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His themes are mostly the Nashville perennials of hootch, heartbreak and hallelujah. But his best songs—chronicles of a tough, sensitive drifter—have a gritty conviction that comes from being unsparingly autobiographical. As Willie says, they are "songs that had to come out." The deep lines around Willie's surprisingly gentle brown eyes bear witness to a lot of hard days and even harder nights, and he sings about them with sentiment but no sentimentality, with pain but no self-pity. He celebrates their brief, boisterous pleasures, as in I Gotta Get Drunk:
I'll start to spend my money,
Callin 'everybody honey,
And wind up singin' the blues.
He bemoans their frequent emptiness, as in Opportunity to Cry:
I think I'll go home now
And feed my nightmares
He voices the exhilaration and melancholy of ceaselessly moving on, as in Bloody Mary Morning:
Baby left me without warnin'
Sometime in the night,
So I'm flyin 'down to Houston
With forgetting her the nature of
my flight.
When Willie moved on from Nashville, his decision to settle in Austin was no accident. Texas to him meant his native heritage, his own people, his starting place. To paraphrase a classic country hymn that Willie favors, the circle was unbroken.
The circle began in the dusty hamlet of Abbott, Texas, where Willie and his sister Bobbie, now the pianist in his band, were raised by gospel-singing grandparents; their parents had drifted off in opposite directions shortly after Willie was born. Willie was five when he got a guitar and a few rudimentary lessons from his grandfather, a blacksmith who had taken mail-order music courses. Soon Willie was pressing his ear against an old wooden Philco radio to hear Grand Ole Opry. At 13 he formed his own band—with his father, then living in a town 40 miles away, on fiddle. He left high school at 16, was mustered out of the Air Force after eight months because of back problems, and quickly married a Waco carhop named Martha Matthews.
Then came a sequence of "whiles"—a while as a door-to-door encyclopedia and Bible salesman, a while as a plumber's helper in Oregon, a while as a disc jockey in Fort Worth, and so on. Willie was forever setting off for new destinations with everything he could call his own loaded into his 1946 Ford: Martha, the three kids they soon had, some furniture and an "Oklahoma credit card" (a length of hose for siphoning gas from roadside tanks). A few years of this and Martha began heading for a destination of her own: divorce court. "I tried being like other people," Willie says. "I tried to work and come home and watch TV. That just wasn't me."
Wherever he wandered, Willie sang and played guitar in local honky-tonks, at times performing behind a chicken-wire screen set up to protect musicians from flying beer bottles. Out of this harsh apprenticeship came one of his earliest and best songs, a neon-lit lament called Night Life:
The night life ain 't no good life,
But it's my life.