Nelson had only just moved to Nashville two years prior, and he struggled to make an impression at first. But when you look, it’s hard to see the grizzled tax-evading, pot-smoking outlaw hippie hero we know and love in this fresh-faced gent. Close your eyes and you’ll hear that it’s undoubtedly Nelson’s familiar warble-though not so weathered with age as we’ve grown used to. He’s a gentle outlaw an old-fashioned country troubadour who has remained on the progressive activist edge and an unassuming, traditional artist who happens to be loved across the spectrum of generations, political persuasions, and musical styles.īut before Nelson became an international superstar he appeared on the country music circuit clean-shaven, short-haired, and in the natty suit and tie you see him wear in the clip above from a televised 1962 Grand Ole Opry performance.

And if Red Headed Stranger is an unlikely blockbuster, Nelson is an unlikely superstar, full of contradictions. That 1975 album of tear-jerkers and murder ballads, which established Nelson as a “superstar recording artist,” is so “old-fashioned” it sounds “like a tale told around a cowboy campfire.” And it is for that reason millions of fans can’t tear themselves away from its compelling narrative and achingly sad, homespun laments-including myself, a few friends, and a stranger on a schedule who came to the door. And for the next thirty minutes, no one says a word as the album tells its mournful tale of betrayal and bloody revenge, a story, writes Allmusic “about a preacher on the run after murdering his departed wife and her new lover.” It’s an album that remains-with its “brief song-poems and utterly minimal backing”-perhaps “the strangest blockbuster country produced.”

“Is that Red Headed Stranger,” he asks? Yes. He pauses behind his clipboard, hearing the music from inside the house. Someone puts on a Willie Nelson album, and there is a knock at the door. On an ordinary afternoon, a group of friends sit around listening to records.

Who sings we are young