By 1972 Nelson had quit Nashville and moved to Austin, where he noticed that young rock fans were turned on by honky-tonk and folk. (His way had been prepared, in part, by friend and colleague Johnny Cash’s eclectic 1970s TV show, showcasing the Man in Black, who had been performing at folk-music festivals for years, with folk-revival stars from Dylan to the Carter family.) Shrewdly, Nelson resurrected the country-folk-rock style that Nashville had rejected, enhanced by his lengthening hair, cowboy-Indian duds and hippie-crossover ideas. His old Music Row pals thought he’d killed what was left of his career. In fact, he had finally found his audience, post-1960s types who thought rock was too corporate and responded to Guthrie-esque storytelling minus the whiny self-indulgence of James Taylor, Carly Simon and Carole King–the same crowd Emmylou Harris would wow and Bruce Springsteen would tap with Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom Joad.
After an abortive stab at his own indie label, Nelson recorded with Atlantic, by then a major label that had mostly jettisoned r&b and jazz for the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. With soul-music producer Arif Mardin and his own band (including pianist Leon Russell), Nelson cut killers like “Shotgun Willie,” which crossed funky soul back into country and rock, laced with the introspective touches and wry phrase-turnings that Nashville had scorned. In 1974, “Bloody Mary Morning,” a Texas-swing smoothie with characteristic witty lines (“It’s a bloody Mary morning baby left me without warning sometime in the night”), hit No. 14 on the country charts. At 41, Willie Nelson was finally hitting his stride.
One of my Austin-based colleagues comments with bemused affection, “Willie is the Buddha. He’s also a duet whore.” In terms of consistent quality, he’s right, but Nelson’s duets, which have included outings with Charles, Cash and Dylan as well as U2 and Julio Iglesias, if nothing else do reveal Nelson’s prismatic musical curiosity. Two classics (“Good Hearted Woman” and “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys”) boast Waylon Jennings, that other Outlaw who, with Nelson, launched the 1970s back-to-the-roots country movement, its revisionist rock, rockabilly and folk ingredients contrasting sharply with contemporary countrypolitan productions. Merle Haggard, another perpetual Nashville outsider, shows up for Townes Van Zandt’s evocative border ballad “Pancho and Lefty,” where Nelson’s nuance nicely plays off Haggard’s swagger while making clear that Haggard, whose band, the Strangers, routinely improvises, is among the few country singers whose jazzy phrasing–the dancing rhythms that infiltrated the best American singing after Louis Armstrong–compares to Nelson’s.