Augusta (1995)

Just found another Willie Nelson friend album.  He recorded this with his long-time golfing buddy Don Cherry in 1995.  I’ve already reviewed Willie’s other collaboration with Don Cherry, “It’s Magic” (2007), but now I come to find there is also a third, “The Eyes of Texas” (2002).  I’ll have to rustle up a copy of that disc in 2011 as I zero in on the hardest to find of Willie’s albums.  I downloaded this off Amazon, so I don’t have any information about the musicians, but it sounds like Willie and Don singing behind a canned background.  What’s interesting about these collaborations is that Don Cherry clearly has a voice that is technically “better” than Willie’s, but Willie’s is more interesting, more memorable.  It’s hard to put a finger on why one voice is more interesting than another. 

“Augusta” is a paean to golf.  Which reminds me that yesterday as I was finishing Willie’s autobiography, it struck me why Willie is so obsessed with games like chess, dominoes, and golf.  For someone that is so “free” spirited in his personal life, he craves the absolute rule-bound nature of games like golf and chess.  It seems that even free spirits crave order and rules.  Interestingly, Willie spends most of his time playing these games, so he actually spends more time within the confines of circumscribed, rule-bound environments than he does being a free spirit.  He may sing and believe Sinatra’s “My Way,” but the thing about chess and golf is that you always do it golf’s way.  You can’t make up rules or break them and do it your way.  And we seem to crave environments where we can’t do it our way, where we don’t have to do it our way.  Willie’s vocals on this track make the cd worth buying, though the background sounds like synthesizer drums and strings.  Willie slows “One for the Road” (track three) way down.  The sax solo sounds canned, but this may be the only place to hear Willie interpret this song in such a mellow, laid-back way.  “When I’m gloomy, you simply gotta listen to me, till it’s talked away.”  I’m pretty sure Willie usually sings this in an upbeat manner (with Leon Russell).  “Red Sails in the Sunset” is another smart song selection for Willie.  It’s amazing that Willie has these hidden gem vocal performances scattered hither and yon on obscure almost-impossible-to-find albums.  So far, Willie has been on every track, which was not the case on “It’s Magic,” where Don Cherry has several solo performances.  I’m wishing Willie had recorded these songs solo with a legit sax player like Sonny Rollins or Joshua Redmon.  I wouldn’t have picked “Try a Little Tenderness” for Willie, but he finds something new in this song.  Unlike “It’s Magic,” I will need to re-visit this album to study Willie’s interpretations of songs that he may not have recorded anywhere else.  “Tangerine” (track six) didn’t do much for me, but Willie’s voice may be near its peak in 1995, so this album is worth owning as a study of Willie’s voice during this time period.  “Love You for Sentimental Reasons” gives further proof to this.  “Prisoner of Love” explores the need to escape love, something Willie has experienced again and again.  Willie sings, “I’m not free…my very life is in her keeping.”  Sounds like Petrarch again.  In his autobiography, Willie calls himself a troubadour, so the connection with Petrarch and the love poets makes sense.  “Tenderly” may be one of the best tracks on this album, closer to Stardust than the others, and it’s all Willie, no Don.  A real treasure that more folks should know about.  Don’s back with “Maybe You’ll Be There” (track ten).  This is the first song so far that doesn’t feature Willie at all.  Willie is also AWOL on “So Rare” (track eleven).  I’d actually like to hear Willie tackle this tune.  The album ends with another solo Don effort, “Don’t Go to Strangers.”  So all in all, it isn’t magic, but it’s better than “It’s Magic,” and despite it’s flaws, it’s worth owning.

The Gypsy (2001)

