willie

Willie Nelson at 80

willieFor the past 40 years the music legend has invited fans to celebrate with him over the July 4th holiday. Once again, the annual event will be held at the Fort Worth Stockyards in Fort Worth, Texas on July 4th, but this year they are celebrating Willie’s 80th birthday. 

Returning to help Willie celebrate will be such stars as Leon Russell, Kris Kristofferson, David Allan Coe, Ray Wylie Hubbard and Ray Price. In addition, Academy Award and Grammy winner Ryan Bingham and rising star Justin Moore are scheduled to perform.

Beginning in 1973 in Dripping Springs, Texas, Willie’s 4th of July Picnic has become a Texas tradition unlike any other. At its start, the hippie movement was well under way when a 40-year-old Willie Nelson decided to hold a music festival in a field in Dripping Springs. Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings and Tom T. Hall headlined the festival that brought over 40,000 people to the inaugural run of what would become a Texas tradition.

In 1975, just a few days before Willie’s third annual picnic, the Texas Senate honored Willie by declaring July 4, 1975, as Willie Nelson Day in Texas.

It was a big deal in 2004 when Nelson announced that he was bringing his picnic to one of his boyhood homes – Fort Worth.

With a six-decade career and a catalog of more than 200 albums to his credit, the iconic Texas singer-songwriter Willie Nelson has earned a permanent position in pop music’s pantheon with songs that combine the sophistication of Tin Pan Alley with the rough-and-tumble grit and emotional honesty of country music. He brought pop and country together on the radio in the early 1960s with unforgettable songs like Crazy (Patsy Cline), Hello Walls (Faron Young), Funny How Time Slips Away (Billy Walker), Night Life (Ray Price) and others and, by the mid-1970s, had become a superstar in his own right as a prime mover of a revolutionary and thriving outlaw country music scene.

The Red Headed Stranger, Willie’s first album for Columbia Records in 1975, catapulted the artist to the front ranks of popularity across America and around the world. A seven-time Grammy Award winner, Willie is a co-founder of Farm Aid, an annual series of fundraising events which began as an all-star benefit concert in 1985 to raise money for American family farmers. He continues to lobby against horse slaughter and produces his own blend of biodiesel fuel. An old-school road-dog troubadour with new school wheels, Willie plays concerts year-round, tirelessly touring on Honeysuckle Rose III (he rode his first two buses into the ground), taking his music and fans to places that are always worth the ride.
Following on the successful 2012 CD release Heroes, Willie Nelson and Family are back with a diverse, heartwarming CD release titled Let’s Face the Music and Dance. Willie has put together some old favorites (Twilight Time, South of the Border) with a balanced combination of jazzy, bluesy, popish/rocky, country and Latin influenced tracks.

Perhaps at 80 he’s reminding us once again to not try to box him in some category of music or style. After all he’s just Willie!

by Pamela Hulse Andrews

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