Willie Nelson – The Essential Willie Nelson

William Hughes Nelson, who turned 70 in April, has made his most lasting contributions to country music via three artistic personas. There’s “W. Nelson,” the songwriter; “Shotgun Willie,” the single and album artist; and just plain “Willie,” the celebrity. These categories don’t encompass every aspect of Nelson’s five-decade career, just the most important ones; and, although they represent distinct roles, they overlap a good deal too.

It’s a testament to Nelson’s talent, and to his importance in the country story, that he’s made an impact on so many fronts. Yet it’s precisely the wide-ranging nature of his influence that ensures any anthology titled The Essential Willie Nelson, even one including 41 tracks over two discs, will sell short one or more parts of his essentialness.

To showcase his songwriting adequately, for instance, we’d need to avoid a good many Willie Nelson recordings altogether. W. Nelson has compiled an impressive catalogue of memorable titles over the years, but his reputation as one of country’s greatest songwriters rests mostly on a handful of songs he wrote in the late ’50s and early ’60s, when he was playing bass in Ray Price’s Cherokee Cowboys, writing for the publishing company Pamper Music, and trying to make a go of a solo career.

His most enduring half-dozen or so songs from this era — “Hello Walls”, “Crazy”, “Funny How Time Slips Away”, “Night Life”, “Family Bible”, and “Undo The Right” — have done more than simply hold up well under innumerable treatments; they remain exemplars of melodic and lyrical economy. The Essential includes Nelson’s studio versions of the first four of those songs, and in each, he establishes intimacy and narrative command with just a couple of lines. For those few who might need reminding, the concise and conversational openers in question are: “Hello walls. How’d things go for you today?”; “I’m crazy, crazy for feeling so lonely”; “Well, hello there. My it’s been a long, long time”; and, “When the evenin’ sun goes down, you will find me hangin’ ’round.”

In each of these songs, Nelson is distressed and myopic, unable to let go of what’s already gone. The results are crazy; he’s left conversing with windows and walls or letting on as if he couldn’t care less. Indeed, in “I Never Cared For You”, he conveys apocalyptic misery by insisting that his old love meant nothing and that “the sun is filled with ice and gives no warmth at all” (another arresting opener).

Despite the strength of this material, though, Nelson could only watch as his great songs were transformed into great, indelible records by the likes of Faron Young, Patsy Cline, Billy Walker, Ray Price, Claude Grey, Johnny Bush and others. His own versions charted barely, or not at all.

Just why Nelson’s early sides were so unimpressive — and that’s putting it generously; singers have rarely sounded so uncomfortable and unmusical as Nelson often does on his 1962 Liberty album And Then I Wrote — has been the subject of much speculation over the years. It wasn’t that he couldn’t sing yet; his spare and haunting demonstration recordings (many recently issued on Sugar Hill as Crazy: The Demo Sessions) prove that well enough.

And it wasn’t, as has been suggested, that some of the best studio musicians in the world cramped his unconventional style. There are too many instances, both early and late in his career, where Nelson made it work just fine with A-Team pickers. For instance, “Me And Paul”, a minor hit from 1971 and Nelson’s initial essaying of life on-the-road-again, sounds like the best record Tom T. Hall never made.

Perhaps it was that, attempting to sing the songs differently than he had on his demos — which, at least in terms of their phrasing, were mimicked fairly closely by Cline and Price on those already well-known hits — he found he could not be himself at all.

Eventually, however, being himself would transform Nelson into a recording artist whose recordings deserved his songs. In the 1970s, Shotgun Willie cut some of the best country albums ever made. These albums — including Shotgun Willie, Phases And Stages, and Red-Headed Stranger — succeed in part because they add up to far more than just a collection of parts. Where singles strive for immediacy, the best albums possess an accretive power.

That’s a quality, unfortunately, that The Essential can’t convey. For example, Nelson’s “Bloody Mary Morning”, included here and a #14 country hit in 1974, is an unforgettable record about forgetting; Nelson is both drinking and running away from his problems. But unless we’ve heard the tracks that precede it on Phases And Stages, unless we’ve encountered all the ways the singer has brought this upon himself, its impact will necessarily be diminished.

These albums are among the recordings most strongly tied to the outlaw movement’s demands for artistic freedom. What Nelson quickly did with his freedom was to record about as un-outlaw-ish an album as could be imagined: Stardust, a 1977 collection of Tin Pan Alley standards produced by Booker T. Jones. “Georgia On My Mind”, “Blue Skies”, “All Of Me” — these tender and typically spare country pop sides provided Nelson some of the biggest hits of his career. Along with 1975’s “Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain”, the Fred Rose-penned original that was his first #1, they also established Nelson as a singer whose biggest chart successes tended to come with other people’s songs.

Some of Nelson’s interpretations are stunning (his version of the late-period Elvis hit “Always On My Mind” and his duet with Merle Haggard on “Pancho & Lefty”, both from 1982), while others are little more than pedestrian (his 1979 reading of “Help Me Make It Through The Night”). At its most affecting, Nelson’s voice can sound like a yelp — and one taking its time to be sure it doesn’t miss one twinge of pain. But it can also sound indolent, or like it had no affect at all, a vocal approach that would become more common as the ’70s gave way to ’80s.

Perhaps not coincidentally, it was at this point that celebrity Willie began to surpass his earlier incarnations. The first sign of this new phase in Nelson’s career came as he began doing soundtrack work for, and appearing in, movies such as The Electric Horseman and Honeysuckle Rose. But it has calcified over the past two decades, a period when Willie has recorded a seemingly endless string of celebrity duets; become a well-known TV pitchman and tax scofflaw; and guest-starred in any number of made-for-TV westerns.

Nelson’s work in these years has been inconsistent, to say the least, an assessment that begins to become painful on The Essential’s second disc. “Highwayman” (with Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson and Waylon Jennings), “On The Road Again” (a signature, if weightless, hit from ’79), “To All The Girls I’ve Loved Before” (the Julio Iglesias duet that surely stands among the nadirs of 20th-century pop), and “Mendocino County Line” (with Lee Ann Womack), as well as duets with U2 and Aerosmith — these cuts all capture Willie playing “Willie.” Cue a grizzled character actor, sporting pigtails and a duster. Meanwhile “W. Nelson” and “Shotgun Willie” seem to have exited the scene entirely.

Still, when all three Willies showed up at the same time…well, there’s never been another Willie Nelson. “Angel Flying Too Close To The Ground”, one of his own songs recorded as he neared the height of his popularity in 1979, for instance, is surely one of the finest records of Nelson’s career. “If you had not’ve fallen, then I would not have found you,” he begins, his distinctive yelp lingering, quivering tentatively, over each cruel remembrance. “I patched up your broken wings and hung around awhile,” he sings, in this case not so much obsessed as just very, very tired from “trying to keep [her] spirits up and [her] fever down.”

Midway through, Willie Nelson takes a leisurely acoustic guitar solo, all jagged edges and unpredictable turns. His guitar notes seem to hover just above the earth, they slowly levitate, and then they’re gone.