Can’t believe I’m just now discovering this album Willie recorded with jazz guitarist Jackie King.  It’s from that fertile period between 1996 and 2002 when Willie recorded so many of my favorite albums: Teatro (1998), Spirit (1996), Night and Day (1999), Me and the Drummer (2000), and Storytellers (1998).  That and the period 1971-1978 may be Willie’s peaks: Yesterday’s Wine (1971), Red-Headed Stranger (1975), and Stardust (1978).  It is fitting that I listen to this album after having just spent a good bit of time with Willie’s performance on Piano Jazz with Marian McPartland and Jackie King in 2002.  They clearly have chemistry.  I wouldn’t rank this as highly as Stardust or Night and Day, but it remains a hidden gem that more folks should know about.  The title song, “The Gypsy,” defines Willie’s whole life perfectly.  I just finished his autobiography today, and it makes clear that Willie came by his wanderlust honestly, from both of his parents.  The book has a jazz-like quality because he alternates chapters between his own version of how things happened and chapters titled “The Chorus,” where other important figures in his life give their takes on Willie.  You get a polyphonic, impressionistic feel for Willie’s life this way.  “The Nearness of You” on track two is purely instrumental.  Willie is playing Trigger and is accompanied only by electric guitar (Jackie King), acoustic bass (Andrew Higgins), electric bass (Jon Blondell), piano (Don Haas), and drums (Bob Scott).  Willie’s vocals on “Heart of a Clown” (track three) contain some inspired phrasings, though I think he has better recordings of this song.  On track four Jackie meanders around the standard “Once in Awhile” for almost seven minutes.  “Jealous Heart” (track five) may be one of Willie’s more inventive vocal performances.  It doesn’t have the clean, polished, perfect finish of the Stardust numbers, but you get the sense that Willie is challenging himself, reaching, extending.  He starts out so slow it almost seems as if his voice will come to a complete halt, but then about three minutes into the song, the piano picks up the tempo and the second half of the song takes off with all of the musicians contributing lively solos.  “Back Home in Indiana” (track six) returns to a purely instrumental setting.  Interestingly, ITUNES (or GraceNotes) labels the genre of this album “Easy Listening,” but the attentive listener will find it to be more adventurous than this label suggests.  It’s only easy if you aren’t listening.  There’s nothing easy about Jackie’s guitar work on “Back Home in Indiana.”  Clearly Willie is doing this album to help out an old friend, but I wonder how much these friend albums really help Willie’s friends.  I’ll need to compare this version of “My Window Faces South” (track seven) to others Willie has recorded, but this one doesn’t disappoint.  The song could be the title of Willie’s biography.  Willie could have written the line “I’m never frownin’ or down in the mouth.”  Despite all the cheatin’ and cryin’ songs Willie has written and sung over the years, he makes sure his own window faces south at all times.  A Panglossian outlaw.  We never knew outlaws could be optimistic till Willie showed us how.  Dark figures always looking on the bright side.  The instrumental “Cherokee” (track eight) confirms that this album is Stardust on speed.  Again, reading Willie’s bio helps you appreciate how fitting it is for Willie to record an album full of gypsies and Cherokees combined with clowns and windows facing south.  Willie is the paradoxically cheery Cherokee.  This may not be Willie’s best “San Antonio Rose” (track nine), but it stands out because of the spare setting.  Willie ends with an almost seven-minute long excursion into “Lover Come Back to Me” (track ten).  I should mention that I listened to this album two or three times through yesterday and then another time through today.  This is an album I will revisit often with pleasure.  It would be nice in a mix with Stardust, Night and Day, Moonlight Becomes You, and the recently released American Classic.              

It’s Been Rough and Rocky Travelin’: The Earliest Willie Nelson 1954-1963 [Disc 3]

12/28/2010

I listened to this disc twice through today (all 30 songs) while making Beef Daub Provencal. It’s a good disc to cut five pounds of raw meat to. I’ve just finished the Graeme Thomson bio and have just started Willie’s autobiography, so it is safe to say I am stewing in Willie Nelson music and lore. While my stew simmers for its final hour, I’ll see what strikes me on this third listen through the third disc of this Bear Family compilation of Willie’s earliest recordings. I have reviewed all of these songs previously when I reviewed The Complete Liberty recordings, and I seem to remember preferring the recordings from his second Liberty album. The songs on this disc come from sessions in 1963, and they have a smaller cast of musicians and a sparer setting.

