Willie Nelson Read Online Free PDF Page A

24, 1940, when complications from medication taken for pneumonia unexpectedly took Alfred’s life. He was fifty-six. His six-year-old grandson, Willie Hugh Nelson, was old enough to understand that his family, strong as it was, would never be the same. He was the man of the house now.
    The loss of Alfred left a giant hole in all their lives. Nancy, Bobbie Lee, and Willie Hugh moved from the house on the edge of town to a smaller dwelling by the tabernacle. The house had plank floors. Its walls were made of cardboard and pages of the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram,
the newspaper of West Texas, which provided insulated protection from cold drafts in the winter and more fodder for a boy’s imagination. The cracks in the ceiling were big enough for him to stare at the stars at night.
    The loss of the grandfather who raised him had a profound impact, inspiring Willie to write a flurry of heartbreak songs about losing in love, betrayal, and cheating, subjects a seven-year-old boy had not experienced himself, although he was working on it—he already had a girlfriend, Ramona Stafford. On a school trip to the State Fair of Texas in Dallas, he sat next to her and took her hand in his. They both looked straight ahead and smiled, their hands clasped together.
    Nancy Nelson did her best to get by, teaching music lessons on the pump organ for a quarter or fifty cents and eventually taking a job at the Abbott school cafeteria for $18 a week. Sometimes the boy would help out, mopping floors for a dinner. It was no way to keep up with the prominent families who lived west of the tracks and the highway on the “nice” side of Abbott, but Nancy managed to instill in her family a sense of dignity and the urge to be creative.
    Within a couple years of Alfred’s passing, sister and brother were putting their music learning to practice. World War II was raging in the bigger world and three local boys who joined the army—Nookie Holland, Cleo Rafferty, and J. V. Kennedy—were killed in action. But music was more than a call to arms in the small wood-frame house in Abbott; it was the glue that held them together.
    T HE WORDS flashed on the big screen.
R EPUBLIC P ICTURES PRESENTS
BACK IN THE SADDLE
    The letters were superimposed over black-and-white images of singing cowboy and radio star Gene Autry, riding his stallion, Champ. It was a dramatic introduction to a story about a cowboy named Gene Autry who discovers copper on his ranch only to have evil miners pollute the water supply and poison his cattle. Along with his loyal but hapless sidekick Frog Millhouse (played by Smiley Burnette), Gene retrieves the jailed son of a neighboring ranch owner and cures him of his big-city ways to fight the bad guys and prevail in a climactic gunfight. The saga concludes back at the corral, with Gene and his beloved gal, Patsy (played by his “Little Darlin’,” Mary Lee), and all the ranch hands singing together.
    The whole concept of good over evil had never made so much sense. Not even the most inspiring preacher had explained the whole cosmic reason for being as fully and eloquently as Gene had. All of Willie’s friends wanted to be like Gene, who grew up in Tioga, northeast of Dallas. Willie just wanted it a little bit more.
    “Willie liked them ol’ western movies,” his friend Morris Russell said, citing films starring cowboy actors and recording artists such as Gene, Roy Rogers, Bill Boyd, Ken Maynard, and Tex Ritter. “We called them shoot-’em-ups.” “We could spend the whole afternoon on Saturdays at the Ritz in Hillsboro,” Bobbie said. “We loved Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, Johnny Mack Brown, Tom Mix, Sunset Carson,” she said, laughing. “We’d try to reconstruct the movie. I’d try my best to be Mary Lee. Until we went back again, we were into that movie, playing all the parts. We never were bored.”
    When Willie was seven, he went to Hillsboro to meet his first real live cowboy-movie star. Johnny Mack Brown was no Gene or Roy,