Energy Follows Thought: The Stories Behind My Songs

Introduction

© The Estate of David Gahr via Getty Images

When it comes to songs, I’m a patient man.

I don’t try to push or prod them. I just let them happen, just like this book is happening. I never thought about separating my words from my music. They go together like ham and eggs. Although unlike ham and eggs, I don’t cook them at the same time.

The words always come first. I figure that once I get the words right, melodies will appear. They always have. Get the story down first and it’ll sing on its own.

The energy driving my words remains a mystery to me. Those words have been popping into my head ever since I was a little kid putting together my first little book of songs. I never questioned that mystery or tried to figure it out. Figure it out and it’s no longer a mystery. And the thing about mysteries is that they’re fun. I don’t want to take the fun out of my songs—even those that aren’t funny.

I want to keep the mystery. By doing that, you’re naturally free to interpret them however you like. Whatever they mean to you is fine with me. You probably understand them better than I do.

I love talking about these songs and recollecting what was running through my mind when I wrote them. But as far as pinning down exactly what they mean . . . well, let me quote myself on that very subject . . .

To Make a Long Story Short

I see nothing to be gained by explanations

No need to try to say who’s right or who was wrong

No need to enter into lengthy dissertations

To make a long story short she’s gone

I won’t attempt to explain the things that happened

To put in words why she’s not here would take too long

It’s all too far beyond the realm of understanding

To make a long story short she’s gone

The way you look at me you don’t believe she loved me

But she once loved me with a love so sweet and strong

And I won’t try to give the reasons why I miss her so

To make a long story short she’s gone

In the studio with Fred Carter Jr. and producer Fred Foster.

Michael Ochs Archives via Getty Archives

That song was written back in the early sixties. I got help from my good friend Fred Foster, one of the few producers who understood me when I was trying to make it in Nashville.

I like the feeling of To Make a Long Story Short because that’s my mantra when it comes to lyrics. Less is more. You’ll see how some aren’t any more than eight lines. In most of my songs, I tend to repeat the choruses two or three times. Here on the page, I’ve kept them stripped down so they read right. I love short songs. Say what you got to say in three minutes or less.

Good storytelling is disciplined storytelling. The discipline comes in editing yourself. Understand that your listener doesn’t have all day to hear you moan and groan. Moaning and groaning are important; it’s important to get your feelings out so they don’t tear you up inside. But get to the heart of those feelings—and keep it to a minimum. In doing so, you’ll have the maximum effect.

It might not look like I followed my own principle in a book that’s jammed with 160 songs. But keep in mind, I’ve written over a thousand. And every day I’m writing new ones. So yes, I’ve done some whittling.

Because I’m not an orderly man, I’ve kept the order of this collection loose. I’m not adhering to a strict timeline of when a song was written or where or why. Instead, I’ve grouped the lyrics according to mood.

You’ll hear me chattering in between songs, and I’ll say only what comes to my heart. I see these lyrics as little postcards from a long life. I see them as expressions of sadness or joy, fear or frustration, heartache and hope that are all part of our daily struggle to stay sane.

Without those songs, I might have gone insane. They let me vent whatever needed venting.

Sometimes they correspond to real events in my life. Other times I’m just making up stories that I tried to write in a way that’s relatable to average folks like me.

Songwriting isn’t exactly average work, but it’s hardly the only work I’ve done. I’ve worked dozens of different jobs, including pumping gas and raising hogs. But the one I love best is writing and making music. I’d rather write a lyric than plow a field. I’d rather write a song than paint a barn. I loved picking cotton when I was a kid, but the moment I found a way to make money making music, I was gone.

Now that we’re talking about money, here’s the first group of songs, most of them written in Houston in the late fifties when I was in my twenties. I was down and out. Didn’t have a clue of what a song might be worth. All I knew is that I had to write them.

Fifty Bucks a Song

© Scott Newton

It took me a while to realize that songs can mean big money. As a naive kid, I figured that just like the songs sung by birds belong to everyone, so do songs sung by humans. Didn’t know the first thing about copyrights and publishing. Maybe because songs came to me so easily, I never considered them work. Consequently, I didn’t understand their monetary worth. I barely had enough money to buy food and pay the rent, so hiring an attorney was out of the question. Besides, I didn’t know any.

