My "Cuzin Willie" Nelson

That's right. We are blood relatives. His grandma and my great grandmother were cousins. I remember Willie at our family gatherings. A few times anyway. I was just a little squirt running loose with my brothers and pals. Willie was already a highly skilled guitarist as a teenager, and he entertained everyone with his sister singing wonderful old-time gospel songs. If it had been a few years later, I would have had an opportunity to sit in with them on some of the songs. I became a fairly adept drop-thumb banjo player and he would have liked that. Of course, I was not even close to being in his league as a musician. I never was. Maybe nobody ever was. I don't know how old Willie and his sister were. I was a little kid and we never knew stuff like that. I just knew he seemed grown up. I had never heard anybody play music like that before although there were a lot of musicians in my family. We were hillbillies from Kentucky and I think Willie was from Texas. Our gatherings were usually in Arkansas. Willie already played bar chords and added fancy runs up and down the fingerboard. My Kentucky family just played straight chords and simple dance and folk songs. It was all I ever learned and Willie was way over our heads. So that is about it as far as my personal knowledge of Willie Nelson. Everything else in this little biography is either from material that was written about him or from my own conjecture. I am from the same family and even if his musicianship is far exceeding everyone else in our family, there are going to be some similarities in our thinking and ideals so I will express them the best I can. I believe we share some kind of spiritual connections and I will try to rely on them in telling Willie's story.