Willie Nelson gave an interview recently and said he has given up smoking and the news spread around the world that he had given up smoking marijuana. There are hundreds of articles out there, these are just a few of the headline.
Oh, and Willie was talking about tobacco cigarettes. He stopped smoking cigarettes some time ago. He still enjoys marijuana for health and enjoyment.
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CNN International Willie Nelson says he has stopped smoking because it almost killed him (CNN) Country music icon, Willie Nelson, announced he is no longer … Nelson is known for singing the virtues of smoking pot and even has his …
CBS News Willie Nelson smoking: Country singer says he’s no longer smoking weed, cannabis to “take better care” of himself after breathing problems Willie Nelson is known for a few things – being a Texan, his country music and of course, his affinity for marijuana. But in a recent interview, …
FOX19 Willie Nelson says he doesn’t smoke anything anymore Willie Nelson says he doesn’t smoke anything anymore. The 86-year-old country music legend said he no longer smokes to help protect his …
The Dallas Morning News (blog) Willie Nelson has quit smoking weed Asked whether Nelson still partakes of the drug via other methods, Nelson’s publicist says simply, “Willie has not given up cannabis.”.
Marijuana Moment
Marijuana enthusiasts around the world have been shocked by the news that Willie Nelson no longer smokes cannabis. Cue the “Has hell …
CBS Dallas / Fort Worth ‘I Don’t Smoke Anymore’: Wille Nelson Gives Up Marijuana For Health Reasons
SAN ANTONIO (CBSDFW.COM) – Country music legend Willie Nelson says he’s stopped smoking pot — 65 years after he rolled his first joint.
Snopes.com Did Willie Nelson Quit Smoking Weed? Singer and activist Willie Nelson told a San Antonio news station he quit smoking weed for health reasons. What’s False. However, Nelson …
Patch.com Willie Nelson Stops Smoking Marijuana For Health Reasons Willie Nelson Stops Smoking Marijuana – Austin, TX – The singer has made no secret of his penchant for cannabis over the years, but breathing …
KXAN.com Willie Nelson says he’s done smoking marijuana Country music icon Willie Nelson said he’s done using marijuana.
Noisey Relax, Willie Nelson Has Not Quit Weed Last week, country legend Willie Nelson played two shows at San Antonio’s Majestic Theatre and gave an interview to local news station …
fox8.com Willie Nelson says he has stopped smoking pot because it almost killed him Country music icon, Willie Nelson, announced he is no longer smoking due to ongoing health and breathing issues. Nelson is known for …
USA TODAY
Willie Nelson says he quit smoking weed for his lungs. Are vapes and edibles any better? Country music outlaw and marijuana proponent Willie Nelson has quit smoking weed, citing his personal ailments. But are the alternatives any …
The Boston Globe Willie Nelson says he’s not smoking, but is still using pot Willie Nelson may have given up smoking, but he hasn’t stopped using marijuana.
The Week Magazine Willie Nelson hasn’t actually quit weed, spokeswoman clarifies Willie Nelson, one of the world’s most famous proponents of marijuana and ganjapreneurs, surprised a lot of people when he told San …
Billboard Willie Nelson Has Stopped Smoking, But He Still Using Pot Willie Nelson may have given up smoking, but he hasn’t stopped using marijuana. While in San Antonio last week for two performances, the …
Santa Rosa Press Democrat Willie Nelson says he’s stopped smoking marijuana Willie Nelson isn’t smoking anymore. But don’t be alarmed, the 86-year-old country superstar hasn’t completely given up marijuana. Nelson, 86 …
The Boot Willie Nelson Isn’t Smoking Anymore — But He’s Not Giving Up … Willie Nelson says he’s given up smoking, but that doesn’t mean he’s giving up marijuana. After an interview in which Nelson shared that he’s …
KRIS Corpus Christi News Willie Nelson says he’s given up smoking grass because of … SAN ANTONIO, Texas — Texas icon Willie Nelson told a San Antonio television station he has given up smoking after years of marijuana use …
NBC Chicago Willie Nelson Is Still Using Pot, Just Isn’t Smoking It It’s still all going to pot. Willie Nelson may have given up smoking, but he hasn’t stopped using marijuana. While in San Antonio last week for …
CBS Dallas / Fort Worth ‘I Don’t Smoke Anymore’: Wille Nelson Gives Up Marijuana For Health Reasons
SAN ANTONIO (CBSDFW.COM) – Country music legend Willie Nelson says he’s stopped smoking pot — 65 years after he rolled his first joint.
