www.newyorker.com/magazine
By Alex Abramovich
When Willie Nelson performs in and around New York, he parks his bus in Weehawken, New Jersey. While the band sleeps at a hotel in midtown Manhattan, he stays on board, playing dominoes, napping. Nelson keeps musician’s hours. For exercise, he does sit-ups, arm rolls, and leg lifts. He jogs in place. “I’m in pretty good shape, physically, for ninety-two,” he told me recently. “Woke up again this morning, so that’s good.”
On September 12th, Nelson drove down to the Freedom Mortgage Pavilion, in Camden. His band, a four-piece, was dressed all in black; Nelson wore black boots, black jeans, and a Bobby Bare T-shirt. His hair, which is thicker and darker than it appears under stage lights, hung in two braids to his waist. A scrim masked the front of the stage, and he walked out unseen, holding a straw cowboy hat. Annie, his wife of thirty-four years, rubbed his back and shoulders. A few friends watched from the wings: members of Sheryl Crow’s band, which had opened for him, and John Doe, the old punk musician, who had flown in from Austin. (At the next show, in Holmdel, Bruce Springsteen showed up.) Out front, big screens played the video for Nelson’s 1986 single “Living in the Promiseland.”
“Promiseland” joined Nelson’s preshow in the spring, after ICE ramped up its raids on immigrants. The lyrics speak on behalf of newcomers: “Give us your tired and weak / And we will make them strong / Bring us your foreign songs / And we will sing along.” The video cuts between footage of Holocaust survivors arriving on Liberty ships and of Haitian migrants on wooden boats. In Camden—two nights after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, one night after the State Department warned immigrants against “praising” his murder, hours after bomb threats forced the temporary closure of seven historically Black colleges—the images hit hard. When the video ended, three things happened at once: stagehands yanked the scrim away, Nelson sang the first notes of “Whiskey River,” and a giant American flag unfurled behind him.
“Whiskey River” has been Nelson’s opener for decades. He tends to start it with a loud, ringing G chord, struck nine times, like a bell. On this night, he sat out the beginning and took the first solo instead, strumming forcefully, pushing the tempo. “I don’t know what I’m going to do when I pick up a guitar,” Nelson said. He plays to find out, discovering new ways into songs he’s been singing, in some cases, since he was a child. “Willie loves to play music more than anyone I’ve ever met,” the musician Norah Jones told me. “He can’t stop, and he shouldn’t.” For Nelson, music is medicine—he won’t do the lung exercises his doctors prescribe, but “singing for an hour is good for you,” he says. His daughter Amy put it more bluntly: “I think it’s literally keeping him alive.”
Last year, Nelson didn’t make it to every performance. On those nights, his older son, Lukas, filled in. At the end of the tour, no one knew if Nelson would go out again; five months later, he did. I started following him in February, in Florida. In Key West, Lukas and Annie flanked Nelson as he sat and rested before going on. Annie had her hand on the small of his back and Lukas on his shoulder; they looked like two cornermen coaxing a boxer back into the ring. Nelson suffers from emphysema. He barely survived COVID-19. (He got so sick he wanted to die; Annie told him if he did she would kill him.) His voice is still inky, he struggles for air, but he stays in charge, or lets go, as the moment requires.
“I’m definitely following Willie,” Nelson’s harmonica player, Mickey Raphael, told me. “He sets the tempo. He picks the songs.” Raphael is tall, with dark, curly hair and the easy swagger of a man who has spent his life onstage. When he started with Nelson, in 1973, there was no set list. Every night was “stream of consciousness,” catch-as-catch-can. Now, even with set lists taped to the carpet, Nelson might switch songs or skip ahead, lose his way, or drop verses—things he did as a younger man, too. At the end of a number that’s really careened, he’ll look over his shoulder and cross his arms in an umpire’s safe sign. “We made it,” he’s telling Raphael on these occasions. “We’re home.”
Nelson’s sense of home is elastic. For a long time, it was wherever work took him. In the fifties, when he was a young husband and father, in Texas, he washed dishes, trimmed trees, pumped gas, tooled saddles; he sold Bibles, Singer sewing machines, and Kirby vacuum cleaners door to door and drifted through a string of small-station radio jobs in Pleasanton, Denton, and Fort Worth. He was working as a d.j. at KVAN in Vancouver, Washington, when Mae Boren Axton, who co-wrote “Heartbreak Hotel,” came by the studio. Nelson played her a tape of his songs. She told him to seek his fortune in Nashville or back in Texas, where he ended up teaching guitar out of Mel Bay books, staying one lesson ahead of his students and writing extraordinary songs—“Crazy,” “Night Life,” “Funny How Time Slips Away”—that he offered to other artists for ten dollars apiece. Nelson’s oldest child, Lana, told me that when she found out he’d been peddling his songs she was crushed. “Nobody will ever know that you wrote them,” she said, “and how does that help?” “Look,” Nelson told her. “We got groceries.”
Larry Butler led the Sunset Playboys, a band at the Esquire Ballroom, in Houston. He told Nelson that his songs were worth a lot more, lent him fifty dollars, and hired him to play in the group. Others made similar offers—Nelson never forgot them—but there were songs, including “Night Life,” that he had to sell anyway. Twelve times a year, when the rent was due, the family moved. Lana said it never bothered her: “It’s not like you had developed this huge friendship with anybody over that thirty days.”
The idea of home comes up again and again in the songs Nelson wrote during this period, starting with “Misery Mansion,” recorded in 1960 as a rejoinder to “Heartbreak Hotel.” He followed that with “Where My House Lives,” “Lonely Little Mansion,” and “Home Motel”—a “crumbling last resort . . . on Lost Love Avenue.” In “Hello Walls,” Nelson pushes the metaphor to its limit, greeting not just the walls but the ceiling and the windows: “Is that a teardrop in the corner of your pane? / Now don’t you try to tell me that it’s rain.” The suffering in these songs is almost comical, but the hurt under the wordplay was real. Faron Young’s 1961 recording of “Hello Walls” became Nelson’s first No. 1 hit in Nashville, where he spent the sixties, until he finally grew to suspect that, for him, home might not be any one place at all.