“Right or Wrong” sounds like Randy Travis or George Strait from the late 1980s. I’m almost certain Randy Travis recorded this song on one of his early albums. Bobby Bruce’s up-tempo fiddle sets this song apart from other recordings. The yodeling at the end seems forced. It isn’t Willie. “Roly Poly” also opens with the speedy fiddle. There’s a jarring transition from two up-tempo Bob Wills-style Western Swing dance numbers to the moody, brooding ballads “Let Me Talk to You,” “The Things I Might Have Been,” and “The Way You See Me.” This captures perfectly the yin and yang of Willie’s musical repertoire. He can go as fast or as slow as you want him to. And he can switch speeds on a dime. On track six he picks up the tempo again with “Columbus Stockade Blues (version 1)” with Shirley Collie. It’s actually a slowed down version of this normally blistering crowd pleaser. Willie manages to enunciate words that other singers would slur. He seems to have a special ability to manipulate time. He is able to custom fit notes into bars. He measures out beats the way my wife’s Mississippi grandmother measured spices: one shake of this, two shakes of that. Willie sings to taste. His own taste. The raw banjo, the jazzy piano, and the Johnny Gimble-esque fiddle shine on these tracks. I like how the Bear Family puts Willie’s duets with Shirley together on this disc (as they did with Disc 2). Willie confirms in his autobiography that Shirley is the only person who could ever sing harmony with him. He says that she would anticipate where he was going. Sort of like shooting skeet. You have to lead the clay pigeon and shoot where it’s going to be, not where it is. She is the only one who could ever lead his phrasing and anticipate where he was going and end up in the same place. Jimmy Day’s steel guitar tries to save “You Took My Happy Away” from the strings and back-up singers, to no avail. Same with Roger Miller’s “Second Fiddle.” There are a half dozen violins listed for this track, but whoever has the solo redeems the rest of the string section, especially with the delicate flourish at the end. Willie pushes the limits of the meter with his phrasing even in an over-produced recording like this one. This isn’t one of my favorite versions of “Opportunity to Cry,” but it may be my favorite Willie song, so I covet every version I can find. Gene Garf’s piano stands out on this track and on “Lonely Little Mansion.” Hargus M. “Pig” Robbins takes over the piano for the April 25th session and the second version of “You Took My Happy Away.” The line “My sorry gets bigger each day” is vintage Willie. In Hank Cochran’s “Feed it a Memory” Willie sings, “I just feed it a memory to keep it alive.” Vintage Proust, vintage Fitzgerald. The next four tracks are from a November 20th session in which Willie sings other people’s songs: “I Hope So” (Shirley Collie), “This Cold War with You” (Floyd Tillman), “Blue Must Be the Color of the Blues (Jones-Williams), and “Seasons of My Heart” (George Jones). The back-up vocals and strings are toned down a bit, which gives Willie’s voice and Bill Purcell’s piano a bit more room to operate. Trumpets seem out of place on the last two of these recordings. “There’s a blue note in each song,” though, and Willie somehow finds the blue, the bruise, the pain, the hurt in even the most syrupy setting. “There are no seasons in my heart” and “my love for you will bloom eternally” are another way of saying “Funny How Time Slips Away.” “My tears like withered leaves will fall.” On November 21st Willie adds a flute to the mix. That may be “At the Bottom” of the list of instruments Willie should record with, but I’m sure it wasn’t his choice. I wish I could isolate Willie’s voice and Bill Purcell’s piano. I wonder if Garage Band or some other software would allow home users to do what Mickey Raphael did with “Naked Willie.” We could reverse engineer the songs and isolate Willie’s voice. “I’ll Walk Alone” may be the sparest song so far on this disk. Just Willie, piano, and flute with a bass behind them. This version of Fred Carter’s “River Boy” is equally spare. I started the day in bed listening to Neville Jason reading Proust’s Swann’s Way on tape. And then to hear Willie sing “nothin’ but a river boy.” The same social class issues Proust wrestles with through all six volumes of In Search of Lost Time. Memories and longing and always feeling outside of something. The next four tracks come from the same date in 1963, but a different session. Willie’s vocals are as good as they get on “Am I Blue,” but the do-wop singers are back. “Take Me As I Am (Or Let Me Go)” could be a Willie anthem, a honky tonk version of “Just as I Am.” “You’re trying to reshape me in a mold, love, in an image of someone you used to know.” But you can’t shape a shape-shifter like Willie. Willie channels Hank Williams on Hank’s “There’ll Be No Teardrops Tonight.” “If you think that you’re above me,” you got another thing coming. You can’t make me cry. I won’t let you hurt me. Then Willie does Hank Thompson’s “Tomorrow Night.” “You said tomorrow night that you might be able to keep this rendezvous with me at eight,” but tomorrow never comes. I’m beginning to appreciate Willie’s elocution, which his grandparents hammered into him. It adds seriousness and sincerity to every lyric. Not sure why Bear Family put these two alternate versions of “Columbus Stockade Blues” at the end of this set when they were recorded at the same time as the version on track 6. All of the versions are keepers. Maybe they thought listeners would not enjoy hearing the same song three times in a row. I wish Willie had recorded more with Shirley (and with Bobby Bruce and Gene Garf). The snappy snare drummer motors all three versions along as well. The disc ends with four tracks that were overdubbed in 1969. Not sure why they overdubbed these. “You Wouldn’t Even Cross the Street” is another “Funny How Time Slips Away” song. I think I prefer the version of “River Boy” on track 20. Willie’s vocals are more front and center in the version on track 20. The overdubbed version puts Willie’s voice in the background and brings the strings up front. The overdubbed version of “At the Bottom” nixes the flute that was on track 18, which is a plus. Willie’s always better at the bottom. “Better at the Bottom” could be his motto. You have nothing to fear when you’ve already gone to the dogs. Where else can you go? The overdubbed version of “I Hope So” tones the back-up singers way down to a faint whisper. “Happiness is sometimes hard for hearts to cling to” indeed. “You say your heart will never break.” Famous last words. Imagine an unbreakable heart. Would we want one if we could have one?