On December 6, 1984, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson record “Highwayman” at Nashville’s Moman Studios. Among the musicians on the session is guitarist Marty Stuart.
photo: Khue Bui
Life Magazine
December 5, 1998
Award winner Willie Nelson and his wife arrive at the Department of State for the Kennedy Center Honors Gala dinner Saturday, Dec. 5, 1998, in Washington. The center honored comedian Bill Cosby, musician Willie Nelson, composer and conductor Andre Previn, songwriting team of Fred Ebb and John Kander, former actress and ambassador to Czechkoslovakia Shirley Temple Black.
Willie Nelson No Longer Smokes Cigarettes: ‘I Have Abused My Lungs’
www.People.com By: Julie Mazziotta
Willie Nelson told a Texas TV station that he no longer smokes, sparking speculation that he stopped smoking marijuana.
Nelson’s publicist Elaine Schock tells PEOPLE he does indeed “still taste the flower.” “Willie doesn’t smoke any more or any less [weed],” Schock says.
Schock confirmed that he no longer smokes cigarettes, clarifying what Nelson told KSAT in San Antonio on Monday.
“I don’t smoke anymore. I take better care of myself,” the 86-year-old country music legend said.
Over the summer, he had to cancel his tour due to a “breathing problem.”
“I have abused my lungs quite a bit in the past, so breathing is a little more difficult these days and I have to be careful,” he said. “I’ve mistreated my lungs since I was [young]. I started smoking cedar bark, went from that to cigarettes to whatever. And that almost killed me.”
But Nelson is still very much alive, even if rumors started circulating that he was near death after he had to cancel his shows. “I don’t give a s—,” about the rumors, Nelson said. “I’m here, I’m glad to be here. I’m lucky to be here.”
And continuing to tour is actually helping him, Nelson said. “Singing out there for an hour is a good workout,” he said. “Your lungs are the biggest muscle you’ve got. So when you’re out there working, you are working out.”
Nelson is a well-documented fan of weed, and even has his own curated line of marijuana called Willie’s Reserve.
“I feel like I bought so much, it’s time to start selling it back!” he said in 2015.
He even convinced Woody Harrelson to start smoking pot again after the actor took a 2-year break.
“He was never comfortable with me quitting, it just bothered him,” Harrelson said in May 2018. “I would always say, ‘Willie you know I’m not smoking,’ He would always do the same thing like he was hearing it for the first time, ‘Oh really? Sorry!’ This happened like 500 times.”
But after a poker game, Nelson got Harrelson to smoke up.
“I was in a celebratory mood and he hands me that pin and I was just snatched and it was like ‘ah, f— it,’ ” Harrelson said. “I take a big draw of it and he says ‘Welcome home, son.’ ”
Session guitarist Grady Martin was born on January 17, 1929, was born in Chapel Hill, Tennessee. Before he joined Willie Nelson & Family, Grady had played with Patsy Cline, Marty Robbins, Elvis Presley and Ray Price. He also wrote the song sung by Ronnie Milsap, “Snap Your Fingers.”
*Article originally printed in the August, 1984 edition of Country Song Roundup magazine.
Young country fans know Grady Martin as the lead guitarist in Willie Nelson’s band, but he is much, much more. His contributions to the development of the Nashville Sound as a studio musician in the 1950’s and 1960’s have been incalculable.
