Farm Aid News – Annie Nelson and Margo Price join Board of Directors
April 16th, 2021
www.FarmAid.org
Farm Aid has announced that Grammy-nominated artist Margo Price and lifelong humanitarian and advocate for family farmers Annie Nelson have joined its Board of Directors.
Via unanimous vote, Price and Nelson will work alongside founders Willie Nelson, Neil Young and John Mellencamp, artist board member Dave Matthews, and six industry professionals and family farm supporters.
Price and Nelson join a committed board that has steered Farm Aid for 35 years, hosting a unique annual festival to galvanize support for family farmers, organizing against corporate consolidation, deploying funds and resources to strengthen farm families facing ongoing challenges, and nurturing a cultural movement that values the people who bring good food to our tables. Farm Aid stays true to its founding values and traditions; for example, Farm Aid President Willie Nelson signs every grant check distributed by the organization to its nonprofit partners, and the organization keeps its ear to the ground, listening to a group of farmers from diverse backgrounds who care for the soil and water.
Price grew up in Illinois on her family farm before she witnessed its loss in the Farm Crisis that inspired the first Farm Aid concert. Price has been a staunch advocate for Farm Aid’s mission long before her first performance at Farm Aid 2016 in Bristow, Virginia. She has not missed a Farm Aid festival since, and this past year, she joined Dave Matthews to announce Farm Aid 2020 on Good Morning America. Price is the second artist to be added to Farm Aid’s Board of Directors after its original founding, following Dave Matthews’ appointment in 2001.
“It is always a thrill to perform alongside my heroes on the Farm Aid stage, and it is one of the greatest honors of my life to become a member of the Farm Aid board,” said Price. “It’s been a dream of mine to help family farmers and communities across America ever since my family lost their farm in the fall of 1984 — a year before the first Farm Aid concert. I hope to use my voice to shine light on the issues of climate change, our health and the health of our soil and water, and most importantly, food justice.”
Annie Nelson — who met husband Willie Nelson shortly after the first Farm Aid concert in 1985 — has served an integral role in the annual Farm Aid music and food festival. She has worked for decades to stand up for family farm agriculture and create opportunities for local, independent farmers, and she is an activist on many issues that positively impact America’s family farmers.
“I am honored to join Willie and the other members on Farm Aid’s Board of Directors,” said Nelson. “I’ve witnessed the incredible strength and resilience of America’s family farmers through my involvement in Farm Aid, and I am eager to continue to help our family farm system thrive through this new role.”
For more information on Farm Aid’s Board of Directors, visit: farmaid.org/about-us/board-and-staff/.
Farm Aid’s mission is to build a vibrant, family farm-centered system of agriculture in America. Farm Aid artists and board members Willie Nelson, Neil Young, John Mellencamp and Dave Matthews host an annual festival to raise funds to support Farm Aid’s work with family farmers and to inspire people to choose family farm food. For more than 35 years, Farm Aid, with the support of the artists who contribute their performances each year, has raised more than $60 million to support programs that help farmers thrive, expand the reach of the Good Food Movement, take action to change the dominant system of industrial agriculture and promote food from family farms.
Willie Nelson and Paula Nelson, “Have You Ever Seen the Rain”
April 16th, 2021
Rodney Crowell talks about Willie Nelson (Texas Monthly One by Willie)
April 15th, 2021
www.TexasMonthy.com
by: John Spong
Rodney Crowell is one of the rare singer-songwriters to have kept one foot in the coffeehouses while placing the other squarely at the top of the charts as an artist. He’s a Houston-born troubadour who had a literal seat at the table when Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt revolutionized country songwriting in the early seventies (see James Szalapski’s landmark music documentary, Heartworn Highways). But he also happens to have been the first act ever to earn five number-one country singles off of one album, 1988’s Diamonds & Dirt.
