown-up man’s name someday, that he might be more proud to have a name like Granddaddy Nelson’s—William—stuck on a marriage license. But he was never William. He was always Willie.
    Willie’s granddaddy and grandmother—our grandparents—used to teach singing in Arkansas before the family moved to Abbott, Texas, in 1929. They would take over some country schoolhouse for ten days or so and teach music to the families—men, women, children, everybody loved singing. My goodness, up in the Arkansas mountains no shows came through. When you weren’t working, you were either in church singing or you were at a party singing or a schoolhouse singing. I was only eight or ten years old, but I was the pump organ player. Granddaddy Nelson would have me learning new songs constantly. He was the song leader. Whatever he wanted to sing, that’s what I learned to play. I would help chalk music on the blackboard at the singing schools. Everybody would learn to read music, read the lines and spaces. And they would sing by notes.
DO, RE, ME
. I played by shape notes, and that’s why it was so hard, because
DO
remains the same shape but it changes lines every time you change keys.
    We would ride horseback to the schoolhouse for the singing schools and spend nights with the people who came to study. Everybody brought food and gathered to study music for maybe two weeks at a stretch. We mostly sang gospel hymns. We would sing all six verses of every hymn.
    Granddaddy sang bass. At night he would hold little Willie on his lap and sing him to sleep with his beautiful bass voice—songs like “Polly Wolly Doodle All the Day” and “Show Me the Way to Go Home,” “She’ll be Comin’ Round the Mountain,” and “Where Have You Gone Billy Boy.”
    Willie’s father, Ira, was always wanting to go off and play in a band somewhere, and Myrle would go with him, so I would take little Willie, just a few months old, to our house and he would sleep in the curve of my arm. Bobbie would sleep with Mama Nelson.
    When Willie was about two, some of us bought him a little Christmas gift. It was a mandolin made out of tin with real strings on it, so he could strum the chords. That was his first musical instrument. Willie kept it a long time. He and Bobbie weren’t destructive, they kept their toys. Of course, they