The Monument Recordings (1964)

According to Graeme Thomson, Willie left Liberty Records in 1964 and recorded two sessions with Monument. Like the Pamper demos and recordings, these songs do not show up on the major compilations that I have found except for one song: “I Never Cared for You,” which shows up on The Essential Willie Nelson (Disc One). Thomson calls this Willie’s “most distinctive and successful recording of the entire 60s” (page 64). If this is true, why does no one include it in their compilations? And what of the rest of the Monument recordings? Fred Foster produced a session on July 6, 1964. Willie recorded three songs. One of which was “”(There’ll Be) Someone Waiting For You.” I haven’t found a recording of this yet. Three weeks later, Foster produced another session with a much smaller band and fewer bells and whistles. “I Never Cared For You” was recorded in that session, but I have no idea what other recordings were made at that time. Seems like someone needs to release these babies or tell me where I can find them.

It’s Been Rough and Rocky Travelin’: The Earliest Willie Nelson 1954-1963 [Disc 2]

12/22/2010

All of the songs on this disc can also be found on the two-disc compilation titled Willie Nelson: The Early Years: The Complete Liberty Recordings (Plus More). The mixing or re-mixing is probably different, but I would have to do a more careful side-by-side listen to see which is better. Both compilations come with excellent liner notes, but it is a bit confusing because the roughly 60 songs are sequenced in a very different order in each collection. Someday I’ll have to sit down and compare the liner notes and try to discern the rhyme or reason for the way the two compilations have arranged essentially the same material. I’m also not sure why the Pamper Recordings, that only seem to be on Crazy: The Demo Sessions, don’t appear on either of these collections. Perhaps they couldn’t get the permissions, or perhaps their status as demos set them apart from these other “official” recordings. Someday the ultimate Willie Box Set will be released on ITUNES like the Beatles catalog, but to much less fanfare, and it will be MUCH bigger. It took Willie 15 albums just to get warmed up and figure out who the heck he was.

See my blogs on The Early Years for more details on these recordings, but I’ll just hit a few highlights this time through. I did finally read through the extensive liner notes (a book, really) from It’s Been Rough and Rocky Travelin’, and the Bear Family seems to group their comments by recording sessions and dates.

I’m also working my way through Graeme Thomson’s Willie Nelson: The Outlaw, so I’ll open with a quotation he attributes to Willie:

“I had to stop thinking that I had a home” (page 8).