On this week’s One by Willie, Crowell dissects Willie’s rip-roaring meditation on self-medication, “Bloody Mary Morning.” It’s a song that barely dented the country top twenty when it was released as a single in 1974, but as the lead track on side two of that year’s Phases and Stages—the album many Willie fans argue is his best—it went on to become a showstopper in his live sets and an all-time country classic. And it prompts thoughts from Crowell on nasty hangovers, going to Willie shows as a high-school kid in the mid-sixties, and that time in the late seventies when he showed up for his first recording session with Willie in Bogalusa, Louisiana . . . only to discover a red Camaro doing doughnuts in a field next to the studio. And you will not guess who was driving.
Willie Nelson, “Fly Me To The Moon”
April 15th, 2021Willie Nelson Art
April 15th, 2021Just finished this painting of @WillieNelson for Didis Downtown in Frisco, Texas. Going to install it next week. pic.twitter.com/p7PtMfAfLY
— patrick ganino (@patrick_ganino) April 15, 2021
New Willie Nelson Album out April 13, 2013, “Face the Music and Dance”
April 13th, 2021Artist: Willie Nelson and Family
Title: Let’s Face the Music and Dance
Release Date: April 16, 2013
Label: Legacy
Format(s): CD, DD
Willie Nelson’s second album in his new contract with Legacy is a new trip back to the world of pop classics with Let’s Face the Music and Dance. The album, recorded with his group of over forty years, Family, will be released on April 16.
Following in the steps of his classic pop-country albums like Stardust, Let’s Face the Music and Dance was recorded at Pedernales Recording Studio in Austin, Texas, produced by Buddy Cannon and mixed by Butch Carr at Budro Music Repair Shop in Nashville, Tennessee.
Compiling the repertoire for Let’s Face The Music And Dance, Willie chose a range of pop, rock, jazz and country classics drawn from the 1930s (Let’s Face the Music and Dance, Walking My Baby Back Home), 1940s (You’ll Never Know, I Wish I Didn’t Love You So, Shame On You) and 1950s (Matchbox) covering evergreen songwriters Irving Berlin , Mack Gordon , Carl Perkins , Frank Loesser , Django Reinhardt and Spade Cooley, among others. Willie turns in a beautiful new version of his composition Is The Better Part Over, a song he introduced on 1989’s A Horse Called Music.
Track List:
- Let’s Face the Music and Dance (Irving Berlin)
- Is the Better Part Over (Willie Nelson)
- You’ll Never Know (Mack Gordon)
- Vous Et Moi (Claude Francois & Jean Bourtayre)
- Walking My Baby Back Home (Fred Ahlert & Roy Turk)
- Matchbox (Carl Perkins)
- Twilight Time (Al Nevins & Morty Nevins)
- I Can’t Give You Anything But Love (Dorothy Fields & Jimmy McHugh)
- I’ll Keep On Loving You (Richard Coburn & Vincent Rose)
- I Wish I Didn’t Love You So (Frank Loesser)
- South Of The Border (Jimmy Kennedy & Michael Carr)
- Nuages (Django Reinhardt)
- Marie (The Dawn Is Breaking) (Irving Berlin)
- Shame On You (Spade Cooley)
Willie’s Reserve
April 13th, 2021
Willie Nelson and Mickey Raphael
April 12th, 2021
Outlaw Country: the Birth of the Music That Changed Texas Forever, Texas Monthly (April 2012)
April 12th, 2021
Forty years ago, Willie, Waylon, Jerry Jeff and a whole host of Texas misfits grew their hair long, snubbed Nashville, and brought the hippies and rednecks together. Country Music has never been the same.
by John Spong
Texas Monthly
April 2012
What it was, was a generational shift, and not one that Music Row wanted. In the late sixties, Nashville country music was defined by the string-swelling, countrypolitan gloss of Tammy Wynette and Glen Campbell. RCA executive Chet Atkins was a chief architect of the Nashville sound, and when people asked him to define it, he liked to jingle the change in his pockets and say, “It’s the sound of money.” No tweaks to the formula were tolerated. Even Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, two Texas boys with ideas of their own, were forced to fit the mold. They recorded for RCA, and their records sounded exactly the way Atkins wanted.
