Archive for the ‘Paul English’ Category

Happy birthday, Paul English

Monday, November 6th, 2023

Still so missed.

Me and Paul

Sunday, November 5th, 2023

Bobbie Nelson and Paul English (Denver, Colorado) (July 30, 2016)

Sunday, July 30th, 2023

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Thank you, Janis Tillerson, for these photos from the Willie Nelson & Familyshow at Fiddler’s Green in 2016.

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“Me and Paul”, new book about Willie Nelson and Paul English

Thursday, June 30th, 2022
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www.RollingStone.com
by: John Freeman

Willie Nelson will explore his many adventures with late drummer Paul English in his new book, Me and Paul: Untold Tales of a Fabled Friendshipset to be released Sept. 20 via Harper Horizon.

A member of Nelson’s band since 1966, English was renowned for his tough, outlaw style and served as the group’s de facto bodyguard in addition to his drumming duties. He adopted a persona called “The Devil,” matching the name with an evil-looking goatee and wearing a cape. He earned a reputation for fist fights as well as getting his mates out of dangerous situations on the road. Nelson immortalized him in song with 1971’s “Me & Paul,” a travelogue of sorts that chronicled some memorable — and possibly illegal — mishaps in Laredo, Milwaukee, and Buffalo.

English remained a regular member of Nelson’s band up until his 2020 death at the age of 87.

“There’s something about my friendship with Paul that reminds me of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn,” Nelson said in a statement. “Tom was more civilized and Huck was wilder. Although I was plenty wild at age 22, I’d have to say Paul was wilder. Like Tom and Huck, though, we became a team. Nothing could or would ever separate us.”

Nelson wrote Me and Paul in collaboration with journalist David Ritz, who previously worked with Nelson on 2015’s It’s a Long Story: My Life and Me.

The 89-year-old Nelson is currently headlining shows on the Outlaw Music Festival tour with guests including Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, Brothers Osborne, Allison Russell, and Charley Crockett.

Read article here.

Paul English, family man in Dallas

Friday, June 3rd, 2022
Paul English (drummer) Paul English Willie39s longtime drummer

Willie Nelson’s best friend, Paul English, led a quiet family life in Dallas
by: Rachel Stone

read article here

Paul English put the outlaw in country.

He dressed like the devil, with satin-lined capes and pointed sideburns. He carried a gun, hung out with Hells Angels and was not afraid to bust skulls to make sure beer joints and honky-tonks paid his boss at the end of the night.

English saw the world looking at the backside of Willie Nelson for 54 years, keeping rhythm for songs we all know by heart. Before he was Willie’s drummer, English led a life of crime. Yes, he was a pimp. Yes, he did a little time in the Ellis County jail as a teen. He was a Cowtown hoodlum who looked up to gangsters like Benny Binion and Herbert “The Cat” Noble. Later, he had interests such as used car lots in Houston and Fort Worth, and he funded some of Willie’s early career.

After Willie hired him in 1966, he led the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle and never left it until days before his death.

What most of the world never knew before English died at age 87 in February 2020 is that he also attended Jesuit football games and basketball games at Parish Episcopal. He wanted his grandson to attend St. Rita Catholic School because he loved Father Joshua Whitfield’s op-eds.

This hellraiser who was Willie Nelson’s best friend and protector was married for 41 years to Janie English, a licensed counselor who has two master’s degrees. She is currently a school counselor at St. Rita, and she also works nights at a private counseling center.

Her husband always loved this about her. When they first started dating, he would introduce her by saying, “This is Janie. She has a job, and she goes to college.”

1977

THEY MET AT THE BLACK EYED PEA FESTIVAL in Athens, Texas, the year Elvis Presley died.

She was at a gathering at someone’s home in Oak Lawn, and Mickey Raphael was there. Raphael, Willie’s longtime harmonica player, is from Dallas.

“He said, ‘I’ve been playing in this band, and I’m trying to get a ride to Athens,’” Janie says.

She had bragging rights from seeing the Rolling Stones the first time they played the Cotton Bowl, but she says, “I actually had no idea who Willie Nelson was.”

When they arrived, Raphael told her to hang out and let him know if she needed anything.

