Willie Hugh Nelson Born on April 30, 1933, in Fort Worth, Texas, USA Nelson is an American songwriter and guitarist and one of the most popular country music singers of the late 20th century.
Nelson He learned to play the guitar with his grandfather, and at the age of 10 he was already playing in the local dances. He served in the United States Air Force before becoming a disc jockey in Texas, Oregon, and California during the 1950s. He also performed in public and wrote songs. By 1961, he was residing in Nashville, Tennessee, and was playing bass in Ray Price’s band. Price was one of the first of dozens of popular country and rhythm-and-blues singers to achieve hits with Nelson’s tunes from the 1960s, including classics. “Hello Walls“,”Night life“,”Funny How Time Slips Away“and, the most famous,”Crazy“. Conversely, Nelson she achieved only modest success as a singer in that decade.
In the early 1970s, he returned to Texas and, with Waylon Jennings, spearheaded the country music movement known as Outlaw music. Starting with the narrative album Red Headed Stranger (1975), which featured the hit song “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain“, he became one of the most popular artists in country music in general. Performances by Nelson They had a unique sound, and their relaxed singing style and string guitar were the most distinctive elements. Unusual for a country album, songs by Hoagy Carmichael, Irving Berlin, and other major popular songwriters formed its Stardust (1978), which eventually sold more than five million copies in the United States.
Nelson found more success in the crossover with the album Always on my mind (1982) and the single “To all the girls that I’ve loved before“(1984), a duet with Julio Iglesias. After making his acting debut in The Electric Horseman (1979), Nelson appeared in movies like Honeysuckle rose (1980), which introduced what would become their title track, “On the Road Again“, Y Red Headed Stranger (1986), a drama based on his album.
In 1990, the Internal Revenue Service, claiming that Nelson owed $ 16.7 million in unpaid taxes, seized his assets. To raise funds, he recorded the album The IRS Tapes: Who’ll Buy My Memories (1991), which was initially only available via phone order, but sold in stores beginning in 1992. Despite this setback, he continued to record at a prolific pace into the 21st century. His later albums included Across the Borderline (1993) and Reggae Tinged Countryman (2005).
As the years went by Nelson earned the place of a respected musician, his recordings increasingly focused on traditional songs and covers. Among them were Heroes (2012); Let’s face the music and the dance (2013), a collection of standards; To all the girls … (2013), a series of duets with female singers; Y Summertime (2016), a set of songs by George Gershwin. In 2014, it launched Band of brothers, which comprised largely new material, and Willie’s Stash, Vol. 1: December Day, the first in a series of releases from their vast catalog of recordings. The last album focused on his collaborations with his sister and pianist, Bobbie. Later he published two collections of original meditations on mortality, God’s Problem Child (2017) and Last man standing (2018). Throughout his career, he recorded with dozens of other singers and released album collaborations with musicians such as Jennings, Merle Haggard, and jazz trumpeter, Wynton Marsalis. He received several Grammy Awards.
Besides his own career, Nelson produced the annual Fourth of July country music festival in Texas and elsewhere, and in 1985 co-founded Farm aid, which organized festivals to raise funds for farmers. Nelson was a marijuana connoisseur and enthusiast and, after some states legalized the sale and purchase of the drug, he launched in 2015, a marijuana supply company, the Willie’s Reserve. He wrote several memoirs (with co-authors), including Willie: An Autobiography (1988), Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die: Musings from the Road (2012), and It’s a Long Story: My Life (2015).
Nelson he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1993. He accepted the Kennedy Center Honor in 1998, and in 2015 he received the Gershwin Award for Popular Song from the Library of Congress.