Willie Nelson celebrates his birthday with the release of a new album, God’s Problem Child. One of the new tracks on the album is “Still Not Dead.”
Nelson was born in Abbott, Texas on April 29, 1933 (although his birth certificate lists April 30 as his birth date). Now in his 80’s, Nelson’s voice, phrasing, and guitar playing still combine for some wonderful songs.
God’s Problem Child includes songs like “He Won’t Ever Be Gone,” a tribute to Merle Haggard written by Gary Nicholson. The first single, “Still Not Dead,” is a fun laugh at mortality by a man often rumored to be dead. Below is the official video for “Still Not Dead.”
The album is full of solid songs that sound like classic Willie. NPR describes the new album as Willie Nelson reflecting “on this season of his life with a mischievousness and equanimity that already feels familiar coming from him.” God’s Problem Child hits stores and the Internet on April 28, 2017.
What is your favorite Willie Nelson song? Leave your two cents in the comments.
In what has become an annual tradition on Chimesfreedom, we wish a happy birthday this week to Willie Nelson, who was born in Abbott, Texas late at night on April 29, 1933. Due to the late hour, the birth was not officially recorded until the next day and his birthday is sometimes reported as April 30. So, Nelson celebrates his birthday on both dates. One of his recordings I love is his wonderful interpretation of Guy Clark’s “Desperados Waiting For a Train.”
The song “Desperados Waiting For a Train” combines themes of memory, aging, history, and mortality. The singer recounts being friend with an old man when he was a boy.
The singer reports how the old man told him about his youthful days as a drifter working on oil wells. And the young man watches the old man get older. Anyone who as a child has been close to an elderly person or a grandparent may recognize the relationship and admiration. The singer sums it up, “Well to me he was a hero of this country.”
One of the reasons the lyrics ring so true is that Clark based the story on someone he knew. As he explained in a 2011 interview, “It’s a true song about someone in my life – I mean, you couldn’t have made that up. . . . It was about a guy who was like my grandfather.” Clark also recounted how he knew he would write about the man almost as soon as he started writing songs.
Versions of “Desperados Waiting For a Train”
There are several excellent recordings of “Desperados Waiting For a Train.” Guy Clark made a beautiful recording of it, including some live versions. Jerry Jeff Walker released the first recording of the song on his 1973 album Viva Terlingua. Actor Slim Pickens released his own version, where he reads the lyrics like poem over the music.
Willie Nelson took part in an earlier version recorded with Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson as the Highwaymen. Their version that appeared on the super group’s album Highwayman was a top 20 hit when released as a single in 1985.
The more recent version by Nelson alone appeared on a wonderful Guy Clark tribute album, This One’s For Him (2010). At the time, Nelson, like the old man in the song, was “pushin’ eighty.” This version of the singer as an older man looking back on his youthful encounter with old age and death adds a deeper layer to the classic song. Check it out.
For some additional Willie, the Larry King Now website features a recent episode where Larry King interviewed Nelson about music, marijuana, politics, and aging.
Happy birthday Willie, and thanks for the presents to us.
What Willie Nelson song are you playing for his birthday? Leave your two cents in the comments.
Eighty years ago this week, Willie Hugh Nelson was born on April 29, 1933 in Abbott, Texas. Nelson is still going strong making music, and he using his annual birthday concert to benefit the West, Texas volunteer fire department that was affected by the recent fertilizer plant explosion that killed fourteen people and injured many others.
We have highlighted some of Nelson’s songs in other posts, and the man has such a range it is hard to select one song to celebrate the special occasion. So here are several spanning the birthday boy’s career.
Here is some early Willie Nelson from before the long hair and the beard. In this video, he performs a medley of songs at the Grand Ole Opry. One of the songs he performs is “Night Life,” which he wrote and which became a hit for Ray Price. Nelson also played bass for a time in Price’s band. Nelson also performs part of his classic ‘Crazy,” which of course was a big hit for Patsy Cline.
