Willie Nelson and Family (1971)

Listening to Willie and family on my 17th anniversary. This album opens with versions of “What Can You Do to Me Now?” and “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down.” Willie’s vocals are strong, but the string arrangements cloy. There are so many better versions of these songs on other albums. I wasn’t expecting to find a Hank Williams tune on this album. This version of Hank’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” sounds like the domesticated Disney version. I’m actually shocked that Willie would do this with syrupy strings and triangles tinkling. I’m afraid this version might make Hank cry, but I suspect Chet Atkins is to blame, not Willie, for adding the strings. The strings probably made Willie cry, too. Just as I’ve said that Willie should stay away from Paul Simon songs, I think he should avoid JT as well. I don’t think anyone can improve on JT’s own versions of “Fire and Rain,” and this one just didn’t need to be re-done. And for some reason, Willie is trying to sound like JT. That’s so un-like Willie, who always seems to sound just like himself. Track 5 is where Willie starts sounding like himself. Willie and family get funky on the swingin’ gospel “Kneel at the Feet of Jesus.” Willie has several gospel albums, but they are more sober gospel tunes. I’d love to hear a whole album of rowdy gospel tunes like this. This version of “I’m a Memory” is solid despite the strings. I confess I kind of like the cheesy horns. Track 7, a version of Harlan Howard’s “Yours Love,” may be the most interesting song on the album. The only other place I have seen it so far is on the 2006 album “Songbird.” It is a hopeful, optimistic sort of prayer. Instead of a foolish promise, it’s a prayer for faithfulness. A prayer for lasting love. It is one of the few places where Willie seems to be praying, asking for his love to last. And he seems to mean it as the song rises pleasantly in intensity. He chants the verses like a prayer, and the incantatory effect builds momentum. “I Can Cry Again” is new to me; this is the first time I have seen it in close to 100 albums. It’s always good to see another song about crying from the crying cowboy. This song needs the naked treatment; the strings and back-up vocals need to be stripped. The vocals remind me of “Red Headed Stranger,” but the arrangement drowns them out. Only Willie would think it was “good to see” he could cry again. Only Willie would be “glad to say” that he can cry again. “Now I’ll return to life and live again.” For Willie, crying is living. Living is crying. If you ain’t cryin’, you ain’t livin’. Sort of like the skier motto: if you’re not falling down, you’re not really skiing. If you’re not getting hurt enough to cry, you’re not really living. It’s good to cry. Willie is glad to cry. Previously, his “pride would not permit [his] tears to fall”; he “walked through burning hell and never cried at all.” But now he’s happy once again because he can cry. He’s not happy unless he’s crying. Not sure how this fits with his stoic, Buddhist philosophy of accepting with a smile whatever comes his way. Here he suggests that might not work. That crying is important. I haven’t seen “That’s Why I Love Her So” on any previous albums. Again, Willie’s voice is “Yesterday’s Wine”-esque, but the strings taint the track. Merle Haggard’s “Today I Started Loving You Again” is another new song to my ears. I’m not sure why he hasn’t re-visited this song on more albums. He has so many hidden gems like this that beg to be re-done without strings. It reminds me of George Jones’s “He Stopped Loving her Today,” but in reverse. He thought he was over her. But today he sings, “What a fool I was to think I could get by with only these few teardrops that I’ve cried. I should have known the worst was yet to come and that cryin’ time for me had just begun.” So the day he starts crying in earnest for her is the day he starts loving her again. So here, again, he associates crying with loving. He cries because he loves. The absence of crying indicates the absence of loving. It is only in crying that we truly live and love. Again, the strings kill another great vocal performance. Some hidden gems here, but overall, not an untenable top ten album. Worth buying on ITUNES for $9.99, which is the only place I could find it, used or otherwise. Even on LP, it’s hard to find. EBAY has some, but they can be pricey. For now, ITUNES is the way to go, and I suppose Willie actually gets some money for it that way, whereas if I buy it used he gets nada.

