Red Headed Stranger (1975)

The only Willie Nelson album my wife likes. Opens with “The Time of the Preacher.” Time is everywhere in Willie’s music. Time and crying about time. “He cried like a baby, he screamed like a panther.” “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.” Crying over lost time. This raises the question again, can Buddha have the blues? Can Buddha cry? And do you want to be Buddha if you can’t ever cry? “My eyes filled with tears…and I couldn’t believe it was true.” For someone who is so happy-go-lucky, he’s crying on every song. For someone who lives so fast and hard, he sings so slow and soft.

Willie had much to cry about. His house burned down in 1970.

He recorded the entire album in a day and half for $20k. On the liner notes, Willie uses the word “sparse” to describe the sound he was trying to create.

“Love is like a dying ember, and only memories remain, and through the ages I’ll remember blue eyes crying in the rain.” Love always dies; only memories remain. And even the memories are of lost love, of dying embers, of tears. Love is death, but mind defeats death, so death be not proud. As Willie tells it, he had nothing for this album and just wrote it with his wife on the car drive back from a ski trip. Willie has his standard road band with him in the studio.

“Can I Sleep in Your Arms?” may be one of my top ten all-time favorite Willie songs (how many times have I said this already?). The chorus harmonizes better than any chorus on a Willie album I can think of. Mickey Raphael’s harmonica sobs like never before on this track.

After listening to Willie’s version of Scott Wiseman’s 1938 song “Remember Me,” it appears that Willie has cribbed many of his lyrics from this song. “Funny How Time Slips Away” is almost identical to this; Willie just adds the clinching twist in the last line.

http://bobdylanroots.com/remember.html

(original Scott Wiseman lyrics)

You told me once that you were mine alone forever

And I was yours till the end of eternity.

But all those vows are broken now, and I will never

Be the same except in memory.

CHORUS:

Remember me when the candle lights are gleamin',

Remember me at the close of a long, long day.

And it would be so sweet when all alone I’m dreamin'

Just to know you still remember me.

A brighter face may take my place when we're apart, dear,

Another love with a heart more bold and free.

But in the end, fair weather friends may break your heart, dear.

And if they do, sweetheart, remember me.

Willie’s countless other songs of memory, time, and love could be traced to this 1938 song.

Later, he sings, “It’s the same old song, and it’s right and it’s wrong.” That’s helpful. Clear as mud. Earthy and ethereal. I especially like the instrumental interludes on this concept album. And how does Willie tell the back story for a song someone else wrote with other songs that other people wrote? He is a master arranger and recycler and transformer of material.

In the bonus material, he sings Hank Williams’ “Can’t Help It (If I’m Still in Love With You).” There’s nothing he can do about it now, and he can’t help it. This helplessness, this resignation to fate. And yet a hopeful resignation, a Taoist freeing from worry by accepting. The Tao of “On The Road.”

A little history shows that, in a way, Willie’s music comes out of the Gay Nineties, the late 19th century, the sentimental 1890s. And so much of what I like about literature comes from the late 1800s and early 1900s.

“This song was written in 1939 when LuLu Belle and I spent a year at radio station WLW, Cincinnati. In our guest room at home when I was a child there was a fancy old cup and saucer which sat on the dresser. The phrase "Remember Me" was on the cup in fancy gold lettering. We children were not allowed to touch this momento [sic] of the sentimental Gay Nineties, somehow connected with the courtship of Mother and Dad. Feeling a bit homesick and sentimental during the bustle of radio shows and road trips, I "made up" the song while riding in the car to personal appearance jobs. The lyric was not intended to apply to any particular person.”—S. Wiseman

Letters to Dorothy Horstman, Apr 8/Aug 8, 1973; reprinted in Dorothy Horstman, Sing Your Heart Out, Country Boy, New York, 1976, p. 191.

Interesting that Chesterton writes about this modern fear of being sentimental. How has Willie escaped irony and cynicism? So few have. Perhaps Bono is right. And Buechner. He transcends the mundane by observing it so carefully. He creates stories, uses narrative, to give shape to the shapelessness and fleetingness of human experience. He tells stories about lost love and somehow regains it by retelling it. Re-membering is re-telling is re-claiming.