Put bluntly, there would be no Nashville music industry as we know it, were it not for Grady Martin. Country entrepreneur Tillman Franks thinks Grady belongs in the Country Music Hall of Fame. “There are five great musical geniuses that made Nashville Music City U.S.A.,” he says. “They are: recording studio innovator Owen Bradley, music publisher Fred Rose, Grand Ole Opry superstar Roy Acuff, and musicians Chet Atkins and Grady Martin. Of these five, Grady MArtin is the only one not in the Country Music Hall of Fame. As a charter member of the Country Music Association, I hereby nominate Grady Martin for the Hall of Fame in 1984.”
Franks said that in December 1983, at a tribute dinner held in Martin’s honor by the Nashville Music Association On that occasion, Grady was lauded by his peers and given the first Master Tribute Award, designed to honor the unsung heroes of music: the backup instrumentalists. On hand were Brenda Lee, Floyd Cramer, Chet Atkins, Jerry Reed, The Jordonaires, and a ballroom of other celebrities. Willie Nelson hosted the tribute to his friend and bandmember.
Studio musicians got their due at long last that night. Finally it was stated publicly that Grady Martin was the session leader for the hundreds of hit productions that put Nashville on the map. He was a chief architect in the building of Music City.
Grady Martin was born 55 years ago, Jan. 17, 1929, 50 miles south of Nashville on a farm between Lewisburg and Chapel Hill, Tennessee. He grew into a strapping six-footer, but he always preferred making music to doing his farm chores. “My dad played the jug,” he chuckles, remembering his musical youth. “And my mother played the piano. My brother had bought a guitar for eight dollars and he wouldn’t let me fool with it much. I had to slip away to get it.” Maybe that’s why he took up the fiddle at age 13. “There was an old fella down the road named John Davis who played his fiddle at night on his porch. He went down to all the local dances and played.”
He inspired Grady so much that the youngster was soon one of the most accomplished fiddlers in the area. When Nashville radio star Big Jeff Bess came south for a show, Martin was played for him backstage. Impressed, Bess offered the 15 year-old a job.
“We had an early-morning radio show, and just played schoolhouses and anywhere we could. Four or five dollars a night was a good night’s pay. This was during World War II.” Bess was the husband of the legendary Hattie Louise “Tootsie” Bess, later immortalized as the owner of Nashville’s Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge Bar, across the alley from the Ryman Auditorium downtown, mother church of the Grand Ole Opry.
“I went up to the Opry one Saturday night and met manager Jim Denny. I was just askin’ for a job with somebody on the show. And he turned me on to The Bailes Brothers. So I traveled and appeared with them for awhile.” At the time the group was riding the crest of a wave of hits that included Dust on the Bible, I Wanna Be Loved (But Only By You), and As Long As I Live.
Martin toured with such Opry headliners as Jamup & Honey and Uncle Dave Macon. When he began appearing with trick fiddler Curly Fox and “The Sophie Tucker of Cowgirl Singers,” Texas Ruby, he switched to guitar. Thus, on that instrument he made his recording debut when Fox took him into a studio in Chicago.
He joined the band of Red Foley then about to become the biggest star of his generation of country vocalists. [A] 1949 Nashville recording session produced Foley’s huge number-one hit Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy. It was the first of many million-sellers that were to feature Grady’s guitar. “We recorded that at the Old Castle Studio that was in the Tulane Hotel on Church Street in Nashville.”
Artists like Carl Smith, George Morgan, and Little Jimmy Dickens began using him on their sessions. Hall of Fame member credits Martin and guitarist Jabbo Arrington for developing his hit sounds= with their twin-guitar playing.
Martin even played (fiddle) on a Hank Williams session. He also accompanied Williams to “The Kate Smith Show” in New York in 1952, country music’s debut on prime-time, nationwide network TV.
As Red Foley’s airplane pilot and lead guitarist, Grady Martin accompanied Foley on his commutes to Springfield, Missouri. There he became the band leader on the Foley-hosted “Ozark Jubilee,” the first network TV country variety series.
