photo: Mark Lambie
www.elpasotimes.com
by: Doug Pullen
There are tons of old and older musical artists who continue touring well beyond the statute of aesthetic limitations.
Willie Nelson isn’t one of them.
Like Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and a generation of trailblazing blues men before them, Nelson just keeps moving. His 79th birthday on April 30 is just another date on the calendar.
Packing 34 songs – most of them classics; many of which he wrote – into 90 minutes for an appreciative, near sell-out crowd of about 1,900 Saturday night, the iconic singer-songwriter and his band gave a mesmerizing lesson in personal and musical history at the Plaza Theatre, which is only three years older than the man from Abbott, Texas.
A Willie Nelson concert is about timeless songs rooted in real-life experiences, and music rooted in the hills and hollers of the South, mixed with blues, jazz, gospel and Texas dust. He has a certain way of doing things, like always opening with “Whiskey River” as a huge Texas flag unfurls behind the band (a reappearing prop that, no doubt, gets bigger cheers east of her).
His is a cross-pollenated version of tradition-rich country music that’s been marginalized by today’s pop- and youth-obsessed country establishment.