For Willie, from the very beginning, every part seems to be “the part where I cry.” In fact, life is the part where we cry. A Buddhist view. “Touch me and you’ll know how you’d feel with the blues.” Yet you can’t touch Willie. He won’t let you. To touch the untouchable. To touch the essence of loss and emptiness. Like touching a black hole. Maybe the “Record Man” can touch what can’t be touched in any other way. Is that what art and radio does for all of us? Fills the empty air between lost souls? In “Go Away,” Willie pushes away the very thing he longs for in “Mr. Record Man.” Barking to get out, barking to get in. “I feel much better when you’re gone.” I feel much better when I feel bad. When I’m with you, I miss missing you. Now there’s a song Willie should sing. “I Miss Missing You.” “The Waiting Time” produces all the art there ever was. The hurting time, the parting time. The arting time. Art fills the mundane parts of life, which are about 90% of the time, like the dark matter in the universe. Only 10% is visible matter. “Where My House Lives” describes Willie’s sentiments quoted at the start of this blog: “I had to stop thinking that I had a home.” So he started singing about home instead. You sing about what you can’t think about. Is that what art does? It allows you to do something with the things you can’t think about? “Country Willie” gets at the rural/urban tension, the town and gown. “How Long is Forever” and “Funny How Time Slips Away” may be Willie’s defining songs. Willie’s touchstones, his madeleines. “Three Days” are the three parts where Willie cries, at the beginning, middle, and end. I guess I am just connecting the dots between his songs. Weaving together his albums like panels into a larger quilt. He has so many albums, that it is hard (even, perhaps especially, for him, I suspect) to see the forest for the trees. Willie doesn’t yodel very often, but he does a little Hank Williams on this recording. He sounds like he’s trying to sound like someone else, which he rarely does. The irony of syrupy doo-wop singers crooning in the background of a song called “Darkness on the Face of the Earth” strikes me anew upon this listen. Are these supposed to be the heavenly choir of angels singing as he dies of a heartbreak? George Jones’s voice was hoppy enough to cut through this syrup (like a double IPA) and still sound sad, but Willie’s not sad enough. “One Step Beyond” stands out this time. Not sure why. “Just one step beyond caring anymore.” One step beyond the blues. One step ahead of suffering. Can we really outrun pain? Willie isn’t really a Buddhist, though, because he doesn’t want to escape this life to escape suffering, he just wants to outrun it, stay one step ahead, so he can still enjoy the thrill of the chase. Like his first wife throwing pots at his head. “Undo the Right” is a Manichean, yin-yang kind of song. Country music is about finding the pain, finding the catch in the throat, in the note, that will perfectly reflect, embody the physical pain. Same with the blues. Towards the end of “Undo the Right” you hear Willie searching for that inflection, that phrasing that will somehow be more honest, more true. “Crazy” is track 13 on this disc. A bit ironic since it has been the luckiest song Willie ever wrote. The background singers cheapen the song, but Willie’s phrasing still intrigues on this classic recording. It’s crazy to try to love in a fleeting, ephemeral world. Crazy to put down roots, crazy to long for something lasting. Like running up the down escalator. Why do we do it? This string of recordings—Crazy, Funny, Hello Walls—is on a half dozen compilations. The liner notes indicate that Willie recorded his most famous stretch of songs in a short burst of creativity which emerged from a uniquely poignant, painful time in his life. And he has spent the next 50 or so years re-working and re-interpreting this same material. The way the monsters in Monsters, Inc. lived off the canned screams of children, Willie has bottled some pain from 1960 and made it last for 50 years, like a batch of yeast for friendship bread past down through the generations. Willie hits the word “time” with a wah-wah pedal in his voice: tie-ai-ime. Then he personifies everything, the pathetic fallacy that all of nature feels his pain. This only happens when life hits us so intensely, so for Willie it was 1960 or so. It seems sappy and sentimental to folks who aren’t in the throes of it, and yet we buy it up and listen to it on lonely drives in the car across the desolate plains of our empty lives. Okay, that’s spreading it a bit thick, but I know what I mean. “Wake Me When It’s Over” begs to be re-mixed without the back-up vocals. To desire to sleep through the pain of life is to desire to sleep through life itself. Life is the pain. Life without pain is not life. It is Brave New World, not Hamlet or Keats, who are banned in utopia. Soma is the only way to avoid pain, which is what marijuana is to Willie, I guess. Then we have a string of duets with Willie’s second wife, Shirley Collie, the only person who could ever truly sing harmony with Willie. I’ve listened to pretty much everything he’s ever recorded multiple times, so I feel pretty confident in asserting that no one has ever been able to follow Willie’s phrasing step for step. All duet partners end up singing polyphonically with Willie, an interesting but distinct vocal line weaving in and out of Willie’s, but not a true homophonic duet. She may be the only person who could ever play Garfunkel to Willie’s Simon. But like Simon, Willie had to ditch his Garfunkel and move on. “Our Chain of Love” cannot last long indeed. I’d like to hear Willie try “Is This My Destiny” again. “The grave would be escape for me from this my destiny.” “Willingly” gets at Willie’s will. The role of free will in the face of fate. Does it matter what we will if time slips away regardless? I like how the Bear Family puts all four duets with Shirley Collie next to each other. These are unique recordings in Willie’s oeuvre, and they deserve special attention. He doesn’t sing like this anywhere else. I’m not sure he ever really tries to sing with someone else the way he tries to sing with Shirley. “There Goes a Man” shows Willie’s ability to empathize, to detach from himself and see the other side, to see “both sides now.” It’s a maddening, paralyzing, Hamlet-like empathy. It’s Keats’ negative capability. “There’s Gonna Be Love” raises the question, is Willie Martin or Candide? Maybe both. Maybe we are all both. Maybe that’s the human condition, that we can’t pick one or the other, yet we perpetually yearn to do so. “You Wouldn’t Even Cross the Street to Say Goodbye” is “Funny How Time Slips Away” and “How Long is Forever This Time” all wrapped into one. The guitar work on this second version of “How long is Forever” stands out. And Willie holds the space after “forever” for what seems like forever. This song could be a textbook for how Willie works. How he uses his phrasing to build tension. He doesn’t break meter, but he bends it almost to the breaking point. And listeners break a sweat feeling that he just might break it this time. It takes a certain skill, a certain discipline to appreciate Willie’s vocals on these recordings. Despite the dreadful setting, he’s doing interesting things with his phrasing at every turn. “Take My Word” could be an up-tempo crowd pleaser today if Willie wanted to dust it off and breath some new life into it. Willie stretches the spaces in “The Last Letter” to the last possible moment. I’m a sucker for this soulful, bluesy rendition of “Home Motel.” This could be another funky crowd-pleaser with the right band behind it. Version two of “Take My Word” blows the other out of the water speed-wise. Could be one of Willie’s fastest tunes. Begs to be re-done.

