Willie Nelson (6 page)
W
EARING
the western suit purchased by the five girls in the Willie Nelson Fan Club, he joined twenty-one other students from the Abbott High class of ’50 in graduation exercises in the gymnasium and a baccalaureate service at the Methodist church. The graduates were all exceptions to the rule, Willie especially, considering the hand he was dealt growing up. Only 11 percent of the adults in Hill County could claim a high school degree. Willie Hugh was one of them. So were Mary Ann Kolar, Danny Ozyomy, Adolph Janecka, Jean Carroll, Bobby Watson, Donald Reed, Ermalee Ellis, Lawrence Hlavaty, Helen Pettitt, Gayle Gregory, Joseph Jenecka, Mattie Row Payne, Jackie Clements, Ramona Stafford, Billy Harsler, Helen Urbanovsky, Donald Pendegrass, and Ralph McIlroy.
The year Willie completed high school, country music was redefining itself as Red Foley racked up jukebox spins with his version of “Birmingham Bounce,” a song initially popularized by an Alabama cowboy known as Hardrock Gunter, while another ’Bama boy, Hank Williams, was moaning the blues with “Long Gone Lonesome Blues.”
A
FTER
graduating, Willie started running around with Zeke Varnon, a buddy of Bud Fletcher’s whose main mission in life seemed to be the pursuit of a good time.
“I met him at the Nite Owl,” Willie said. “I was playing music. He’d just gotten out of the army. We started hanging out together.” Zeke endeared himself to Willie by dancing with all the girls in the Willie Nelson Fan Club seated at the table by the front of the bandstand and by clowning and carrying on. Zeke and Barbara Jean McDearmon, who was Willie’s sweetie when she was killed, were old friends from Hillsboro.
When Willie wasn’t playing, he and Zeke liked to “drink, run around and chase the girls,” Willie said. “He had done it all his life. I never knew what he was gonna do. He never knew what he was gonna do, and when he’d get drunk he was like everybody else—there was no telling what he was going to do.”
Some nights, Zeke and Willie would drink to the point of passing out and wake up the next morning and start drinking again. They attempted to enter the bootlegging trade, pooling their earnings and buying nineteen half-pints over the McLennan County line and driving the haul back to Hillsboro, where half-pints went for twice the price. “We sold two bottles,” Willie said, and drank or gave away the rest. “We were great bootleggers.”
Zeke had a wild streak wilder than Willie’s and was a natural-born con, always trying to work a scam, shave an angle, and hustle up money, with a willing Willie as his coconspirator.
“One night, another good friend of mine who’d get a little alcohol in him beat the hell out of Zeke with a ball-peen hammer and landed him in the hospital, almost killed him,” Willie said with understatement. “It had to do with a woman, of course. They were the best of friends, when all of a sudden, Zeke opened the door and—bam! It wasn’t the first time for him.”
He was Willie’s soul brother. “We always wore the same size of everything—clothes, boots, hat,” Zeke said about Willie. “He used to stay all night with me on Saturday night, and he would wear my clothes on Sunday. If I stayed with him, I’d wear his clothes.”
Willie followed Zeke to Tyler later in 1950, where they found work as tree trimmers for the Asplundh company for eighty cents an hour, until Willie fell from a tree and hurt his back. Out of ideas about what to do next, he followed in the footsteps of other young men his age and signed up for military service, joining the air force. He had been classified 1-A, meaning he’d likely be drafted into the armed services anyway. At least this way, he could choose which branch of the military to join. And just in case, he brought along his guitar.
He was stationed at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, then transferred to Sheppard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Texas, Scott AFB in southwestern Illinois, just east of St. Louis, and Keesler AFB in Biloxi, Mississippi, where he went into radar mechanics.
The air force afforded him the opportunity to sing and play along with other musically inclined airmen from every corner of America, which helped him realize he was more than the best guitarist in Abbott, Texas. When he was at Sheppard AFB, Bobbie or Bud would fetch him from Wichita Falls to play with Bud Fletcher and the Texans on weekends. By the end of his hitch, he was playing six nights a week at the Airmen’s Club.
But too many drinks, too many wild nights off base, one too many fights, and a bad back led to his departure from the military. Whether it was from falling out of the tree in East Texas with Zeke or from baling hay for Rudolph Kapavik alongside Morris Russell as a boy, the pain in his back came on so fiercely, he was hardly mobile. Nine months in, his rank reduced to private, he was offered an honorable medical discharge from the air force as long as he agreed not to sue the military for his back problems.