He maintained his ties to the infant recording center in Nashville, however. Kitty Wells, Ernest Tubb, Webb Pierce, and dozens of other Nashville pioneers featured him on their hit records.
“I guess the person I played the most hit licks for was Marty Robbins,” says Martin wistfully of his old friend. That’s Grady’s Spanish-style picking embellishing El Paso, and on Don’t Worry he developed the electric fuzz-tone sound that was to influence an entire generation of psychedelic electric-guitar stylists.
He played vibes on Floyd Cramer’s timeless Last Date. He played dobro/guitar on Wilma Burgess’ lovely Tear Time. He banged tambourine and played the banjo lick on Wings Of A Dove by Ferlin Husky.
“On sessions that produced, like Johnny Horton’s Battle of New Orleans or Jimmy Dean’s Big John, I just went ahead and started it up without the producer. He trusted me and I loved it. When he’d come in later, we’d have a hit arrangement worked out.”
Grady also arranged (and wrote) Joe Henderson’s Snap Your Fingers (1962), perhaps Nashville’s first black top pop hit. The following year, he arranged and published Our Winter Love, one of Music City’s biggest ever pop instrumentals.
He played on all the hits of Patsy Cline and on all the worldwide million-sellers of Brenda Lee. He’s on Elvis Presley’s movie soundtracks. He’s on Gone (Ferlin Husky), Saginaw Michigan (Lefty Frizzell), Waterloo (Stonewall Jackson), Uncle Pen (Porter Wagoner, Grady’s last major session as a fiddler), Devil in Disguise (Elvis), Oh Pretty Woman (Orbison), I’m Sorry (Brenda) and For the Good Times (Ray Price).
Jim Reeves, Johnny Cash, Dottie West , Loretta Lynn, Conway Twitty, Larry Gatlin, and Kris Kristofferson records all feature Grady Martin. In fact, it would be easier to name the Nashville stars that he has not accompanied in the studios than it would be to list all he has.
“We worked round-the-clock back then. It was like being in a submarine. You’d ‘submerge’ and stay ‘down’ for hours, all night long and sometimes the next day, too. If you got tired you curled up under a piano for awhile and got up and played some more.”
Surrounded by such “A-Team” pickers as Bb Moore, Buddy Harman, Ray Edenton, Harold Bradley, Hank Garland, Pig Robbins, Pete Drake, Floyd Cramer, Tommy Jackson, The Anita Kerr Singers, The Jordonaires, and a handful of others, Grady Martin forged a sound and style. Never before or since in the annals of popular music have so few been so responsible for so many hits.
It was hard work, but what Grady remembers most are the good times the pickers shared in the good old days of Nashville recording. Today, he says those historic sessions are “all a blur to me. You can ask me anything except about dates and song titles.”
At his peak, his reputation spread to pop musicians like Perry Como, Al Hirt, Theresa Brewer, Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, Henry Mancini, Tab Hunter and Burl Ives, all of whom used his talent on records, Martin’s own recording group, The Slewfoot Five, was a pop/jazz act.
As the 1970’s dawned , Grady MArtin returned to playing live on the road. He served a stint in Jerry Reed’s band before Reed made so many movie-making commitments. Requested by Willie Nelson to play on the soundtrack of the film Honeysuckle Rose in 1979, Martin wound up serving as the model for the Slim Pickens character in the movie. He has remained with Nelson in the 1980’s, both touring and recording with the superstar. Nelson remembers Grady from when he played on a then-green songwriter’s first album. Now Martin plays guitar on such huge Nelson hits as the Merle Haggard duet, Pancho & Lefty.
That the spotlight is finally falling on him after years in the darkness of recording studios won’t change good ole Grady a bit. He remains a Buddah-like, lovable, modest country character without a trace of pretense. “Chet’s a star. I’m not a star,” he says. “Makin’ a good record and havin’ it accepted, just bein’ part of havin’ a hit record, that’s what mattered to me.”
Martin’s modesty might be one reason he has received so little recognition before now. “I really don’t do interviews. I never saw why anybody would want to write anything about me. I’m just a factory worker in the studio.”
