Willie Nelson and Shirley Collie
There were times during Willie’s ten year marriage to his second wife, Shirley Collie, when they enjoyed periods of domestic bliss. At one point, Willie even went so far as to quit the road and the two of them settled down near Nashville on his 100-acre farm to raise hogs. (He also had 45 head of cattle and 390 chickens.) But it was an unsuccessful venture. “Hogs is an art,” ex-wife, Shirley told Pete Asthelm (Newsweek, August 14, 1978), “but we didn’t know that. We just left those feeders full and the hogs ate till they ruptured or died.”
“We were buying hogs for twenty-seven cents a pound and selling them for nineteen,” added Willie (Newsweek). “Songwriting was better than that.”
By 1969, his last year in Nashville, Willie was at an emotional low. He recalled the circumstances that led up to his decision to move back to Texas: “the night before, Hank Cochran and I had been sitting in the basement writing songs. That year, I went through a divorce. I had four cars wrecked. We were kicking all this around, and we wrote a song, “What Can You Do To Me Now’. The next day, my house burned down.”
Lost in the flamers were tapes of hundreds of Willie’s unrecorded songs. In fact, all he was able to save was his cherished, ancient Martin guitar, and his stash bag. “I had a pound of good Colombian in there and I knew I was going to need it” (Rolling Stone, January 15, 1978).
Within a few days, Willie was back in Texas. He put up his band at a friend’s dude ranch near Bandera, Texas, and they started playing the road again. “It wasn’t necessarily an overnight move” (Hustler), “I was closer to where I was workin’ all those years. Livin’ in Nashville, I had to drive so much that I wanted to start livin’ where I was working. It gave me time to concentrate and get some plan of action together.”
Waylon and Willie
Bob Allen