So when someone came along and said they liked my song well enough to buy it, I never argued price. Or if artists I admired said they would record my song, I wasn’t about to ask any questions about ownership or royalties. I figured that, at least in some way, I was being paid in hope. And hope was what kept me going.

Night Life

When the evening sun goes down

You will find me hanging round

The night life ain’t no good life

But it’s my life

Many people just like me

Dreaming of old used-to-be’s

And the night life ain’t no good life

But it’s my life

Listen to the blues they’re playing

Listen to what the blues are saying

Mine is just another scene

From the world of broken dreams

And the night life ain’t no good life

But it’s my life

© Scott Newton

When I first met Ray Charles, who became one of my best friends, he said, Willie, I gotta be honest. When I first heard ‘Night Life,’ I was sure it was written by a Black man.

Thank you, was my quick reply. It was one of the nicest compliments I’ve ever received.

The song’s been sung by everyone from Aretha Franklin to B.B. King. I like their versions more than my own. It’s not because I don’t think white people can’t sing the blues. They can. I can. But in doing so, I gotta remember the blues is a musical form, even a spiritual form, that originally comes out of the Black struggle. The blues are beautiful because they transform sad to glad. When you sing them, and when you listen to them, you can feel that heavy weight of heartbreak starting to lift.

Did I have the blues as a young man? Hell, I think we’re all born with the blues. We get the blues the minute we realize we’re gonna die. And no matter how far we evolve in our thinking, the thought of physical annihilation is never a pretty one. We comfort ourselves with thoughts to help energize us in a positive direction. I personally believe in reincarnation. But even though I look forward to slipping into a different form doesn’t mean that I’m eager to slip out of this present form.

Yes, night is followed by day. But that new day, for all its golden glory, will, like butter, soon melt into the darkness of night.

Funny How Time Slips Away

Well, hello there

My, it’s been a long, long time

How am I doing?

Oh, well, I guess I’m doing fine

It’s been so long now and it seems that

It was only yesterday

Gee, ain’t it funny how time slips away?

How’s your new love?

I hope that he’s doing fine

Heard you told him

That you’d love him till the end of time

Well, you know, that’s the same thing

That you told me

Well, it seems like just the other day

Gee, ain’t it funny how time slips away?

I gotta go now

Guess I’ll see you hanging round

Don’t know when, though,

Never know when I’ll be back in town

But remember what I told you

That in time you’re gonna pay

Gee, ain’t it surprising how time slips away?

© Photojournalist Jimmy Moore

Here’s the funny part about Funny How Time Slips Away: It has. Even though I wrote the damn thing over sixty years ago.

It feels like only yesterday that the story fell out of my brain onto the page. Like all these songs, I let my unconscious do the work.

Maybe my unconscious was thinking of mystery movies. I love those film noirs from the fifties like Kiss Me Deadly and The Big Heat. Maybe Funny How Time Slips Away is a minimovie, with its black widow–type character, a woman who does a man dirty.

Was there such a woman in my life?

Don’t think so. If anything, it’s been the other way around. I haven’t always acted with unquestionable honor.

So why did I create a black widow who hurts a man to the quick?

Simplest answer is that the sultry seductress has been an alluring character ever since Antony hooked up with Cleopatra. Shakespeare wrote a play about them that takes up five acts and will probably be staged till the end of time.

My little song, a far more modest statement, may not enjoy such a long life. If it disappears, that’ll be a shame. But what can you do? Songs, like time, do slip away.

Crazy

I’m crazy, crazy for feeling so lonely

I’m crazy, crazy for feeling so blue

I knew that you’d love me as long as you wanted

And then someday you’d leave me for somebody new

Worry, why do I let myself worry?

Wondering what in the world did I do?

I’m crazy for thinking that my love could hold you

I’m crazy for trying and crazy for crying

And I’m crazy for loving you

Dave G. Houser via Getty Images

Sometimes the craziest stories are the best.