Around 1970, Nelson left Nashville and moved back to Texas, where he became an “outlaw.” Here in this performance from 1974, Nelson performs “Good-Hearted Woman,” which he wrote and recorded with Waylon Jennings.
Here is a 1975 performance of “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.” The song was written by Fred Rose, but the song is forever linked to Willie Nelson after he covered the song on his great concept album, Red-Headed Stranger (1975).
Here is one you might have missed, a more recent song from Nelson. Nelson is a great interpreter of a range of styles and songwriters, which he shows here in a cover of “Gravedigger,” a Dave Matthews song. The song appeared on Nelson’s 2008 album Moment of Forever.
Finally, here is something even more recent showing Nelson’s sense of humor. Conan O’Brien recently showed Willie Nelson’s audition tape for the role of Gandalf in Hobbit 2. Of course, there is some of Nelson’s pot humor as well as a short rendition of “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Orcs.”
Whether you like early Willie, Outlaw Willie, or modern Willie, put on some music today.
What is your favorite Willie Nelson song? Leave your two cents in the comments.
In 1984, Willie Nelson and Ray Charles released the duet, “Seven Spanish Angels,” a Western saga telling a tragic story of two lovers and the mysterious seven Spanish Angels.
Willie Nelson was born in Abbott, Texas on April 29, 1933. In 2012 a statute of Willie was unveiled in Austin, but instead of choosing his birthday, organizers chose the appropriate date of April 20 at 4:20 p.m. for the man who released an album that features a song with Snoop Dogg called, “Roll Me Up And Smoke Me When I Die.” Today we consider another one of his great collaborations, this one with Ray Charles singing “Seven Spanish Angels.”
The songwriters wrote the song in a style reminiscent of Marty Robbins’s “El Paso.” But since Robbins had passed away, reportedly they turned to Willie Nelson. And, in at least one version of the story, after Nelson made a demo of “Seven Spanish Angels,” producer Billy Sherill suggested they also enlist Ray Charles in a duet. (But see video below for a slightly different version of events.)
The duet was released as a single in November 1984 and originally appeared on Nelson’s album, Half Nelson (1985) and on Charles’s album, Friendship (1984). Although Charles had several successful country recordings including his great album Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, this song was his most successful single.
I was surprised to learn that this song was so successful for Charles, as it is not the first country recording I think of when I think of Charles. But it is an excellent one.
In the video below, contrary to the Wikipedia story that Nelson’s producer enlisted Ray Charles after Nelson already had made a recording of the song, Nelson says here that Charles brought the song to him. Nelson adds that “it is going to be a phonograph record pretty soon.”
The Song’s Story and Who Are the Seven Spanish Angels?
Like Willie Nelson’s great recording of Townes Van Zandt’s “Pancho & Lefty” with Merle Haggard, “Seven Spanish Angels,” written by Troy Seals and Eddie Setser, recounts the story of an outlaw in Mexico. Instead of being about two men, though “Seven Spanish Angels” tells the story of an outlaw and his girlfriend. But the song takes a more tragic turn than the death of the outlaw.
After the outlaw is killed in a gunfight with a posse, the woman exclaims, “Father, please forgive me; I can’t make it without my man.” Then she picked up his rifle, knowing it is empty, and points it at the men who then shoot and kill her. The Seven Spanish Angels in the song “pray for the lovers in the valley of the guns.” When the smoke cleared, “seven Spanish angels took another angel home.”
The line about “another angel” at the end always made me wonder, does that mean the Seven Spanish Angels left the woman’s boyfriend behind? But there is another way to read the chorus because it repeats throughout the song, including after the first verse.
He looked down into her brown eyes, And said “Say a prayer for me;” She threw her arms around him, Whispered “God will keep us free;” They could hear the riders comin’, He said “This is my last fight; If they take me back to Texas, They won’t take me back alive.”
The outlaw does not clearly die in the first verse but it is followed by the chorus, which includes the line “And seven Spanish Angels / Took another angel home.” So the chorus at that point tells us the outlaw died and the seven Spanish Angels took him “home.” Then, after the verse about the girlfriend dying, the chorus, which is repeated, is just referring to the angels taking her “home.”