The Willie Way (1972)

I think Willie is trying to sound a bit like Johnny Cash on the opening track, “You Left a Long, Long Time Ago.” “Today might be the day that you walk away, but you left me a long, long time ago.” Real leaving happens in the mind. Willie insists that she go without saying why, without saying sorry. No questions. This is another theme in his music: accepting fate and not questioning or dwelling over the reasons. And yet this contradicts the career he has made out of dwelling and questioning. He lives on “the usual memories that always linger on.” They provide the content for so many of his songs. The lingering memories, the remembrance of things past. He is either trying to outrun or hide from the past, or he is chasing it down, in search of lost time. He’s either trying to lose it or find it. And he does both with equal vigor, often at the same time. The arrangement is pleasantly lacking in strings or back-up vocals, so it seems to be a vast improvement from 1969’s “My Own Peculiar Way.” “Wonderful Future” captures this paradox perfectly because Willie also has a song called “A Wonderful Yesterday.” Tomorrow and Yesterday are always better than Today, and yet this flies in the face of Willie’s live-in-the-present, hakuna matata mentality. He loves and hates three days: yesterday, today, and tomorrow. “Today as I walk through my garden of dreams, I’m alone with the sweet used-to-be.” Sweet memories, sweet used-to-be. That’s where Willie likes to live, in his garden of dreams, in his mind, in the sound in his mind. The heavenly choir of his own mind. “My past and my present are one and the same, and the future holds nothing for me.” Willie is outside time; he has transcended its bounds. Past and present are one. “Yesterday’s kisses still burning and yesterday’s memories still find me. Scenes from the past keep returning. I’ve got a wonderful future behind me.” Memories linger and haunt. They pursue and hound. It’s almost a Greek way of looking at things. Willie sees his future in his past. The Greek goal was to build a lasting legacy, to be remembered, so you always had an eye to your own past. Your future was merely a means of creating a memorable past. Willie has beaten them to the punch because his future is already past. He has outrun time. But now he is in this weird limbo. “You say there is happiness waiting for me, but I know this is just fantasy. Let me trade one tomorrow for one yesterday. Let me live in my garden of dreams.” Willie wants to trade one tomorrow for one yesterday. He wants to live in the past. This recording of Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make it Through the Night” starts out as one of my favorites, but the strings and back-up vocals kick in and ruin it midway through. This version of “Wake Me when It’s Over” is the funkiest one I have come across. It has a gospel, bluesy feel, with a little Hammond organ and an almost R and B drum backing. The harmonica slips in midway through and Willie has fun with the phrasing. May be my favorite version of this song. I can’t say the same about this version of “Undo the Right.” Very straightforward and perfunctory. There are many superior versions out there. This is the first time I’ve heard Willie sing Scott Wiseman’s country/bluegrass standard “Mountain Dew.” I love the spare acoustic setting, but it needs a fiddle and a banjo. “Home is Where You’re Happy” seems to have a harpsichord, and it is a rare Willie tune that only appears here and on “The Ghost.” “Home is where you’re happy, just any house will do.” This fits Willie’s house/home song genre. Home is where the heart is. A house is not a home without you there. This version of “A Moment isn’t Very Long” ranks up there with the best. With the exception of the cheesy strings and back-up vocals on “Help Me Make it Through the Night,” this has been a spare acoustic album. Definitely an important early album with mostly Willie-penned songs in spare settings. I’m surprised this slipped through the Nashville Sound production system. This is the first time I’ve heard Willie’s “What Do You Want Me to Do?” It sounds like a tape recording of some conversation he had with one of his many wives. You can see why these songs were too real for Nashville. They can be painful to listen to because they are all conversations or thoughts we have had but were to embarrassed to admit, even to ourselves. You feel uncomfortable like you are overhearing another couple argue right next to you. “Well I can’t read your mind when you change it all the time, and I don’t know what’s the matter with you. I think I do my share to show that I care, so just tell me what do you want me to do? I’ve tried to be kind. But it don’t work sometimes, and you’re not the same person that I knew. And tell me where should I start to return to your heart, and tell me what do you want me to do? What do you want me to do with the dreams that I own. Should I change them to memories and leave you alone? Maybe I’m not too smart. I guess you know me by heart, and if my chances of winning are few, let my heart step aside with what’s left of my pride, and tell me what do you want me to do?” Willie asks if he should turn his dreams into memories. They are safer and more stable there. More lasting. Even sweeter. Ugh. The cheesy back-up vocals return on the last track, “I’d Rather You Didn’t Love Me.” Why? This could be a top ten album without those few bits of strings and back-up vocals. Nevertheless, I will return to it often for the funky version of “Wake Me When It’s Over.”

My Own Peculiar Way (1969)

What are the chances I pull out my 1946 edition of G.K. Chesterton’s 1913 book The Victorian Age in Literature and find something related to Willie Nelson on the first page? About 100%:

“real development is not leaving things behind, as on a road, but drawing life from them, as from a root. Even when we improve we never progress. For progress, the metaphor from the road, implies a man leaving his home behind him: but improvement means a man exalting the towers or extending the gardens of his home.”