Willie returned to play with Bud Fletcher and the Texans, but the band was on its last legs. Bud’s temper led to a separation and eventual divorce from Bobbie. Years later, he was killed in a tragic wreck on the highway. The girls in the Willie Nelson Fan Club had moved on to other singers. Willie traveled to Dallas to check out the city lights and to Fort Worth to see his father, Ira, and his wife, Lorraine, and their two boys, Doyle and Charles. Ira had found work as a mechanic at Frank Kent Ford, where Doyle worked in the parts department. Whenever Willie visited, they’d go hear music. “My dad knew a guy named Chester Odem, who had a band, and we’d go listen to them,” he said. Drinking, playing dominoes, drinking, cruising, hell raising, and drinking with Zeke occupied most of his time. When Willie was at a loss for what to do, he and Zeke would stand on opposite sides of the highway, thumbs out, and take the first ride offered, no matter if it was to Hillsboro or to West. It was enough to get out of town and go somewhere. Anywhere.
When Zeke bought a ’48 Studebaker, they had mobility to go wherever they wanted whenever they wanted, as long as they had enough money for gas. Most often, they found themselves drawn to the bright lights of Waco, the closest big city to Abbott.
T
HE HEART OF TEXAS
was a kind nickname for the city of Waco, acknowledgment of its location in the center of the state’s population, which in the wake of World War II was evenly divided between rural and urban citizens. The heart part did not suggest a soul. Ever since it was established in 1849 by Jacob de Cordova, replacing the Hueco Indian village next to abundant springs, Waco had been a tough place to live.
Waco’s leaders bragged that the small city was a manufacturing, retail, and wholesale hub, as well as home to Connally Air Force Base, and the capital of the Brazos River agriculture empire. More accurately, Waco was an overgrown small town controlled by good Christian oligarchs who were joined at the hip to the administration of Baylor University, the oldest institution of higher learning on Texas soil and the world’s largest Baptist institution. Drinking and dancing were not part of Waco’s official history. Neither were honky-tonks.
But to a charismatic kid from Abbott with music on his mind, the city of almost one hundred thousand “wide-awake and hospitable people,” according to the local chamber of commerce, looked like a wide-open situation. Any place on the Dallas Highway with enough electricity to power a 40-watt bulb was a beer joint, dive, private club, or roadhouse, with the featured entertainment a live band or a jukebox. The city’s main drag, the red-bricked Austin Avenue, was an aspiring neon-lit Broadway. Storied venues such as the Melody Ranch, the Western Club, the new Terrace Club, Geneva Hall, Linden Hall, Elk Hall, and various SPJST and Knights of Columbus halls were scattered all over Waco.
Waco was devotedly Southern in outlook, western in underbelly, and closer to Jesus than most communities, or so its citizens liked to think. New people with new ideas contrary to their own were not wanted in a place where cotton was still king and African Americans were still “nigras,” as far as most respectable Wacoans were concerned.
But Waco was also a weird, gothic kind of place that was home to a succession of cranks, crazies, and rugged individualists, including the gentlemen who invented Dr Pepper and Big Red, two distinctive soft drinks that endure to the present. The parade of different drummers began with William Cowper Brann, the publisher of the
Iconoclast,
an incisive, wickedly biting journal published during the late nineteenth century that boasted a circulation of one hundred thousand who ate up the opinions Brann openly shared with his readers. A consistent critic of all things Baptist, Brann was twice engaged in gunfights in the streets of Waco. He lost the second battle along with his life at the corner of 4th and Austin on April 1, 1898, shot in the back. But the God-fearing Christians were not satisfied. More than a hundred years later, the profile of his likeness etched on his tombstone was defaced, a chunk of marble near his temple chipped out, supposedly from a bullet.
The Waco that Willie Nelson came to know was more the Brann version than the Baptist. His first impressions were formed from the radio, where Hank the Hired Hand, as Hank Thompson was first called, was a daily feature on WACO, 1460 on your radio dial. The son of Bohemian immigrants, Thompson had been exposed to the same breadth and variety of music as Willie. He had his first hit record, “Whoa, Sailor!” when Booger Red was starting out with Bud Fletcher and the Texans. “He came to the gymnasium in Abbott and had braces on his teeth,” Willie recalled. “He was just getting ready to go Big Time.”
Thompson proceeded to heat up jukeboxes well into the 1950s with a string of singles, from “Humpty Dumpty Heart” to “Six Pack to Go,” as he built a rep as the new King of Western Swing, despite Thompson’s being a cultured man who’d seen the world in the navy and had attended Princeton University, which earned him derision from his musical peers. “Hank Thompson had a great band until Billy Gray left; he didn’t know shit about meter,” one player remarked. Bob Wills called him a pretty boy. “If Hank ever runs out of nursery songs, he’s going to run out of songs,” Wills once said. The comments could have easily been dismissed as jealousy; by 1954 Thompson could brag twenty-one Top 20 country hit singles. The rhinestone sparkles on his western suit spelled the word STAR for a reason. His hottest streak began with “Wild Side of Life,” which would become his signature song, charting number 1 nationwide for three months in 1952.