So maybe each time I listen to the same recordings and try to capture them, it’s like a photograph of the same object at a different time of day, in different weather. You see something different each time. Or like different takes of the same song. Some are better than others. Maybe it’s good to take several stabs. Stabs seems especially apt. Stabs at the right word to pin down the feeling, because words can never truly pin down feelings like butterflies behind glass. Each word is an essay, an attempt.

And maybe non-fiction is writing with training wheels. Or a coloring book. You have the content, the outline, so all you have to do is fill it in, color it. But the pressure of pure invention from a blank page, which is too overwhelming for all but the poet or novelist, is somewhat lessened for the historian or nonfiction writer. There is still room for creativity and invention, the same way Willie can be creative and inventive while interpreting other people’s songs just as easily as he can with his own. But it doesn’t have to be written from the same place of desperation.

Willie on Piano Jazz with Marian McPartland (2002)

12/21/2010

Willie on Piano Jazz with Marian McPartland (2002)

I have to find a way to get a copy of this show. Not sure why Willie hasn’t released this as a CD or a download. Right now you can stream it here:

http://www.npr.org/2010/11/24/131571288/willie-nelson-on-piano-jazz

I just heard the show for the first time a few weeks ago, but it was originally recorded in 2002. Willie plays with Marian and Jackie King. Somehow I missed Willie’s recording with Jackie King called “The Gypsy.” I just ordered it today, so I’ll be reviewing it soon. Jackie says during the interview that this album is recorded on his label, Indigo Moon. Apparently this show was in conjunction with the release of this album.