So which is Willie doing? “Leaving things behind” or “drawing life from them”? Or, paradoxically, both? Is he “leaving his home behind him” or “exalting the towers and extending the gardens of his home”? Is he severing roots or watering them? Or has he somehow found the magic formula to allow roots to grow deeper on the road? Rootless roots, road roots? Roots rooted in the road? Maybe in America the road is our roots. The ride over was a kind of root for the pilgrims. The sea is home for Ishmael and the White Whale. Homer’s whale-road, or was it Beowulf’s? Or both.

I turn next to Jacques Barzun’s little book of lectures titled “The Use and Abuse of Art.” He quotes E.M. Forster: “[Every artist professes to] create a world more real and solid than daily existence…, [a world] eternal and indestructible.” This is what Willie does in his mind, in his songs. The sound in his mind becomes more real and solid, more eternal and indestructible, than life itself.

Willie recorded “My Own Peculiar Way” in 1969, the year I was born. This may be the worst setting for Willie’s songs I have heard yet. Willie’s vocals sound fine on the title track, but the back-up vocals and the syrupy strings taint the music like oil from the BP spill. This is the first time I have heard Willie sing “I Walk Alone.” “I walk alone where once we wandered…Till you return I’ll stay the same, dear. I’ll still be true and walk alone…By stars above I swear to love you.” Another promise song. Willie promises to be true forever in the face of fickleness. The strings and back-up singers didn’t seem quite as offensive on this track. Ditto for this version of “Any Old Arms Won’t Do.” I only have three versions of “I Just Don’t Understand,” but it has one of my favorite wry Willie lines: “Do you mind too much if I don’t understand?” That kind of questioning line captures the essence of Willie’s tone and style. Quizzical, sardonic, ironic, but somehow not cynical. “I Just Dropped By” appears only on this album and on “Naked Willie,” which I is the same version denuded:

“I just dropped by to see the house I used to live in. I hope that you don’t mind. I won’t stay very long. So long ago someone and I lived here together. And then so suddenly I found myself alone. I couldn’t stand the thought of living here without her. And so I moved away to let my memories die. But my memories outlived my better judgment. This may sound strange to you, but I just thought I’d drop by. The very door your standing in, she used to stand there and wait for me to come home every night. And when I’d see her standing there, I’d run to meet her. These things were on my mind, so I just thought I’d drop by. I guess that I should leave. Someone might just not understand. And I’m aware of how the neighbors like to pry. But you can tell them all today a most unhappy man was in the neighborhood, and he just thought he’d drop by.”

It’s another house song. Another ghost song. Another local memory song. Willie tries to let his memories die, but they have a life of their own. They override his judgment. They are on his mind, they haunt his mind, they run his mind. Not one of my favorite versions of “Local Memory.” The only other version of Merle Travis’s “That’s All” I can find is on Willie’s duet album with Wynton Marsalis, “Two Men with the Blues.” The version with Wynton is six minutes long, though, and this one is only 2:26. “If you can’t preach without going to school, brother, you ain’t no preacher, you’re an educated fool.” Doing without knowing, doing unselfconsciously, naturally, is superior to doing by rule. And if you can’t, “You better change your way of living cause the good lord say, that’s all.” Willie’s vocals on this version of “I Let My Mind Wander” are actually better than many of his other versions of this song. If only we could remove the background fluff. John Hartford’s “Natural to Be Gone” is new to me. It raises the question, what is natural? What does it mean to be and act natural. “What’s the difference being different when it’s difference that now looks alike? You say I’m changing, I’m not sure that’s wrong.” It’s natural for love to come and go. “There’s no season in my mind that I can count on for an answer.” Seasons of the mind. Seasons are like meter, which Willie is always breaking. Breaking seasons, predictable patterns. Seasons never surprise, and Willie thrives on surprise. Seasons are the most unoriginal thing you could find, and original artists resist seasons, and yet the ultimate artist, the ultimate creator, who created artists themselves, was not above creating seasons, patterns, clichés. Changing and moving on is normal, and yet Willie still cries and wants it to last forever. He wants it both ways. He wants it to be both wrong and right. Willie continues his theme of mind with Dallas Frazier’s “Love Has a Mind of It’s Own”:

“I’d love to forget every time that you kissed me. I’d love to forget that you’re gone. And I’d gladly hold back every tear that I’m cryin’…Love is the ruler, the greatest of kings. Love sits up high on a throne. Forgetting you, darling, is not my decision. For love has a mind of it’s own…I don’t want to cry all night long. I wish I could run from the day that I met you…”

Willie can’t control his own mind. He can’t ditch these memories. He tries to outrun time and memory, but he can’t. Willie’s “The Message” may be too clever for its own good, but it also feature’s Willie’s obsession with mind. “There are so many things that I want to say tonight, that my mind keeps moving faster than my pen can write.” Don Baird’s “It Will Come to Pass” has that Taoist resignation to fate and the passage of time and seasons. What will be will be. “Love will grow; it will come to pass.” Even in 1969 we see Willie’s obsessions with time, mind, and memory.