Such a reading is also consistent with a verse written for the song that was omitted in the Nelson-Charles version: “Now the people in the valley swear/ That when the moon’s just right,/ They see the Texan and his woman/ Ride across the clouds at night.” That verse tells us the lovers are still together after death. But the producer of the recording, Billy Sherrill apparently opted to omit that verse as it made the song too long.
And so, due to time constraints, we did not get to see the lovers happy again. Although maybe it was enough to know they had gone off with the seven Spanish Angels.
But who are the seven Spanish Angels? Some have said they signify “not just celestial figures, but also a collective yearning for salvation and solace.” Others have focused on the number seven and used the Bible to conclude they are a “reference to the seven angels from the Book of Revelation, whom bear witness to the end times.” Still others have reasoned that since angels have no nationality, the “Spanish” in the description means the seven Spanish Angels is a “reference to the members of the posse sent in pursuit of the couple.”
But the ambiguity of the meaning of “Seven Spanish Angels” may be intentional and there is no one definitive meaning. Reportedly, songwriter Eddie Setser came up with the title before writing the song. Thus, it was maybe the sound of the mysterious title that first attracted them to creating the story. And there are other ambiguities in the song, as we are left wondering why the man was being pursued to be taken back to Texas. We assume he is an outlaw, but we do not even know that for sure.
The only certainty we end up with is that love is eternal. And that is not a bad message for a song. And that is the story behind the song. What do you think happened at the end of “Seven Spanish Angels”? Leave your two cents in the comments.
We celebrate the birthday of Willie Nelson’s, who was born during the final minutes of April 29, 1933 (so that his birthday is sometimes reported as April 30) in Abbott, Texas. One of my favorite Willie Nelson CDs is Across the Borderline, which was produced by Don Was. The CD was released in 1993, during a traumatic period in Nelson’s life, a few years after his troubles with the IRS had come to a head. AllMusic rates the album highly and refers to it as an album surveying two decades of popular music by a wide variety of music writers. There are a number of guests on the CD, including Bob Dylan singing with Nelson on “Heartland,” a song the two legends wrote together. Despite the variety, though, there is a cohesion in the CD as the theme of loss weaves throughout the songs.
Every song on the album is excellent, but standouts include the cover of two Paul Simon songs, “American Tune” and “Graceland.” I cannot find an article about the background behind “Graceland” (so don’t quote me), but I recall Paul Simon saying in an interview that he had always wanted Nelson to sing “Graceland” ever since he wrote it. Simon, who ended up playing guitar and producing the Nelson version, had to persuade Nelson to record “Graceland.” Nelson finally agreed as he eventually saw the meaning underlying the song.
While I love Paul Simon’s version, Nelson’s voice really works well on the song, as he develops the aching notes of loss and sadness throughout the tune. When I hear Simon’s version, I think of the lyrics about the human trampoline bouncing into Graceland. But in Nelson’s version, I learned to see the loss in lines such as, “She comes back to tell me she’s gone/ As if I didn’t know that. . . As if I’d never noticed / The way she brushed her hair from her forehead.”
Throughout the album Across the Borderline and its themes surrounding life’s pain and wreckage, there are moments of hope. The album ends with “Still is Still Moving to Me,” a Nelson original that invokes Eastern and taoist beliefs in keeping on and accepting. Similarly, the song “Graceland” ends with hope out of the loss: “Maybe I’ve a reason to believe / We all will be received / In Graceland.”
The recording of the song on Across the Borderline is one of those rare moments when two musical geniuses are able to take what was already an outstanding song and make it powerfully relevant to a new singer. On the album, Nelson does all the singing, but in this version below, the two come together for a live performance to sing “Graceland” together. It is a a nice way to celebrate Nelson’s birthday today.
. Actor Slim Pickens released 
was a top 20 hit when released as a single in 1985.
We celebrate the birthday of 
beliefs in keeping on and accepting. Similarly, the song “Graceland” ends with hope out of the loss: “Maybe I’ve a reason to believe / We all will be received / In Graceland.”