Willie opens with “Heart of a Clown.” Then he plays “The Gypsy.” I have been playing this show over and over and over. It ranks right up there with Stardust in my mind. Marian is the perfect partner for Willie. He should do an album with her. She seems to be a match for his quirky phrasing. Willie tells a great anecdote about singing Bob Wills’ classic tune “San Antonio Rose” with Bob Wills, but when Willie sang it, Bob couldn’t jump in with his usual “ah-ha” because Willie would still be singing. When Willie takes someone else’s song, he makes it his own, so much so that the author himself cannot sing it with him. Then Willie does a song from Milk Cow Blues, which he says is his first true blues album. Willie says he heard “Milk Cow Blues” from Bob Wills and the Texas Cowboys. Willie says he didn’t even know it was blues. Willie was pre-genres. He played gospel and blues and country and jazz and pop before he knew what they were, which is why he seems to defy categories to this day. The first song Willie ever learned was “Amazing Grace” and “Just as I Am.” Fiddle player Johnny Gimble told Willie there are only two songs: “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the blues. Willie plays “Rainy Day Blues” next. Willie’s vocals are as good as they get. 2002 is a vintage year for Willie’s vocals. So many of my favorite Willie albums come from about 1998-2002. Willie live in a radio studio with just a piano and a guitar is about as perfect a setting for his vocals as you can find. Willie and Marian talk about Django Reinhardt. Johnny Gimble gave Willie a Django record when Willie was 20 years old. Willie realized at that time that Bob Wills and Willie’s dad had been influenced by Django. Marian, of course, knew Django. She played with him in Paris during the liberation after World War II. So they go into “Nuages,” a Django tune. Jackie’s solo on “Nuages” is brilliant, and Willie and Marian work in around him with piano and acoustic guitar. From this they go into “All of Me.” Jackie and Marian have lovely solos on this song. Willie chuckles during Jackie’s and then tells Marian to “play it.” And she does. Willie follows them with a solo of his own on Trigger while the others comp. The line “You took the part that once was my heart so why not take all of me” reminds me of the lyrics for “Half a Man.” I could add this to my ideas for Willie albums based on recurring themes. One is houses, mansions, homes. Another is body parts. Both are examples of incarnation, how the physical, the carnal, the tangible strives to capture, to literally “embody,” the ineffable, the spiritual, the transcendent. Art is always a grasping for this impossible task. Always a beautiful failure. “I can’t stop smiling,” Mariane says after this song, and I find myself smiling, too. Marian asks Willie, “Who were your many influences on guitar?” He replies, “Chet Atkins, Grady Martin, Hank Garland, Johnny Smith.” Next they play “Stardust.” A bass player, Gary Mezzerape, is also accompanying Jackie, Willie, and Marian, so we have a quartet in the studio for this recording. “My consolation is in the stardust of a song.” Willie’s music is a consolation, like Alan Gurganus’ short story “Reassurance,” about Walt Whitman’s work as a nurse during the civil war. “The memory of love’s refrain.” It’s Proust all over again. Our memory is a refrain. Marian says after this song that, “Nobody should try to do that.” Nobody should try to play and sing like Willie. Don’t try this at home, kids. Jackie apparently wrote the chords for “The Great Divide,” and Willie put words to it. They sing this, spare as a Cormac McCarthy landscape. I’m reading the novels of McCarthy now, starting with the border trilogy, and it seems that the bleak landscape resonates with Willie’s music. A boy traveling alone with a wolf across the border to Mexico. Willie’s music, too, crosses the borders of culture and genre. I’ve probably listened to this show a dozen times now, and I think it may rank as one of Willie’s untenable top ten performances. “The Great Divide” album came out in 2002 as well. As many times as I have heard this song, it’s crazy, but this version of “Crazy” just gave me the chills. Marian says on the webpage that Willie was so into this session that he invited Marian to be his special guest at Irving Plaza that night, and they played several duets. Only Willie could invite some 80-year-old lady on stage and maintain his macho cowboy image. Who else could sing the testosterone-infused “Beer for My Horses” with Toby Keith and then play a tender jazz ballad with Marian McPartland? And who else could see no contradiction? Willie is the ultimate in negative capability. Willie and Marian seem to laugh together more than any other guests I have heard on her show. They seem to be soul mates. It is also interesting how Willie seems to be serving as the hub for all of my interests: Proust, Cormac McCarthy, Marian McPartland, Walt Whitman, and neuroscience. They end with the Proustian “They’ll Never Be Another You.” There will never be another Daisy or Odette who can live up to the memory the likes of Willie, Fitzgerald, and Proust can conjure with their art and their imaginations. This may be my favorite from the entire set. I can’t believe Willie just walks into the studio and throws off a performance like this during the day and then goes on to play a show that night. Such causal, offhand brilliance. Like nature itself.