For some reason, the band’s old bus, which they called The Tube, was out of commission, and she saw this guy wearing red boots and a vest with patches all over it getting out of his car. She thought he looked so interesting.

“So I said, ‘Well as long as I’m going to be hanging around, I’d like to meet that guy,’” she says.

Back then, they kept in touch by writing letters and long-distance phone calls. But soon Paul rented a place in Oak Lawn with tour manager David Anderson, whose girlfriend also lived in Dallas. Paul, who was then in his 40s, threw Janie’s 22nd birthday party at a strip club on Lower Greenville that one of his “character friends” owned.

Janie, who graduated from Berkner High School in Richardson, also went on the road with the band when she wasn’t working at her job in a psychiatry practice at the old Garland community hospital. Once, after she flew out for a show in Tahoe, Paul wanted her to stay, but she had to get back to work.

“He said, ‘Why don’t you quit that job? We’re going out to Los Angeles,’” Janie says. “I said, ‘Well, if I’m going to quit my job, I think I need a ring.’”

THEY HAD A DOUBLE WEDDING IN LAS VEGAS with bassist Bee Spears, who was married to Julia until his death in 2011.

“We just decided we would get married and see where it went,” she says. “He said later he thought it would be six months, and it was 41 years.”

They bought a house off Audelia Road in the Lake Highlands area. It became the party house where all of Paul’s “character friends” hung out alongside bikers, roadies and musicians.

That house burned down on Palm Sunday in 1987 while Janie was at mass, and they lost nearly everything they owned, including priceless memorabilia like song lyrics Willie had written on scraps of paper. Also, their dog, Coco, had died before the fire. And their car was stolen.

This was also around the time that Willie got in trouble with the Internal Revenue Service, and the band was off the road for a couple of years.

Family life

THE ENGLISHES TOOK ALL OF THAT AS A TAP ON THE SHOULDER that maybe it was time to settle down. Paul was 55 when they bought a house on a golf course in Garland.

“I tell you, they were all so obsessed with golf that I thought quitting would be the downfall of the band,” Janie says.

Buddy Prewitt, Willie’s lighting director of 44 years who is known as “Budrock,” says they “had a brotherhood of golf,” that kept them together all the time. When they weren’t playing music together, they were swinging clubs.

Prewitt, who is from Dallas, fathered two of the Willie Nelson family band’s “IRS babies,” born as a result of their time off the road. His two daughters were born around the same time as Willie’s sons Micah and Lucas, and the English boys Paul junior and Evan.

“We just had too much time on our hands, I guess,” Prewitt says.

The Englishes moved to Dallas about 15 years ago to be closer to their sons’ schools.

“We didn’t start out to have these private-school educated children, because we were just a couple of poor kids, you know?” Janie says. “But it was the only way we could take our kids out of school whenever we wanted so they could travel. You couldn’t do that in public school.”

Social justice

PAUL ENGLISH WAS A DUSTBOWL BABY born in Vernon, Texas. He grew up in a “holy roller” household in Fort Worth, and his mother would speak in tongues. Because of that, he never wanted to have anything to do with church, even though he loved Christmas. 

Janie is Catholic and a child of the ’60s. They intersected at social justice.

He served on the board of Farm Aid until his death. She believes her faith calls her to right injustices.

Paul was not highly educated, but he was well-read and genius-level intelligent. He read The Dallas Morning News, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times on Sundays. He was constantly playing chess online with Willie, often while simultaneously working a sudoku puzzle.

Janie still keeps her TV locked on CNN because that’s how Paul always had it. By the way, he couldn’t stand Trump, although he had conservative values.

“Sometimes I still expect to hear him saying, ‘Janie come here and look at this!’ and he’d be all worked up about something Trump did,” she says.

Grandpa Paul

PAUL ENGLISH JR. and wife, Mandy, lived with the Englishes for about a year after their son, Paul English III aka Trey, was born.

Mandy took up crossword puzzles because of her father-in-law.

“We would be sitting in the kitchen at breakfast, and Mr. English would be there doing his puzzles,” she says.

She always says he was an angel in disguise.

Leather tooling and sketch art were among his talents, and all of his siblings are artistic. His younger brother Billy is now the drummer in Willie’s band. His older brother Oliver was a multi instrumentalist who also played in The Family band for a time.