Rainbow Connection (2001)

This is the kind of quirky, eclectic, organic, evolving kind of album only Willie could come up with. According to Willie’s own account written in the liner notes, it started out as a children’s cd, but it evolved into a cd that starts with children’s songs and then evolves into mature adult songs. This is another one of those favor albums Willie does as favors to his friends and family. He did this one for and with his daughters and friends. It’s great to hear Willie singing solo acoustic on the title track, but it isn’t one of his stonger vocal performances. He can’t seem to hit some of the notes. “I’m Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover” is an old tune from Willie’s childhood, and the “Luck Choir” actually makes it sound like a family sing-a-long at Christmas, which it literally was, recorded in Luck, Texas over Christmas. “O’l Blue” becomes even more special when you learn that Willie made his grandmother, who taught him music, play it for him every day, and it made him cry every time. That’s where the cryin’ cowboy learned to cry. A hard-livin’ man with a soft heart. This song is worth the price of the cd, and it is as good as anything Willie has ever done. His daughter sings a lovely, understated harmony. Amy Nelson wrote and sings “Wise Old Me,” but Willie doesn’t sing or play on the track. “Won’t You Ride in My Little Red Wagon” is a fun little tune. Just Willie, Trigger, bass, and a little rhythm guitar. It’s like having Willie singing in your living room for your kid’s birthday party. “Playmate” sounds like Willie has a cold, which is how “Rainbow Connection” also sounds. I think he should have done another take on both of these tunes. Willie sings “I’m My Own Grandpa” better than anyone. He sings it matter-of-fact, straight-faced, and serious. The Luck Choir again adds a homey flavor to this sing-along favorite. Amy Nelson sings “Rock Me to Sleep” and Willie accompanies on Trigger. “Playin’ Dominoes and Shootin’ Dice,” which is what Willie does at his headquarters in Luck, moves this album into the realm of adulthood. Of course Willie’s attention would wander from a children’s cd into something else, something more. Tex Woods and O.D. Dobbs wrote this song in 1952 (or renewed the copyright then), but it could be the story of Willie’s life, the story of a man whose wife finds him foolin’ around, and she beats him with his own guitar and then shoots him. This story gets told over and over again in Willie’s biography. Four or five wives getting after him for foolin’ around. And Willie sings this one straight-faced and serious. Just tellin’ it like it is. No judgment or sympathy. Willie has a knack for finding songs that other people wrote but that describe his own life perfectly. He is a master of song selection. Where does he find songs like this? And how does he have the chutzpa to sing songs that cast an unflattering light on his own behavior. He just lets it all hang out with no apologies or explanations. “Wouldn’t Have it Any Other Way” is the only Willie –penned song on the album, and he wrote it for this album in 2000. It fits Willie’s on-the-road, Hakuna Matata philosophy. “We wake up in a new world every day.” We’re on the road again every morning. We don’t care what other people say, and we live life to the fullest. Unapologetic to the core. A beautiful, simple song, and so typical that Willie would do a children’s cd that morphs into an adult cd; a cd of covers, but then he has to add one of his own. You just never know what you’ll get when you start playing a Willie album, and you get the sense that he doesn’t know either. He’s making it up as he goes along. It grows organically. And you sense the authenticity of this spirit in the songs. He needs them and he means them at that time and that studio with those people. His song selection is as quirky and of-the-moment as his phrasing. He breaks meter in every line and in every choice of song. Always surprising the listener like Thelonius Monk. Expect the unexpected. And where the heck did a rough blues song like Weldon’s 1942 “Outskirts of Town” come from? Matt Hubbard’s harmonica works overtime to bring out the blues. Willie closes out the set with two Mike Newbury tunes. In “Just Dropped in (To See What Condition My Condition Was In),” Willie sings, “found my broken mind in a brown paper bag again” and “tore my mind on a jagged sky.” It’s all about mind with Willie, all in the head. Memory, mind, time. Later he sings, “I broke my mind.” Broken hearts, broken minds. Maybe they’re the same thing. “Had myself crawlin’ out as I was crawlin’ in.” My untenable top ten list has become so untenable, what the heck. Add this to the list. I think it’s at 35 and counting. It will probably end up being my top 50, which will be about half of Willie’s albums. Not very helpful. Oh well. What can I say. I like it all. “The Thirty-Third of August” is the best song on this album. “Today there’s no salvation.” A blind man can “see what [Willie] can’t understand.” “It’s the thirty-third of August and I’m finally touchin’ down/ eight days frum Sunday, and I’m Saturday-bound.” Reminds me of Kristofferson’s “Sunday Morning Comin’ Down.” Willie closes with some of the most haunting, chilling lyrics in his repertoire: “Now I put my angry feelin’ under lock and chain/ I hide my violent nature with a smile/ though the demons dance and sing their songs within my fevered brain/ not all my god-like thoughts, Lord, are defiled.” On a kids album? What was he thinkin’? What was on his mind? This is a far cry from “O’l Blue” and “I Am My Own Grandpa,” but what is a “far cry for some” is just a regular old cry to Willie. Willie makes no distinctions. Cry, cry, cry. It’s cries all the way down. From hungry babies crying to hungover men crying. It’s all hunger for something more, restlessness, crying, emotions. Put it in the top ten, baby. Baby, baby, baby. From babies to grandpas, we’re all human, and Willie finds that humanity and brings it out in every song. But I still worry about him covering up those angry feelings with a smile. Can we trust that smile? What’s he hiding? And why? Why hide your violent nature? Is that honest? Authentic? Where is the real Willie? And to think that he started this album with a song from the Muppet Movie. Only Willie could pull this off and come full circle from Kermit the Frog to “The Thirty-Third of August.”

