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In 1961 Willie sold copyrights to Night Life and one other song for a paltry $150 to finance a move to Nashville. There he quickly made it as a songwriter, but for other singers. Crazy rose high on the charts when Patsy Cline recorded it. So did Funny How Time Slips Away as recorded by Jimmy Elledge, Hello Walls by Faron Young, and dozens of others. It seemed Willie could write a hit for anybody but himself. His own recordings went nowhere, perhaps because they were not truly his own. Producers decreed that he should be backed by slick studio musicians and often swathed in saccharine strings. What came out was the Nashville sound, not the Willie Nelson sound. "I was trying to sell a new style of singer," Willie recalls. "They didn't have a category to put me in."
The category they settled on was outlaw, and Willie and other road-hardened individualists like Waylon Jennings earned it in ways that went beyond unorthodox musicianship. They disdained the studded and rhinestoned outfits of Nashville stars for scruffy clothes. They ducked the record-company celebrity mills for a life of carousing and missed appointments. Willie also met and married a red-haired country singer named Shirley Collie. Though the marriage was to last ten years, it was nowhere near as harmonious as the records they occasionally cut together. Once when Willie came home drunk, Shirley, who knew a little kung fu, pushed him through a glass-paneled door.
Strange to say, Willie's luck improved when his Nashville house burned down in 1972. After plunging through the flames to retrieve his stash of marijuana, he headed again for Texas. There, says Merle Haggard, an admiring colleague, "Willie took his own band and a case of beer and sat down to try to create things." He did so by following his usual rules—that is, none. "Nothing works every time," Willie says. "Everything has to stand on its own. I don't try to limit my thoughts in music. Everything I do is by feel."
Among other things, Willie saw a chance to "create my own market" by bringing together Austin's country audience with the rock devotees and college crowd on its fringes. While his post-Nashville LPs began building a national following, he consolidated his local reputation by promoting a series of July 4th outdoor concerts featuring friends like Leon Russell and Kris Kristofferson—and, not incidentally, himself. "When I was in the encyclopedia business," Willie explains, "I learned that whatever you want to sell, first you've got to sell yourself."