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His themes are mostly the Nashville perennials of hootch, heartbreak and hallelujah. But his best songs—chronicles of a tough, sensitive drifter—have a gritty conviction that comes from being unsparingly autobiographical. As Willie says, they are “songs that had to come out.” The deep lines around Willie’s surprisingly gentle brown eyes bear witness to a lot of hard days and even harder nights, and he sings about them with sentiment but no sentimentality, with pain but no self-pity. He celebrates their brief, boisterous pleasures, as in I Gotta Get Drunk:

I’ll start to spend my money, Callin ‘everybody honey, And wind up singin’ the blues.

He bemoans their frequent emptiness, as in Opportunity to Cry: I think I’ll go home now And feed my nightmares

He voices the exhilaration and melancholy of ceaselessly moving on, as in Bloody Mary Morning:

Baby left me without warnin’ Sometime in the night, So I’m flyin ‘down to Houston With forgetting her the nature of my flight.

When Willie moved on from Nashville, his decision to settle in Austin was no accident. Texas to him meant his native heritage, his own people, his starting place. To paraphrase a classic country hymn that Willie favors, the circle was unbroken.

The circle began in the dusty hamlet of Abbott, Texas, where Willie and his sister Bobbie, now the pianist in his band, were raised by gospel-singing grandparents; their parents had drifted off in opposite directions shortly after Willie was born. Willie was five when he got a guitar and a few rudimentary lessons from his grandfather, a blacksmith who had taken mail-order music courses. Soon Willie was pressing his ear against an old wooden Philco radio to hear Grand Ole Opry. At 13 he formed his own band—with his father, then living in a town 40 miles away, on fiddle. He left high school at 16, was mustered out of the Air Force after eight months because of back problems, and quickly married a Waco carhop named Martha Matthews.

Then came a sequence of “whiles”—a while as a door-to-door encyclopedia and Bible salesman, a while as a plumber’s helper in Oregon, a while as a disc jockey in Fort Worth, and so on. Willie was forever setting off for new destinations with everything he could call his own loaded into his 1946 Ford: Martha, the three kids they soon had, some furniture and an “Oklahoma credit card” (a length of hose for siphoning gas from roadside tanks). A few years of this and Martha began heading for a destination of her own: divorce court. “I tried being like other people,” Willie says. “I tried to work and come home and watch TV. That just wasn’t me.”

Wherever he wandered, Willie sang and played guitar in local honky-tonks, at times performing behind a chicken-wire screen set up to protect musicians from flying beer bottles. Out of this harsh apprenticeship came one of his earliest and best songs, a neon-lit lament called Night Life:

The night life ain ‘t no good life, But it’s my life.

In 1961 Willie sold copyrights to Night Life and one other song for a paltry $150 to finance a move to Nashville. There he quickly made it as a songwriter, but for other singers. Crazy rose high on the charts when Patsy Cline recorded it. So did Funny How Time Slips Away as recorded by Jimmy Elledge, Hello Walls by Faron Young, and dozens of others. It seemed Willie could write a hit for anybody but himself. His own recordings went nowhere, perhaps because they were not truly his own. Producers decreed that he should be backed by slick studio musicians and often swathed in saccharine strings. What came out was the Nashville sound, not the Willie Nelson sound. “I was trying to sell a new style of singer,” Willie recalls. “They didn’t have a category to put me in.”

The category they settled on was outlaw, and Willie and other road-hardened individualists like Waylon Jennings earned it in ways that went beyond unorthodox musicianship. They disdained the studded and rhinestoned outfits of Nashville stars for scruffy clothes. They ducked the record-company celebrity mills for a life of carousing and missed appointments. Willie also met and married a red-haired country singer named Shirley Collie. Though the marriage was to last ten years, it was nowhere near as harmonious as the records they occasionally cut together. Once when Willie came home drunk, Shirley, who knew a little kung fu, pushed him through a glass-paneled door.

Strange to say, Willie’s luck improved when his Nashville house burned down in 1972. After plunging through the flames to retrieve his stash of marijuana, he headed again for Texas. There, says Merle Haggard, an admiring colleague, “Willie took his own band and a case of beer and sat down to try to create things.” He did so by following his usual rules—that is, none. “Nothing works every time,” Willie says. “Everything has to stand on its own. I don’t try to limit my thoughts in music. Everything I do is by feel.”

Among other things, Willie saw a chance to “create my own market” by bringing together Austin’s country audience with the rock devotees and college crowd on its fringes. While his post-Nashville LPs began building a national following, he consolidated his local reputation by promoting a series of July 4th outdoor concerts featuring friends like Leon Russell and Kris Kristofferson—and, not incidentally, himself. “When I was in the encyclopedia business,” Willie explains, “I learned that whatever you want to sell, first you’ve got to sell yourself.”