THE READING ROOM: Dave Dalton Thomas’ ‘Picnic: Willie Nelson’s Fourth of July Tradition’

Texas historian Joe Nick Patoski sums up the experience of attending one of Willie Nelson’s annual picnics as “living inside a Willie Nelson song every Fourth of July.” As Patoski writes in his foreword to journalist Dave Dalton Thomas’ Picnic: Willie Nelson’s Fourth of July Tradition (Texas A&M, April 15, 2024), Thomas’ book is a “biography of a rite.” Indeed, Thomas, formerly with the Austin American-Statesman, has produced a sprawling history of the exalted event that chronicles it from its inaugural year in 1973 up to 2023. Drawing on his own coverage of the event over the years, as well as on 150 interviews with musicians and attendees, Thomas tries, as he writes, “to get it right,” to offer a definitive history—or as close as he can get—of the Picnic. And he succeeds nicely.

The annual event had its roots—or at least one tendril of its larger trunk—in the failed 1972 Dripping Springs Reunion of which Nelson was only a part. According to Thomas, Nelson told Rolling Stone reporter Grover Lewis, when asked if Nelson would return to the Reunion if it became an annual event, “‘you mean if the same people was runnin’ it, or if somebody else was?’” The next year Nelson held his own music festival, in July, in the same spot where the Reunion had petered out, and a tradition was born.

As Thomas points out: “Today the Willie Nelson Fourth of July Picnic is a part of the Texas cultural fabric. The massive events of the 1970s are part of our mythology, and decades later college kids and pale office workers who had no business standing in the sun for eight hours still went to Luckenbach, Fort Worth, or a racetrack east of Austin to be a part of it.”

In each of the book’s ten chapters, Thomas offers a detailed snapshot of several Picnics, usually focusing on one major event and then ones of a little less significance, through which he brings out the colorful character of every gathering he describes. For example, chapter one covers the 1973, 1974, and 1975 Picnics as they move from Dripping Springs to College Station to Liberty Hill. At the top of each chapter, Thomas offers record of the site, the attendance, and the headliners, along with a “Picnic VIP Update” that features the key events in the lives of the major acts in those years.

In 1973, for example, headliners include Kris Kristofferson, Rita Coolidge, Sammi Smith, and Tom T. Hall. For 1973, the “VIP Update” features Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Leon Russell, and Billy Joe Shaver. We learn that Russell had just released his “three-LP Leon Live album on Shelter Records…and was one of the biggest rock stars in the world.” In that first Picnic, Woody Roberts, a media consultant and former DJ, worried that the show might be too country like the previous festival that had failed. As Thomas reports, “What they needed, Woody realized, was not a country music festival but a modern music festival with rock stars that could draw a crowd to a rugged a rural site.” With Russell, Roberts and others could start promoting the event on local rock stations, too. In the end, an estimated 40,000 rednecks and hippies showed up that day in 1973.

While 1973’s Picnic heralded a bright future for the Picnic, 1979’s didn’t shine quite as brightly. That year, Nelson held the Picnic west of Austin on the golf course of the Pedernales Country Club, which he had purchased. Joining Nelson and Russell that year were Ernest Tubb, Johnny Paycheck, and Bobby Bare, among others. Nelson’s neighbors, though, didn’t enjoy the idea of a festival coming into their back yard and filed a lawsuit to try to stop the show. In the end, the Picnic went off, with an estimated 25,000 in attendance. As Thomas reports: “Willie didn’t make any money and made a mess of his new place—photos after the Picnic showed the golf course covered in a sea of trash—but in the end, Willie decided he was going to lose less by cleaning up and repairing the golf course than by renting the land and fighting rural townsfolk.”

Although the Picnic has meant different things to different people over the past 50 years, Thomas points out that “the Picnic was pioneering…Willie brought different people together. Not just the hippies and the rednecks, but the working class and the executives, the rural and the urban.” On the legacy of the Picnic, producer Jack Yoder tells Thomas: “The Picnic showed both Willie’s loyalty to friends and fans and his devotion to Texas music.”

As Thomas reports, one “Willie Nelson superfan,” Janis Tillerson—who has attended all but two Picnics—sums up her experience of attending the gathering: “The Picnic was many things over the years: It was big, it was small, it was legendary, it was infamous, it was great, it was bad, it was hot, it was…well, it was hot…‘Some were hell. And some were wonderful.’”

Elsewhere in the book, blues musician Delbert McClinton reflects on the Picnic’s early days: “In the beginning, it was not a commodity. It was a gathering. And it was magic. The air tasted different. Everything about being a part of that explosion that Willie brought about was just magic. And still is. I mean, it always will be.”

Three appendices feature annotated lists of artists who played the Fourth of July Picnics, a list of events often confused with Fourth of July Picnics, and a list of suggested readings. Thomas. The energy of the Picnics is displayed in the many black and white photographs sprinkled throughout the book, and a gallery of stunning color photos and illustrations of posters from various Picnics adds to the book’s archival value.

Entertaining and told in lively prose, Picnic: Willie Nelson’s Fourth of July Tradition preserves an enduring Texas cultural tradition and durable feature of Americana music.