And God knows how many crazy stories have come out of Tootsies Orchid Lounge, the famous barroom in downtown Nashville a few feet from Ryman Auditorium, home to the Grand Ole Opry. I was in there one night and saw Charlie Dick. I knew he was married to sweet Patsy Cline, who sang like an angel. I had a scratchy record of me singing Crazy where I sure as hell didn’t sound like an angel. I sounded more like a man desperate to have someone else sing the song. Anyway, I played it for Charlie, who liked it so well he drove me over to his house at one a.m., woke up poor Patsy, and made her listen to it.

Because Patsy liked it, I was poor no longer.

It almost didn’t happen because Patsy, who recorded it in a Nashville studio, tried singing like me. Big mistake. No one should ever try to follow my style of phrasing. Not that I don’t like my style. I do. I believe it’s natural, at least for me. But it’s offbeat. I tend to kick way back behind the beat or hurry up ahead of the beat. As my good buddy Waylon Jennings once said, Willie wouldn’t know where the beat is if it bit him in the butt.

Fortunately, Patsy’s famous producer, Owen Bradley, urged her to forget my phrasing and stick to her own.

Crazy is as crazy does, and this particular Crazy convinced me, at a time when I wasn’t a hundred percent sure of my writing talent, that I’d be crazy to stop writing.

It doesn’t get much more country than the Grand Ole Opry.

© 1973 JD Sloan

I Gotta Get Drunk

Well, I gotta get drunk and I sure do dread it

’Cause I know just what I’m gonna do

I’ll start to spend my money calling everybody honey

And wind up singing the blues

I’ll spend my whole paycheck on some old wreck

Brother, I can name you a few

Well, I have gotta get drunk and I sure do dread it

’Cause I know just what I’m gonna do

I gotta get drunk, I can’t stay sober

There’s a lot of people in town

That’d like to hear me holler, see me spend my dollars

And I wouldn’t think of letting ’em down

There’s a lot of doctors that tell me

That I’d better start slowing it down

But there’s more old drunks than there are old doctors

So I guess we better have another round

I’ve written some stupid songs, and I Gotta Get Drunk may be one of them. Stupid, though, doesn’t mean bad. A stupid song—about a guy who’s about to do something dumb—can be a good song. This is certainly a true song.

True songs are those that paint humans the way they really are. I guess you could call this one a self-portrait of me as an idiot. I was a dumb drinker. Many drinkers are. You might even say most heavy drinkers are. Booze can turn your brain to mush. Only a mush brain would challenge someone twice his size to a fight. Or hit on someone’s wife when that someone is standing right there.

In the last part of the song, I sing about doctors’ advice to slow down and then add a line that sounds smart: There’s more old drunks than there are old doctors. Except that probably isn’t true. It really isn’t a smart remark; it’s smart-ass.

When I was drinking, I wrote what I was living. I could be a smart-ass. And even today I’m not against smart-ass songs. They’re fun. But the bottom line is that, for me, there’s nothing funny about drinking. If I hadn’t put down the bottle, I’d be dead long ago and never have this chance to write about some of my dumb mistakes.

Hattie Louise Tootsie Bess with her whistle at closing time.

© Henry Horenstein/AUGUST Image, LLC

The Party’s Over

Turn out the lights, the party’s over

They say that all good things must end

Call it a night, the party’s over

And tomorrow starts the same old thing again

What a crazy crazy party

Never seen so many people

Laughing, dancing

Look at you, you’re having fun

But look at me, I’m almost crying

But that don’t keep her love from dying

Misery ’cause for me

The party’s over

Turn out the lights, the party’s over

They say that all good things must end

Call it a night, the party’s over

And tomorrow starts the same old thing again

Once I had a love undying

I didn’t keep it, wasn’t trying

Life for me was just one party

And then another

I broke her heart so many times

Had to have my party wine

And then one day she said

Sweetheart, the party’s over

Jerry Wexler, a producer who helped me find my voice, in and out of the studio.

The Estate of David Gahr via Getty Images

You could say that The Party’s Over is the hangover following I Gotta Get Drunk. Both songs are soaked in bad booze.