Paul’s “baby boy,” Evan English, married his wife, Taylor, in December 2019. They were high-school sweethearts — he graduated from Jesuit and she from Ursuline in 2013, and they both went to The University of Oklahoma.

Janie says her husband loved taking road trips to visit him in Norman.

“It was just like being on the road,” she says.

He went all out on Christmas lights, putting up an annual display that Clark Griswold could respect.

Paul looked great in a tux, and although he typically hated formal events, he was so happy at Evan’s wedding and led his sister, Nadine, around the room on his arm the whole day, family members say. He was also a great dancer, and so is Evan, who looks so much like his dad.

Paul’s son Darrell, from a previous marriage, lives in Glen Rose and is very much part of the family, Janie says.

Larger than life

AFTER HE DIED, English’s family found out just how many fans he had, and it wasn’t necessarily a pleasant discovery. But old guys have come up to the son Paul to say they remember a joke their dad told on some random tour stop decades ago, he says.

“That shows you the pull he had on people,” the younger Paul says. “He just had a presence.”

He could suck all the air out of a room just by stepping into it. He could intimidate the toughest dudes with a word or a look. 

He once broke his hand on a guy’s face after the guy threw a bottle at the band in a roadhouse in Houston, and he still played the next night, shoving a drumstick into his plaster cast.

Someone once gave him a little antique gun, and it went off while he had it in his pocket and shot him in the back of the leg. They bandaged it up at the hospital, and he still went into the studio that night to work on the Stardust album.

“We were so shocked when he died, and I think what shocked us the most was that something could actually kill him,” Janie says. “Because you think he just couldn’t end. And of course, he hasn’t, because we have Paul and Evan and Trey.”

Made famous or infamous in Willie’s 1971 song “Me and Paul,” he was always a gentleman, friends say. He took Bobbie Nelson by the hand and walked her from the bus to her piano and back every night.

He kept the books and did payroll for the band until the end.

He was tough, but he was never mean, friends say.

“He was honest and fair and one of the best people I ever knew,” Budrock says. “If you ever needed anything or had any kind of problem, you could always go to Paul.”

Backyard dad

ONCE HIS SONS were born, they were the focus of his life, Janie says.

“They can remember dad getting home off the bus, and no matter how long he’d been out or how tired he was, going out and throwing the football,” she says.

The younger Paul, who graduated from Parish in 2007 and later received a degree from UT Austin, says it never felt like his dad was absent, even though he was on the road six or seven months of the year. He commanded respect, but he wasn’t scary, his sons say.

“I think it was remarkable the job that he did,” Paul says. “It always felt like there was a fatherly presence in the home.”

Life after Paul

PAUL THE DAD HAD JUST RECOVERED remarkably well from a stroke in 2011 when, two years later, his tour bus crashed into a bridge at 75 miles per hour on icy roads. Paul sustained a broken hip and a concussion. He didn’t talk as much after that and was never quite the same, although his mind remained sharp for the rest of his life.

His memorial service at Billy Bob’s took place a week before the coronavirus shut everything down. Janie moved out of their 5,000-square-foot house earlier this year. “It was excruciating,” she says. And she recently moved into a 2,500-square-foot house near St. Rita, where Trey is a student.

Evan works in commercial real estate, and Paul English Jr. is a TV writer who has worked on Cruel Summer and is now at work on an HBO series that hasn’t been titled yet. By the way, he got his start on the MTV series Jackass, and the elder Paul loved Johnny Knoxville and the other knuckleheads on that show.

Evan and Paul are both musicians as well, and Trey is learning drums and piano. Mandy is in venue management and event planning, and Taylor works in marketing. They both refer to their father-in-law as “Mr. English,” to this day, even though they’re on a first-name basis with Janie.

English kept his home life separate from his life in that band of gypsies going down the highway. This was the first interview Janie’s ever done, except for talks with Paul’s biographer. 

Now she’s trying to figure out what life is without Paul and how to keep his legacy alive. She just wants her husband to be proud of her.

“When you’ve been a background player in someone else’s story for almost your whole life, how do you write your own?” she says.