He’s wrong. He’s much more than a “factory worker.” He’s 0ne of the creative geniuses in the history of country music.
Easily one of the most emotional songs in the Grateful Dead catalog, “Stella Blue” still remains a fan-favorite out of the Jerry Garcia/RobertHunter songbook ever since it appeared on the Dead’s 1973 studio album, Wake of the Flood. The song was a setlist staple over the years as one of the ballads which Garcia would sing to bring audiences back down to Earth with its beautiful, haunting melodies, often surrounded by the Grateful Dead’s usual storm of psychedelia and experimental jams.
Perhaps its subtle beauty contrasting the rest of the Dead catalog is what drew Texas country veteran Willie Nelson to cover the song on his 2006 album, Songbird. The Ryan Adams-produced recording of Nelson covering “Stella Blue” certainly sticks out in the country artist’s own extensive catalog of recordings.
The recording does have its fair share of guitar power, but in this case, the song is really driven by haunting piano playing and Nelson’s gritty but soothing vocals. Perhaps someone like Nelson, with all of his years of touring and as many miles on his resume as Garcia once had, helps drive home the lyrics, “All the years combine/They melt into a dream.”
Howdy! Willie Nelson came to Abbott on Wednesday, December 3, and it was not so long before he was surrounded by a lot of friends and fans who turned out to greet him. Willie was accompanied by his sister Bobbie who plays the piano when they perform with the band. They had come to Abbott to shoot some publicity photos to be used on the cover of a gospel music album that will be released in the future. The reason why they came to Abbott is to have the photos taken in front of the Methodist Church that Willie and Bobbie attended when growing up here in Abbott.
Willie and Bobbie were dressed in their Sunday-go-to-meeting finest. You can see for yourself how sharp they looked in the photos that have been placed on various pagers of the paper.
Rev. Wayne Dunson, the present preacher at the Methodist Church, is the same one that preached there when Willie and Bobbie attended in their youth. He was in the area when Willie and Bobbie showed up and asked me to take a photo of him and Willie. “But, he whispered in my ear, I need to go over and change my coat before you take the picture. I don’t think it would look right with Willie looking more like a preacher than I do.”
Yours truly really enjoyed seeing Willie in Abbott. He had come through town several times during the past month or so and I was always out of town and missed him. Again, true to form, I was out of town, but Jan got on the telephone and had me located in Waco. My brother Ben found me as the screen printers where I was picking up some new T-shirts of Willie as the Red Headed Stranger, and got the message to me. I returned to Abbott immediately and was able to get the photos that you see in this issue.
While chatting with Willie, I asked him whether the movie entitled “The Red Headed Stranger” would be released. He said, “Plans are made to release it February 19, 1987.” So all of you fans stay on the lookout for the movie and remember you can get tee shirts and pictures of Willie as the Red Headed Stranger right here through the Souvenir Shop, either in person or by mail order.
Some of you no doubt read about the Susie Nelson Show that we had booked at the VFW Club in Cameron, Texas, this past November 15th. The show was very successful as the folks there enjoyed the music and singing of our stars Susie Nelson and her band and Chris Robbins with Stagecoach Symphony.
Several phoots that I took are included in thgis issue (page 7) for your eyeballs’ pleasure. Enjoy! Also, we appreciated a big fan of Willie’s coming to the show — Ann Willis of Temple. Ann showed me a lot of photos that she has taken around the countryside and we will try to run some of them in future editions.
Other recent visitors to Willie Nelson Country have come from Robards, Kentucky, Prag, Oklahoma; St. Joseph, Missouri; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Battle Creek, Michigan; Judsonia Arkansas; Jacksonville, Illionois; and Dallas, Garland, Red Oak, Mesquite, Austin, San Antonio, Temple Branson, Corsicana, Crossroads and Springtown, TX. Coming the longest distance was Lucas Wegmann from Newcastle, Main. We really enjoy meeting and visiting with Willie’s fans from all over the country!
