It was about sundown when Myrle’s waters broke. I remember the period of day because Mama Nelson and I were doing the evening milking of our cow, and Myrle had wandered out to watch and talk with us. She was too pregnant to work, but maybe she could sense it was near and wanted company. Anyhow, Myrle’s waters broke while Mama Nelson was milking the cow. Mama Nelson sent me 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 would starch 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 didn’t get a lot of toys like kids do now. They had to take care of their things because they weren’t going to get something new every time somebody went to town. People didn’t go to town every day, either.
Myrle and Ira got divorced and went their separate ways, leaving Bobbie and Willie with Ira’s folks, Dad and Mom Nelson. Times were hard in the Great Depression. Our granddaddy was a blacksmith. Sometimes people would have work done and then not pay him. Some were well-to-do farmers around Abbott, but they wouldn’t pay and never did pay even after Granddaddy Nelson died and left Mama Nelson with Bobbie Lee and Willie to take care of. Bobbie Lee and Willie had to wear clothes somebody handed down to them, or gave them, but they didn’t mind. If Bobbie and Willie only had one good dress and suit to wear to church, it was always nice and clean.
It was such a blow to us all when Dad Nelson, our grandfather, suddenly died at age fifty-six. He was a powerful man, not tall but real strong, but he had a bad heart. He caught pneumonia and tried to take some kind of sulfa drug that went against his heart. He took sick one day and died two weeks later.
I spent all the time I could with Bobbie Lee and Willie. We played games—hide-and-seek, Annie Over, follow the leader, little games that groups could join in and play. Sometimes we’d play paper dolls with the girls and little Willie would help us cut dolls out of the mailorder catalogues.
Before I got married and left home, I helped look after Bobbie Lee and Willie. Mama Nelson would never let me spank them. I used to tell her, “If you just let me take a broom weed, just a broom weed, and spank their little old naked legs when they get out of line . . .” But Mama Nelson said no.
After I moved a mile down the road with my husband and couldn’t see Bobbie Lee and Willie so much anymore, Mama Nelson had to stake little Willie in the yard, like a cow. She used a twenty-five-foot rope, which gave him plenty of grazing room. I would walk over to the Nelson house to visit the children. When I had to leave, Bobbie Lee and Willie would follow me as far as they were allowed to go away from the house, up to the next street. Then they would lay down in the grass and cry until I was out of sight.
I couldn’t stand that. Finally one day I stopped and went back and said, “Let me have a little talk with y’all. If you keep doing this, I can’t come back. I’ll just stay home and not come see you. So you promise not to follow me up the road and cry.”
They cried some more and promised.
There was never anything said about the children being raised by their grandparents and not having a momma and daddy all the time like other children did. Bobbie Lee and Willie never seemed to mind the fact that they didn’t have something other children had. Of course, it was depression time, when nobody had a whole lot. But Bobbie Lee and Willie were happy, well-adjusted kids.
They made good grades in school. Bobbie always played the piano for the school, and Willie would play the guitar and entertain the kids. Every fall the Abbott school would hold a carnival to raise money, and each class would pick a boy and a girl to be the king and queen of the class. Whatever grade they were in, Bobbie Lee and Willie were nearly always chosen.
Myrle and I used to try to write songs together when Bobbie Lee and Willie were babies. After school we would sit and try to put words together so they would rhyme. I’d say, “Did you think of anything that rhymes real good today?” We’d sit down and work some more. We weren’t worrying with music, just trying to put words together to make a song. We never did get anything written. What made us want to make a song, I don’t know. But we worked frantically at it.
Our grandmother would wake Willie and me up in the morning by throwing ice water on us. Mama might call our names once or twice, but if our feet didn’t immediately hit the floor, here would come this flood of ice water. Usually I would jump out of bed before the water struck—because I knew it was on its way and I didn’t like it—but some mornings she needed a whole pitcher of water to get Willie up. Willie says he would have grown up to be a pretty even-tempered guy if it hadn’t been for the way he was woke up as a kid.
Mama Nelson just didn’t have time to fool with coaxing us out of bed. There were chores to be done. The cows had to be brought to the barn and milked, the hog had to be fed, and the chickens. Willie would go out and ride the milk cow into the barn—his first experience as a real cowboy.
Mama would fix breakfast for our granddaddy and Willie and me before we went off to work—Daddy Nelson to his blacksmith shop and the rest of us in the cotton- or cornfields. Later Mama got a job as a cook in the school lunch room, but still we had to be up and moving while the stars were in the sky.
My earliest memory, I was three years old playing outside our little house in Abbott, under the cottonwood and cedar trees, and our mother Myrle and our daddy Ira—not our grandparents but our real parents—were standing by the car having a loud disagreement. Oh, it was so unpleasant, such an awful thing to hear. I started crying and ran to our bedroom at the back of the house and hid. Willie was just a little baby in his crib. I didn’t know what was happening, but I knew somebody was leaving.
It was our mother Myrle who was leaving. She and Ira were breaking up their marriage. Pretty soon Ira would hit the road, too, leaving his parents—Mama and Daddy Nelson—to bring up Willie and me.
Thinking back on it now, the only time I can remember Myrle and Ira together is the day they split.
But after our mother and daddy left, Willie and I felt just as warm and secure with our grandparents, maybe even more secure because we didn’t have to hear Myrle and Ira fighting. It was a real neat deal to go into the fields with Mama Nelson. You felt like you were helping the family. We had a happy family. We were poor, but we didn’t know it because everybody we knew was poor.