Bands like Thompson, the Lone Star Playboys featuring the Booker Brothers and Johnny Gimble, and the Texas Swingsters starring Doyle Brink gave Willie his musical cues. Zeke Varnon was his social mentor. Zeke got Willie to start carrying a pistol, and he roomed with Zeke at the Grandy Courts in Waco. Whenever he would pawn his guitar, Zeke would repay the loan plus interest on Friday so Willie could play the instrument over the weekend before he put it back in pawn again on Monday.
Willie was riding shotgun in the old black ’34 Model T Ford that they had bought together on the night Zeke drove to the Lone Oak Drive-Inn on the Dallas Highway. The hot Spanish-looking carhop delivering hamburgers caught Willie’s eye. She wasn’t moving around on skates like the other carhops, and there was a pronounced sway to her hips as she walked.
Martha Jewel Matthews was a looker, a ravishing brunette with a shapely figure, and a natural flirt. She was neither Spanish nor Mexican but rather full-blooded Cherokee. Her sharp facial features reminded Willie more than a little of his mother. She was only sixteen, but she looked old enough to buy beer and could hold her own when it came to tossing a few back. She had been around the block, married to a steel guitar player at age fourteen, only to be widowed at sixteen. She knew who Willie Nelson of Abbott was. They’d once talked at a dance he was playing in West, and they talked some more at the Sunday matinee dance at the 31 Club in Waco.
But she refused Willie’s request to ride with him and Zeke. She wasn’t going to get in the car with two guys who appeared to be all liquored up. She would have to be properly wooed. “I’m going to come in here one of these nights and I am going to take you home,” Willie promised before they drove off. Two nights later, he pulled into the drive-in alone behind the wheel of the car he had borrowed from Bud Fletcher and drove her home.
He was smitten. “She was a beautiful girl,” he said. “She had a lot of fire, I liked that. She had long black hair, and I was always a sucker for long-black-haired women.”
In a matter of months, a justice of the peace at the Johnson County Courthouse in Cleburne married the couple. Willie was nineteen and ready to take on the world with his hot momma at his side.
Their marriage was fermented in beer joints and honky-tonks. He played music. She loved to dance. They moved in with Mamma Nelson in Abbott while Willie picked up day jobs in Waco and played music at night. But being young and restless, the couple told a few lies so they could put down a deposit and take a drive-away car from Dallas to the West Coast. The experience made them both feel a little bit like the outlaws Bonnie and Clyde, and they drove all the way to Eugene, Oregon, where Willie showed off his bride to his mother and her second husband, Claude Sharpenstein.
Willie enjoyed being around his mother. They’d never spent much time together when he was growing up, and this was an opportunity to catch up. He tried to plant roots in Eugene, briefly hiring on as a guitarist with Joe Massey and the Frontiersmen, a western band that appeared regularly on the Hayloft Jamboree, a barn-dance show broadcast on KUGN radio in Eugene. Myrle and Martha bonded. But Willie and Martha both missed Texas and left Eugene for Mamma Nelson, Abbott, and Waco.
Like Myrle, Martha was not a woman to be trifled with, and she proved it time and again, stuffing a biscuit in her new husband’s mouth when she took umbrage at something he said at the breakfast table and, after he came home late and very drunk one too many times, tying him up with jump rope and beating him with a broom.
“I didn’t do half what I should’ve done,” she later complained.
They argued, they fought, they smoked, they drank, only to kiss and make up and dance before they fought again.
“Martha was a full-blooded Cherokee Indian,” explained Willie. “And every night was like Custer’s last stand.”
W
ACO’S
appeal diminished at 4:36 p.m. on May 11, 1953, when a monster black cloud dropped a tornado a half mile wide on the city. Willie and a friend watched the twister from across the Brazos. The twister killed 114 people, injured more than 1,000, damaged 850 homes, and trashed 2,000 automobiles. Most of Waco’s downtown was torn apart. The city never fully recovered, not even three years later, when a very famous GI from Fort Hood named Elvis Presley started hanging out in Waco on furlough.
Willie stuck around Waco for another year. His brief tenure in the military allowed him to enroll at Baylor University for the spring and summer semesters in 1954 with his tuition paid by the GI Bill. Ostensibly, he was studying agriculture and business as a part-time student with the vague idea of going into law. He rented a house for Martha and their new baby girl on North 5th Street near Cameron Park and got a job at Ozark Leather on a saddle-making assembly line, coming home stinking of wet cowhide. He tried selling encyclopedias door-to-door, until a dog chased him back into his car. In truth, Willie was spending more time catting around with Zeke, majoring in 42 (a popular game of dominoes) while working on a PhD in honky-tonk.