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Waylon Jennings talks about Willie Nelson in his book, “WAYLON an Autobiography”.

Through it all, Willie and Waylon stayed Waylon and Willie. One RCA executive kept mixing up the two of us. When he came to Nashville, a bean counter that had worked his way up the corporate ladder, I called him on it.

“I heard that you thought Willie and Waylon were one person.”

“Ah,” he laughed. “But I know better now.”  

All us hillbillies look alike,” I told him. “So what you need to do, when you don’t know their names, is just call  ’em  Hoss.”   

“Oh, Horse?”  

I said, “No, not horse. It’s Hoss.”  

“Hass?”  

“No, Hoss.  And perhaps you better not  come down here no more.”

I first  heard the term from Ferlin Husky when I was real young. It’s a sign of  respect, an affectionate nickname that means somebody who’s great at what they do. A thoroughbred, or a champion. A trusted friend. 

That kind of describes Willie, though he’ll be the first to admit that he actually enjoys getting me in trouble.   

“It keeps Waylon alert,” he likes to say. “He could sit over there and get old and weak. I keep him young by sending him problems.”   

If that was the case, I”d be a babe in arms now. I write a lot of songs about Willie, because I never thoroughly understood him.  He’s like a cartoon to me.  I’ll be the first to his door when he’s in trouble, but he could screw up a two car funeral. 

He’s so smart, but he never learns a thing from anything that happens to him.  Sometimes I think he likes courting disaster.  When he pulled his car off the road recently and took a nap, only to wake up being arrested for pot possession.  I thought he was the only person in the world who could get busted for “sleeping under the influence”.  

“But if I’m there for him, he’s there for me.”

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 4th, 2007 at 4:07 pm and is filed under Books, Other Artists, Pictures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.