Willie Nelson – Red Headed Stranger
The language of myth is indirect, metaphorical, and narrative in structure….The movement of mythic narrative, like that of any story, implies a theory of cause-and-effect, a theory of history; but these implications are only rarely articulated as objects of criticism, since their operation is masked by the traditional form of the narrative, its conformity to habits of thought, generic conventions, and literary expectations so deeply ingrained that we are unconscious of them.
— Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment
Example: Willie’s Nashville home burned down, so he went back to Texas.
Which is true; those things did actually happen. It’s just one of the irresistibly punchy metaphors within the larger myth of Willie Nelson: his disaffected departure from Music City as the first step toward his triumphant turn as country-rock outlaw king, first of Austin, then of America. This history pivots on Red Headed Stranger, and a conductivity of myth that helped make it the first million-selling country album ever.
Few individuals were as respected by their industry peers as was Willie Nelson in 1960s Nashville. He was part of a rising underclass of songwriters (along with such notables as Harlan Howard, Roger Miller, and Hank Cochran) introducing new levels of complexity and realism into country music. His songs had become monster hits for stars such as Faron Young (“Hello Walls”), Patsy Cline (“Crazy”) and Ray Price (“Night Life”); he also had a steady gig playing bass in Price’s band (quickly teaching himself right after the offer was tendered).
He was making good money, but his solo recording career was going nowhere fast; his jazz-inflected vocal phrasing and his penchant for experimenting with non-country material put him squarely outside the restrictive Nashville hitmaking system’s ability to market him.
But in Texas, they understood. Strands of divergent music woven into the mix weren’t exactly news on the Bob Wills dancehall circuit. Willie had maintained his Texas connections, touring there periodically into the ’70s, when he noticed an emerging audience: younger fans, raised on rock ‘n’ roll but newly appreciative of their elders’ roots music, its hip quotient imparted by the folk and blues revivals. Ground zero of this country-rock commingling was Austin. Willie’s appearances at Armadillo World Headquarters in its early years, along with his soon-to-be-massive July Fourth picnics, cemented his status as a counterculture icon, at least in Texas.
Thanks to this new constituency (itself a link to increasing coverage in the rock press), his records began to sell. His adventurous LPs for the country division of Atlantic Records (Shotgun Willie and Phases And Stages, the latter a concept album detailing both sides of a broken marriage) became his best-selling albums ever. Then Atlantic unceremoniously folded the division.
Rising national star Willie Nelson was without a label — and the timing couldn’t have been better. For the first time in his career, Willie was in a position to ask for, and get, complete artistic control over his next record.
He responded with a masterstroke: Red Headed Stranger. It was another concept album, a song cycle with recurring sonic and lyric motifs, devices that were all the rage in the rock world of the mid-’70s. The opening chords, rolling into Willie’s “Time Of The Preacher” theme, announced in familiar terms that something ambitious was unfolding. Yet musically it was very traditional, retrograde even; it had fewer rock elements than his previous records, and none of the high-end production values typical of the day’s hit country records. Willie had used his guarantee of artistic control to evoke country music’s past with a direct and uncluttered sound that echoed music of another time and heroes of another era.
The spare instrumental backing — and, not coincidentally, the musical empathy — was provided by Willie’s touring band. The focus was squarely on the voice of the singer/storyteller, as with old Jimmie Rodgers and Lefty Frizzell records, but the singing was pure Willie at his soulful, unhurried best. (This traditionalism and deference would soon be adopted as one of the tenets of country’s “outlaw” movement.) The record was comprised of several new original songs, some covers from a generation before, and snatches of old-world melodies as links, with Willie’s distinctive guitar leads stitching it all together.
He set his trajectory for future fame by reaching into his past, using “Red Headed Stranger” as the central story around which to build the album. This particular story-song (recorded by Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith in the ’50s) had been with Willie for years; he had sung it to his children at bedtime. At the suggestion of his wife Connie, he used the song as a starting point, adding some exposition to create the tale’s “prequel.”
Then he carefully selected several cover songs (including one by his old friend Hank Cochran) to extend the story and flesh out the main character. In another bit of incidental irony, one of those cover songs — Fred Rose’s tender, evocative “Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain”, first recorded by Roy Acuff in 1945 — became Willie’s first-ever #1 hit under his own name, though he’d authored chart-toppers for other artists for years.
Willie constructed a tale of Old West violence and deliverance: A country preacher is driven to madness when the love of his life deserts him. Obsessed, he tracks her down and murders her; then he wanders aimlessly, a grim and dangerous itinerant. He ultimately finds redemption in new love. With its emphasis on visual imagery (not to mention its storyboard back-cover art), Red Headed Stranger was cinematic. And while Hollywood westerns weren’t as big at the box office as they once had been, certain stylistic variations on them were: Clint Eastwood had achieved major stardom as the taciturn loner of Sergio Leone’s “spaghetti westerns.”
Also gaining popularity in the mid-’70s was the anti-hero film; young directors such as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola were making intense, dramatic works full of challenging, morally ambiguous characters. A major influence on this new generation of filmmakers was John Ford, whose genius had elevated the western far above the standard studio-system “horse opera” of a generation before. No single Ford film was more revered than The Searchers, its protagonist bent on vengeance but finding no solace in it. (The casting of Ford favorite John Wayne — a repository of movie-heroism iconography if there ever was one — as the racist, hate-fueled main character masterfully redoubled the film’s complexity.) Ford’s classic films were likewise enjoying new appreciation in the counterculture press, from the same observers who were drawn to Willie’s ambitious early-’70s work.
Critics debate whether Willie sketches the Stranger’s passage and conversion effectively; Robert Christgau, for one, argues that the Stranger is just as likely to turn killer again, should this new love also leave him. It’s a valid point, but I think larger metaphors are at work. The Stranger’s lawless days end when he enters Denver; it’s a city of bright lights “shining like diamonds…in the sky” — a celestial city. There, a man is judged not by his past, but by the look in his eye.
This move from the country to the city also functions as a metaphor for the transformation of America at the onset of the industrial age. The “time of the preacher” is 1901; by that date in history, there was really no room left for the relative freedom (and lawlessness) of the cowboy lifestyle. But the mythology of the Wild West will never surrender its hold on the imagination of the American people, nor be without some measure of currency in their culture.
Romantic representations of rugged individualism are an outsized part of Texas’ cultural identity, and what the home folks knew of Willie’s own history dovetailed into the myth of the Stranger. Perhaps more importantly, his new fans (or even the idly curious) recognized Willie, literally and figuratively, in the rustic illustrations on the back cover; they didn’t even need to hear the music first. So Willie was the Red Headed Stranger to legions of fans. But his iconoclastic genius made the record resonate even deeper, echoing in the psyche of America like his buzzing guitar strings.
The record closes with another instrumental, the wistful “Bandera”, equally suitable for a slow lovers’ twirl or the rolling of closing credits (“bandera” being the Spanish word for banner or scroll). Even more significantly, at least to some: Bandera is also the name of a small town in Central Texas, the town to which Willie first returned in his post-Nashville days. This symbolic journey marked the beginning of a new phase of his career, and Red Headed Stranger confirmed his status as a major icon of American music.