by: Nina Feldman
This Labor Day Weekend, American Routes brings you the best of American Routes Live and in the studio. Each week, Shortcuts offers a sneak peak into the week’s upcoming episode. This week, we go back to this visit from Willie Nelson, when he dropped into the studio with his family band back in 1999.
NS: Welcome to New Orleans Willie
WN: Thank you very much, we’re glad to be back
NS: I wonder if you couldn’t start us off with a little something
NS: I have one we do occasionally
Willie Nelson, Bobby Nelson, and Mickey Rafael play Pick up the Tempo
NS: You and your sister sitting on either side of me here, Bobby Nelson over here on piano. You’ve been playing music together since how old?
WN: Well, she learned to play the piano when she was, I don’t know, seven or eight years old and I came along behind her and I’d sit over there on the stool by her, on the piano stool, and while she would learn to learn the music out of the sheet music well, I would learn along with her. I couldn’t read the music but I would follow along with the chords.
BN: Ears are perfect.
NS: What kind of music were you playing around the Nelson household when you guys were small?
WN: A lot of gospel music, our parents were gospel singers. And from that, country, and pop and blues. There was a lot of the field workers out there along with us that were singing all kinds of music, you’d hear Spanish over here, you’d hear blues over here, so we sort of worked in an opera out there, where we could hear all kinds of music.
NS: The Cotton Field as opera house.
WN: Good sound system!
NS: Did you ever consciously say, “ok, I’m gonna be on the road,” or did it just kind of happen?
WN: No, I think my grandmother, our grandmother, instinctively knew what we were gonna do, because one of the first things she asked us to do was not go on the road.
BN: It’s true
WN: So the first job that I took was a job at a Bohemian polka band, which was six miles away, and as far as she was concerned, that was traveling.
BN: It was.
WN: And that was way too much on the road for her. SO once I’d already broken the rule and started traveling, I might as well go all the way so I’ve been traveling ever since.
For more from the best of American Routes Live, listen Saturday at 7 or Sunday at 6, right here on WWNO or anytime at americanroutes.org.
This entry was posted on Saturday, September 3rd, 2016 at 11:17 am and is filed under Interviews, Willie's Place; Willie's Roadhouse, Sirius/XM; radio. 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.