New Willie Nelson Family Album

Monday, September 27th, 2021

www.bestclassicbands.com

Willie Nelson’s latest studio album, The Willie Nelson Family, has been announced and as its name implies it’s a family affair. The CD arrives November 19, 2021 on Legacy Recordings. The new album includes compositions written by Hank Williams (“I Saw the Light”), Kris Kristofferson (“Why Me”) and George Harrison (“All Things Must Pass”).

Musicians on The Willie Nelson Family are: Willie Nelson (lead vocals, background vocals, Trigger); Bobbie Nelson (piano); Lukas Nelson (acoustic guitar, electric guitar, lead vocals, background vocals); Micah Nelson (drums, bass, background vocals); Paula Nelson (background vocals); Amy Nelson (background vocals); Mickey Raphael (harmonica); Billy English (drums); Paul English (percussion) and Kevin Smith (bass).

A first single, a new recording of “Family Bible,” was released on Sept. 23, the day of the announcement. One of Nelson’s earliest compositions, the song was penned in 1957, inspired by scenes of Willie’s grandmother singing “Rock of Ages” and reading from the Bible after supper. A struggling young songwriter moving to Houston, Willie sold the song to Paul Buskirk, who enlisted singer Claude Gray to record Nelson’s original songs (including “Family Bible” and “Night Life”). Gray’s single version of “Family Bible” was released in February 1960 and reached #7 on Billboard‘s Hot Country Singles chart. The single’s success enabled Willie to move to Nashville, where he established his reputation as a songwriter. Willie recorded his own version of “Family Bible” for the first time in 1971, and the song has been a staple in his live performances.

Willie’s son Lukas (who fronts his own band, Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real) sings lead vocals on two of the album’s tracks–“All Things Must Pass” and A.P. Carter’s “Keep It on the Sunnyside”–while sharing lead vocals with Willie on “I Saw the Light,” “I Thought About You, Lord” and “Why Me.”

Four of the performances on The Willie Nelson Family–“Heaven and Hell,” “Kneel at the Feet of Jesus,” “Laying My Burdens Down” and “Family Bible”–are among the last recordings Willie made with his longtime drummer and pal Paul English. Paul and Willie first played together in Fort Worth in 1955; Paul became Willie’s regular drummer in 1966 and an essential member of the Family until he passed away, at age 87, on Feb. 11, 2020.

Willie Nelson, Bobbie Nelson and Chris Barton have co-authored Sister, Brother, Family: An American Childhood in Music, a children’s picture book illustrated by Kyung Eun Han available in hardcover Nov. 9.

Nelson’s most recent album was That’s Life, a second collection of standards from the Frank Sinatra repertoire, released Feb. 26, 2021, It debuted at #1 on both Billboard‘s Jazz Albums chart and the Traditional Jazz Albums chart.

The Willie Nelson Family Track Listing

1. Heaven and Hell (Willie Nelson)
2. Kneel at the Feet of Jesus (Willie Nelson)
3. Laying My Burdens Down (Willie Nelson)
4. Family Bible (Claude Gray, Paul Buskirk & Walt Breeland)
5. In the Garden (traditional)
6. All Things Must Pass (George Harrison)
7. I Saw the Light (Hank Williams, Sr.)
8. In God’s Eyes (Willie Nelson)
9. Keep It On the Sunnyside (A.P. Carter)
10. I Thought About You, Lord (Willie Nelson)
11. Too Sick To Pray (Willie Nelson)
12. Why Me (Kris Kristofferson)

Nelson turned 88 last April 29. Tickets to see him perform are available here.

Paul English

Wednesday, September 1st, 2021

Tuesday, August 24th, 2021

Wednesday, July 21st, 2021

Tuesday, April 27th, 2021
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Bobbie Nelson and Paul English (Laughlin, Nevada) (March 29, 2014)

Monday, March 29th, 2021
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Thanks to Lane and Katrina, from Flagstaff, for sharing their photo of Paul English and Bobbie Nelson at the Willie Nelson and Family show in Laughlin, Nevada.

Bobby Nelson and Paul English

Monday, December 28th, 2020

Always so sweet when Paul English would escort Sister Bobbie off the stage after every show.

Happy birthday, Paul English

Friday, November 6th, 2020

Bobbie Nelson, Paul English,

Monday, October 26th, 2020

“Me and Paul”

Friday, October 9th, 2020