Nelson news

In the past couple of years, Willie Nelson has a long history of tempting, and cheating, death. In 1969, when his home in Ridgetop, Tenn., caught fire, ...

A multipart documentary in the works aims to chronicle Nelson’s “extraordinary life and career.” The singer himself has co-authored a number of books — memoirs, folksy works of fiction, collections of essays and aphorisms. There are occasions when he has chosen to sleep on the bus even when it was parked in the driveway of one of his palatial homes. [yearslong showdown with the Internal Revenue Service](https://www.nytimes.com/1991/09/02/business/willie-nelson-hopes-for-a-hit-so-does-the-irs.html) (which seized a good share of his assets in 1990) and his multiple busts for marijuana possession. In 1969, Nelson bought a new guitar, a nylon-string Martin N-20, which he fitted with a pickup to produce a tone reminiscent of one of his musical gods, the jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. The nickname was coined one day when he was 14 and his (very stoned) father tried and failed to say the phrase “prodigal son.” By the time Willie was 6, he had his first six-string and was learning to play chords and write songs. Lukas and Micah grew up surrounded by musical equipment and taught themselves to play, bashing out classic-rock songs in a band room near the little building in the rear of the house where Nelson gathered with friends when he was not on tour. They met in 1986, in Arizona, on the set of the made-for-television Western drama “Stagecoach,” where she was working as a makeup artist. (“When you’re here, you’re in Luck,” he is fond of saying. when the house lights dimmed and Nelson took the stage, wearing a straw cowboy hat and a T-shirt that read “I Stand With Ukraine.” Recently, he had switched to performing while sitting down, a concession to age. When Nelson first recorded the song, in 1973, it was an outlaw-country anthem, a woozy blend of honky-tonk and funk and blues — a sound more redolent of weed than whiskey. There was a moment, in the 1990s, when he pulled himself off the road, signing a contract for a six-month residency at a theater in Branson, Mo.