Willie Nelson, man of the road, pays a call at the White House
The White House has never seen any thing to beat it. Where the powerful and the privileged usually dine, a buffet is laid on for members of the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing. Where Casals once played, the entertain ment is a sort of tribal rite in which the guests whoop it up to a Texas honky-tonk beat. The placid evening air is pierced by a singer's plangent cry:
Whiskey River, don 't run dry,
You're all I've got—take care of
me...
Nor has an apparition like the singer himself been glimpsed around the White House lately—without being arrested on sight, that is. Bearded, sporting jeans and sneakers, with a bandanna tying back his shoulder-length red-brown hair and an earring dangling from his left ear, he comes on like some improbable blend of Celtic bard and Hell's Angel, with a smile straight out of Huckleberry Finn.
It is Jimmy Carter's kind of evening. The stock-car crowd is there because Ole Country Boy Carter is devoted to racing tracks the way his predecessors were to putting greens or yachting water. And the singer? Another Carter favorite: high-riding, low-living Willie Nelson, 45, country music's reigning "redneck rocker."
White House dinners are pretty high off the hog for Willie, who not too long ago was being written off by the country music establishment as an "outlaw"—a renegade, a troublemaker who wrote interesting songs but would never fuse his raw performing talents. Then six years ago, Willie bucked the system by leaving Nashville for Austin, Texas, where he took charge of a movement that made outlaw a term of defiant pride. Along with such congenial spirits as Waylon Jennings, Billy Joe Shaver and Jerry Jeff Walker, he fashioned a spare, linear style with a heavy rock beat that reached an audience far broader than the country faithful, mainly by appealing to long-haired rock fans.
The Austin sound—redneck rock or progressive country—began crossing over from country to pop charts and racking up sales once scarcely dreamed of in the country field. In the past two years, three such albums have gone platinum, in trade parlance (i.e., sold 1 million copies): an anthology of progressive stars titled The Outlaws, the duo album Waylon & Willie and Willie's own Red Headed Stranger. Willie's latest, Stardust, is currently one of the nation's hottest-selling country LPs, even though it consists entirely of Tin Pan Alley standards.
Progressive he may be, but Willie remains true to the bedrock traditions of folk, blues, jazz and country. His unusually sophisticated phrasing—now lagging behind the beat, now scooting ahead of it. twisting and rolling the melody like a champion lariat twirler—owes something to Frank Sinatra, one of his favorite singers. But his high, slightly nasal baritone retains an austere lyricism that goes back to Appalachian hills and hollows and beyond. Where much of commercial country music has only a catch in its throat, Willie's has a touch of iron in its soul.