A Classic & Unreleased Collection (volume 3) (1995)

Disc 3 opens up with the remaining tracks from the “Sugar Moon” album. It strikes me as awkward that four songs from “Sugar Moon” end disc 2 and then the remaining six tracks open disc 3. I could have sworn it was Johnny Gimble on fiddle, but the liner notes say it is Jimmy Belken. I think this is Merle Haggard’s band who recorded in Willie’s Pedernales studio and Willie just dropped in and recorded some impromptu jazz and pop standards. I can’t believe they never released this album. Floyd Tillman’s bouncy “I’ll Take What I Can Get” is another version of Stephen Stills’ “If You Can’t Be with the One You Love, Love the One You’re With.” It fits with Willie’s Taoist, Hakuna Matata philosophy. On “If It’s Wrong to Love You” Willie sings, “If it’s wrong to love you, wrong I’ll always be.” There’s that word “always” again. Willie pledging eternal faithfulness in the face of unrequited love. Willie needs to record more with horns. “Struttin’ with Some Barbeque” is an old Louis Armstrong song, and it strikes me that Willie and Louis have a lot in common. “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter” and “make believe it came from you.” Another example of Willie using his mind to create this platonic ideal of love that transcends time and memory. “Till the End of the World” and “I’ll Keep on Loving You” continue this paradoxical theme of always and forever. The crux of honky tonk tunes is the tension between the desire for eternal love and the reality of the fickleness of the human heart. The twin desires of freedom and commitment. These last two songs are what I would call promise songs. I’ll-love-you-forever songs. So many of Willie’s other songs give the lie to these songs, but he can’t help singing them even though he sees right through them. He is able to believe and disbelieve simultaneously. I said it in the last blog, but this is one of Willie’s very best albums; right up there with “Stardust.” He needs to do an album like this with Wynton Marsalis. Tracks 7-10 can be found on “Who’ll Buy My Memories: The IRS Tapes.” The next ten tracks (11-20) are Willie singing Hank Williams tunes with Jimmy Day (who played with Hank) on steel guitar. Willie claims he did the songs in the same key and tempo as Hank. He even tries to sing right on the beat like Hank. Johnny Gimble joins in on fiddle, and many of these songs were recorded in one take. “A House is Not a Home” fits in with Willie’s house songs. “A house with love is not a home.” Is love without a house a home? Is a bus with love on the road a home? “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” seems to be a metaphor for the human heart: it just can’t be filled no matter how much love is poured into it. There seems to be a break, a crack in the human heart, the human condition, which does not allow us to be satisfied. As Augustine writes, “Our hearts are restless till they find rest in thee.” “Why Don’t You Love Me Like You Used to Do”? Why don’t you love me “always.” Why doesn’t love last? Why does love change, fade, cool? Why is the human heart so fickle? Why is love so funny like that? Why does it always slip away? Why does our reach for love always exceed our grasp? This is the puzzle of every country song. The puzzle of Proust and Gatsby. It strikes me, too, that being on the road is a kind of discipline. Playing the same songs every night 200+ days a year takes incredible commitment and discipline that few possess. Should we call it the discipline of freedom? “They’ll Never Take Her Love From Me” gives us that word “never” again. Superlatives abound in honky tonk tunes. Promises about never and always. My love will never fade; it will last for always and forever. Promises, promises, promises that turn to lies, lies, lies. Thus the ubiquity of cheatin’ songs. “They’ll Never Take Her Love From Me” may be my favorite track in this set of Hank Williams songs. Johnny Gimble shines on fiddle. “Why Should We Try Anymore” gets at the notion of living a lie, a half-hearted love. “The vows that we made are only to break…The kisses we steal we know are not real.” And yet we kiss all the same, as if they were real. “False love like ours fades with the flowers.” And what loves doesn’t? What is true love? “Our story’s so old…on the past let’s close the door, and smile don’t regret, but live and forget, there’s no use to try anymore.” Close the door on the past? That would erase every Willie Nelson song, which is based on opening the door to the past. Just listened to a Radio Lab podcast about memory, and they mentioned a study where people took a drug to erase, or defang, painful memories. Imagine if Willie had taken this drug and removed the pain from all his old memories. Would he be happier? He certainly wouldn’t have much to write about. The guy who wrote “Proust was a Neuroscientist” was interviewed, and he mentioned how we re-live and re-create our memories every time we remember, and thus the memories get less and less accurate each time we re-member. So the more you think about the past, the more it becomes about you and the less it is about the past. So your memory literally re-writes the past. The ultimate 1984 propaganda machine. Maybe love is propaganda. Maybe time and memory, too. And yet what beautiful and powerful propaganda.