Some people say it’s not good to feel sorry for yourself. Maybe so, but when it comes to songwriting, self-pity ain’t a bad attitude to embrace. Folks relate. From time to time, we all get to feeling sorry for ourselves.

But how sorry could I feel for myself when, sixteen years after I wrote The Party’s Over, the party wasn’t really over after all? The party had just begun.

In the sixties I recorded the song for RCA and it went nowhere. But then in the seventies, my good friend Jerry Wexler signed me to Atlantic and let me sing whatever I wanted. Even better, he trusted me to produce myself. The label underwrote a live album that I cut in Austin’s Texas Opry House. I included my party song. That was its first reincarnation.

Then it got born again. Its midwife turned out to be my buddy Dandy Don Meredith, the Hall of Fame Dallas Cowboys quarterback turned commentator. Along with Howard Cosell on Monday Night Football, Don let you know when the game was out of reach by singing his out-of-tune version of The Party’s Over. I couldn’t care less that he was out of tune, especially because he’d tell those millions of football fans that Willie Nelson was the writer and they better go see ol’ Willie the next time he comes to their town.

Merle Haggard once told me, That’s the saddest party song ever written.

Maybe so, Merle, I said, but there’s good money in sadness.

Mr. Record Man

Mr. Record Man, I’m looking for a song I heard today

There was someone blue singing about someone who went away

Just like me, his heart was yearning for a love that used to be

It’s a lonely song about a lonely man like me

There was something about a love that didn’t treat him right

And he’d wake from troubled sleep and cry her name at night

Mr. Record Man, get this record for me, won’t you please?

It’s a lonely song about a lonely man like me

I was driving down the highway with the radio turned on

And the man that I heard singing sounded so blue and all alone

As I listened to his lonely song, I wondered could it be?

Could there somewhere be another lonely man like me?

Trying to read with my sister Bobbie and my daughter Amy.

© Lana Nelson

Early on, I adopted an attitude that said I could write a song about anything. I could even write a song about a song. Even more, I could write a song about how I’m looking for a song.

Mr. Record Man has special meaning because I actually became Mr. Record Man. I worked as a deejay everywhere from Fort Worth, Texas, to Portland, Oregon. I wasn’t half bad. I got to shoot the bull and, better yet, got to listen to all the new records coming out. Could be Ray Price. Could be Patti Page or Tennessee Ernie Ford or Chuck Berry or Little Richard or Elvis Presley. I liked them all. I learned from them all.

Appreciating the power of Mr. Record Man was a lesson I learned early on. I could just about play whatever I wanted. Back then things weren’t stuck in strict genres the way they are today. Music was music and music always made me happy.

Naming a song Mr. Record Man was an act of respect. In a weird way, I was writing a song to myself, even as I was writing it to other deejays out there who I hoped would figure out that the song they were searching for was the same song I was singing.

Hello Walls

Hello walls

How’d things go for you today?

Don’t you miss her

Since she up and walked away?

And I’ll bet you dread to spend

Another lonely night with me

But lonely walls, I’ll keep you company

Hello window

Well, I see that you’re still here

Aren’t you lonely

Since our darlin’ disappeared?

Well, look here, is that a teardrop

In the corner of your pane?

Now don’t you try to tell me that it’s rain

She went away and left us all alone

The way she planned

Guess we’ll have to learn to get along

Without her if we can

Hello ceiling

I’m gonna stare at you awhile

You know I can’t sleep

So won’t you bear with me awhile?

We must all stick together or else

I’ll lose my mind

I’ve got a feeling she’ll be gone a long, long time

I got my first-ever full-time job as a songwriter outside Nashville on Two Mile Pike. Ray Price, a country music immortal, co-owned the publishing company. The fifty-bucks-a-week salary made me feel rich. I shared an office with my partner, Hank Cochran. One day, when he got called out of our little room to answer the phone—we didn’t have a phone of our own—I stared at the walls and the walls talked back. So did the ceiling. So did the window. I scribbled down whatever was coming through me, whether it made sense or not.

By the time Hank got back, the song had written itself.

You even made a pun, said Hank.

I did? Where do you see a pun? I asked.

"The line when