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Willie Nelson: the 72-year-old singer on growing up in Abbott, playing in public for the first time, what he listens to on the bus, and why he doesn't hate the music business.

Article Excerpt
Could there have been a Willie Nelson without an Abbott? I doubt it. I've always felt like Abbott was a special place. It was the perfect place for me to grow up because it was a small town and because everybody knew everybody. Everybody there was friends or family or worked together or went to school together. There was something real positive about that.

In a lot of small towns, everybody gossips about everybody else; there's nothing positive about that. But not in Abbott? If it's gossip that bothers you, you're in trouble, because there's gossip everywhere, in little towns and big towns. I was a telephone operator in Abbott back when they had telephone exchange operators. My sister was really the one who had the job. Whenever the operators would take a vacation, they would hire her to run the board, and I would come in and help her. All the time I was sitting there, I'd be listening in to the conversations going on all over Abbott. I tapped every phone in town! I knew everything about the whole county.

What's your earliest memory of Abbott? Playing in the mud and the creeks and the water and the cotton patches.

Did you have any sense back then that there was a whole other world out there, and were you interested in seeing it? No, I didn't think there was a lot out there for me. I was surprised when I left Abbott that there was another world out there, because I thought we had it all right here. In a way, Abbott was a little bitty picture of the whole world. You had nice people, you had assholes, and you learned to live with them and like them and work with them. I thought it was a good education growing up there.

Tell me about the house your family lived in. The first one was down at the edge of town. We had a house with a well where we got our water. We had a garden we grew vegetables in. We had a fattened up calves. I was with the Future every year I had a project.

Big house or small house? Very small house, My parents were divorced when I was six months old, so it was my sister and my grandparents who raised me. My grandfather was a blacksmith. I hung, out with him everyday in his shop. After he died, we moved to another...

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