Before I got my first real piano, Mama and Daddy Nelson made me a toy piano out of a pasteboard box. We colored it with Crayolas and drew the keyboard. I put it under the peach tree in the backyard and played concerts for hours.
Willie would be listening to me and eating mud. We weren’t starving or anything. We just ate a lot of mud. Willie would bake mud pies and mud cookies on our little toy stove and then let them cook in the hot sun. When they were ready, he’d serve them like he was the dessert chef at a fancy restaurant.
“These is especially great today. You’ll love my cookies and pies,” he would say. “Taste this, Bobbie. Ain’t it great?”
Willie was always very convincing. I would eat the mud pies, some of the other kids would eat them, Willie would eat them. Willie ate so much dirt as a kid that I’m sure he really must have liked it.
After our dessert of mud pies and mud cookies, we would have a smoke like the grown-ups did. We smoked cedarbark, corn silk, and grapevines that we called our Camels, Chesterfields, and Lucky Strikes. We’d inhale and get dizzy and stagger around.
Willie was trying to fly in those old days. He would put on his Superman cape and jump off the roof and knock himself out cold.
We had a friend named Moody who would hang out and help us in the fields, cutting the corn tops and all. Moody and Willie were big boxing fans. In the evenings they’d pull off their shirts and box. Moody was bigger than Willie and I think took it kind of easy, but hour after hour they would slug it out, Willie swinging as hard as he could and Moody punching hard enough so Willie would know for sure he’d been hit. Then they’d go to the well and bring up a bucket of clear cold water and duck their swollen, sweaty heads in it. They would shake hands and then fight for another hour. I’ve never seen Willie back down from a fight in his whole life, but I saw him start plenty of them.
When it got too dark to fight, we would play hide-and-seek or kick the can or Annie Over—we had a lot of fun.
After I got a real piano, Mama taught me to play it. I caught on quickly. I could read music just as clear as I could read English. Willie would sit on the bench beside me while I practiced. I’d tell him what chord I was hitting, what key I was in. Later when he got a guitar, he would try to find the chords and play along with me.
We had a houseful of music books. I’ll never understand how Mama and Daddy Nelson could afford so many music books. Any music Willie and I asked for, they’d order it by mail.
Right from the time we were five or six years old, Mama and Daddy Nelson had us performing. They sat us up onstage and said, “Our kids do things.” They’d look at us and say, “Now start doing.” And we did.
At first it was mostly gospel songs. Maybe Willie would sing “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” or “Tumbling Tumbleweed” or something, but we were strong church folks, Methodists. We went to church and Sunday school and Wednesday night prayer meetings. We could hear the Baptists singing across the street. Most of the Bohemian farmers around there were Catholics, and we could hear them singing, too. But the best singers were the Church of Christ. The Church of Christ didn’t allow musical instruments, so their choirs and congregations really learned how to sing beautiful harmonies.
When I was sixteen I met Bud Fletcher and my life took a radical turn. Bud was six years older than me, quite an older guy in my eyes. He was good-looking, smooth, had the gift of gab, a real charmer. Bud invited me to go to a place named Shadow Land to dance. That place was so big and dark and mysterious—kind of dangerous, it seemed, with people drinking and carrying on in ways I hadn’t seen. I didn’t know how to dance. But Bud was such a great dancer that he taught me in no time.
I met Bud in March and married him in April.
Well, Mama Nelson was dismayed. Daddy Nelson had been dead for seven years, and I was Mama’s responsibility.
“That boy is too rough for you. He’s too old for you,” she said. “Tell him he has to go ask your father.”
So Bud went and asked Ira, who was then working as an auto mechanic in Fort Worth, if he could marry me.
Ira said, “Sure. I’m all for it.”
Bud organized a band called Bud Fletcher and the Texans. I was on piano, Willie played guitar and did vocals, Ira would sit in with us. Bud couldn’t play an instrument, so he stuck a broom handle down into a bucket of sand and whacked it like a bass. Bud fronted the band, told jokes, inspired people to get up and dance.
Bud was so slick he got us booked into places we’d never dreamed of. Sometimes we only played a joint once, but we got in the door—which is a big thing when you’re starting out. We played Friday nights, Saturday nights, Sunday afternoons. Willie was thirteen years old, and Bud paid him $8 a show. In today’s terms that would be like a thirteen-year-old kid making $75 or $100 a show.
We would go home and give our money to Mama Nelson to buy whatever we needed—clothes, food, school supplies. The $40 or $50 a week we took Mama, between us, was a fortune.
Willie would hock his guitar every Monday for about $20. He said he hocked it so often the pawnbroker could play it better than Willie could. On Friday, Bud would get Willie’s guitar out of hock and the Texans would hit another weekend of beer joints. That’s sort of the story of our life ever since.
After my sons Randy and Freddy were born, Bud got killed in a car wreck. I remarried, divorced, went to live near Willie in Tennessee, played cocktail lounge piano in Austin, remarried again—and finally joined my brother’s band nearly twenty years ago to keep on doing what Willie and I have been doing since we were children. Playing music together.
You know, it’s funny. When we were kids, he was my little brother. Now that we’re grown, I think of him as my big brother.
Mildred Wilcox, Willie’s cousin, helped raise him and his sister Bobbie. Mildred was at Willie’s birth—and named him Willie.
Bobbie is Willie’s sister and plays piano in his band.