A Classic & Unreleased Collection (volume 2) (1995)

Tracks 1-4 on disc two in this collection can also be found on “The Complete Atlantic Recordings.” Track 5 can be found on “Singin’ with Willie.” Tracks 6-16 can also be found on “The Complete Atlantic Recordings,” but tracks 17-20 are worth the price of the collection. I have not found these tracks from the “Sugar Moon” album anywhere else. Johnny Gimble kills me on fiddle. “I’m a Fool to Care” is as good as anything on “Stardust,” maybe better. The liner notes say the “Sugar Moon” album was recorded in the mid 1980s and that it is stylistically related to Willie’s 1981 “Over the Rainbow” album. I think “Sugar Moon” may be Willie’s first Preservation Hall style New Orleans jazz album. He has horns blasting away like Louis Armstrong and his Hot Fives. I think “Sugar Moon” makes my untenable top ten. It’s right up there with “Stardust.” Another hidden gem that should be better known.

A Classic & Unreleased Collection (volume 1) (1995)

Over a week without Willie is a bad thing. I have been listening, just not blogging. Too busy grading exams. Now, though, it is time to settle down and listen to the rest of Willie’s collection this summer. Volume one of this collection opens with a special introduction recorded by Willie himself. The liner notes are very helpful and thorough. The 1957 recording of “No Place for Me” also appears on the “One Hell of a Ride” compilation, but the flip side of that Portland, Oregon record, “Lumberjack,” appears for the first time (for me, at least) on this compilation. This recording alone is worth the price of this compilation. Many of the demo recordings from Pamper Records (tracks 4-16) also appear on “The Ghost” (though I prefer the mixing on “The Ghost” compilation; it brings the vocals out more), “Face of a Fighter,” “Crazy: The Demo Sessions,” and “Love and Pain.” Track 13, “Who Do I Know in Dallas,” is the one exception (dare I say the lone exception) that does not appear on any of the other compilations, so it is another reason to buy this collection. “Shirley consoled me in Phoenix. And Jeanie in old San Antone. But who do I know in Dallas that will help me forget I’m alone? I can’t spend the night without someone. The lonelies [not sure how to spell this neologism] would drive me insane.” Being on the road is such a funny thing. You hit the road to get away from people and problems and commitments and relationships that tie you down, and yet you can’t sleep at night alone, and you need a woman in every city to take away the loneliness you created by leaving home in the first place. Tracks 16-21 all appear on “The Complete Atlantic Recordings.” So basically you need to buy this disc for two songs that you can’t find elsewhere. It’s worth it, though.