How Willie Nelson Sees America

“That’s his living room,” Nelson’s lighting director, Budrock Prewitt, told me on the road to Camden. He meant the stage—specifically, a twelve-by-thirty-two-foot maroon rug that Nelson’s crew rolls out at each venue before putting every instrument, amp, and monitor in the same spot as always. Whenever Nelson needs to replace the bus, a company that he’s been working with for decades re-creates the same interior in the next one, as precisely as possible. And Nelson keeps his buses leased year-round, whether they’re in use or not. “They park up and wait for us to come back,” his production manager, Alex Blagg, told me. “My bunk is my bunk.”

“We only go skating because we’re too embarrassed to wear our Christmas sweaters on land.”

Cartoon by Victoria Roberts

Nelson’s band does not have its own name. On ticket stubs and marquees, they’re simply Family, as in “Willie Nelson and Family.” For fifty years, Nelson’s sister Bobbie anchored the group from behind a grand piano. She and Willie had a pact: they’d play to the end of the road. When Nelson’s drummer, Paul English, died, he was replaced by his brother, Billy. Jody Payne was Nelson’s longtime guitar player; now his son Waylon plays in the band. Bee Spears started on bass at nineteen and stayed until his death, at sixty-two. Mickey Raphael, who joined the band at twenty-one, is now seventy-four.

Nelson’s road crew is family, too. His tour manager, John Selman, is the son of Wally Selman, who ran the Texas Opry House; he was hired twenty years ago, straight out of college. Prewitt and Larry Gorham, a Hells Angel who handles security, have been with Nelson since the seventies. So has Nelson’s manager, Mark Rothbaum. Rothbaum’s parents fled Poland in 1937; his mother died when he was thirteen. He stopped caring about school. “I was just fucking angry,” Rothbaum told me. He got a job with a business manager in Manhattan. One day, he saw Nelson behind a glass partition at his office, on West Fifty-seventh Street. “He looked like Jesus Christ,” Rothbaum recalled. “He was glowing.” Rothbaum worked his way into the circle. “I adopted them. But I had to do it. I had to become useful.” He and Nelson have never had a contract. “You couldn’t put a piece of paper between us,” he says.

Family members call this Willie World, and it, too, is elastic. When the steel player Jimmy Day drank his way out of it, Nelson didn’t replace him. The steel parts simply disappeared. When Spears went on tour with Guy Clark, Nelson brought in Chris Ethridge, of the Flying Burrito Brothers, to play bass—and, when Spears called and asked to come home, Nelson welcomed him back and kept Ethridge on. For a while, he toured with two bassists and two drummers: a full-tilt-boogie band captured on “Willie and Family Live,” from 1978. At around the same time, Leon Russell joined them on piano, bringing along his saxophone player and the great Nigerian percussionist Ambrose Campbell. When Grady Martin, the top session player in Nashville, retired from studio recording, he went on the road, too, upping the number of people onstage to eleven. “Willie ran a refugee camp, to some extent,” Steve Earle told me.

Bee Spears died in 2011, Jody Payne in 2013, Paul English in 2020, and Bobbie Nelson in 2022. “The biggest change was Sister Bobbie,” Kevin Smith, who now plays bass, told me. Bobbie outlined the chord structure of every song. After her death, Smith was shocked at how little sound there was onstage. These days, Nelson and Raphael take all the solos. Sets are shorter. Lukas sits in when he’s not out touring on his own; his brother Micah, who plays guitar with Neil Young, joins when he can. But Nelson’s sound has been stripped to its essence. “It’s more like spoken word now,” Raphael said. “Like poetry with a rhythm section.”

Nelson goes from number to number with almost no patter—an approach he learned from the great Texas bandleader Bob Wills, who kept audiences on the dance floor for hours. In Camden, he got through twenty-four songs in sixty-five minutes, pausing only to wipe his brow with a washcloth or to sip from a Willie’s Remedy mug full of warm tea. The set didn’t feel hurried—on “Funny How Time Slips Away,” Nelson gave the song’s ironies and regrets space to sink in—but the crew kept an eye on the clock. After Camden and Holmdel, Nelson was scheduled to play Maryland, Indiana, Wisconsin, and, finally, Farm Aid, at the University of Minnesota: six shows in eight days at the end of eight months on the road. “He just keeps going and going,” Annie said. “He’s Benjamin Buttoning me.”

I ran into Annie in Camden, doing her laundry backstage by the catering station. She and Nelson met in the eighties, on the set of a remake of “Stagecoach.” Annie is two decades younger than Willie. She is sharp, protective, and unflappable, with a wide smile and long, curly hair that she has allowed to go gray. She told me that the build-out for Farm Aid was supposed to have started that day in Minneapolis. CNN was planning a live telecast. But Teamsters Local 320—made up of custodians, groundskeepers, and food-service workers at the university—had chosen that moment to go on strike. Members of IATSE, the stagehands’ union, would not cross the picket line, and neither would Nelson. Cancelling the concert, though, would break faith with the people Farm Aid was meant to serve. “It’s not great for us,” Annie said. “But who really suffers? The farmers. This year of all years.”