Starred review from April 7, 2008
This impressive, entertaining chronicle of Willie Nelson's life is replete with exactly what you'd expect-honky-tonk, long nights on the open road, whiskey, womanizing and weed-but Texas writer Patoski (Stevie Ray Vaughan: Caught in the Crossfire, Texas Mountains) looks beyond country music trappings to find the funny, talented, determined man who became an unlikely icon. Raised in Abbott, Texas, by impoverished grandparents, Nelson was writing songs about "love, betrayal and cheating" by the age of seven, but was told throughout his life that he couldn't sing, play or keep a beat. As an adult, Nelson worked odd jobs-encyclopedia salesman among them-while selling songs in Nashville; he had an early hit in 1961 with Patsy Cline's "Crazy," and soon began recording for RCA. Fourteen albums later, "with not much to show," Nelson fled to Austin, Texas, a move many viewed as career suicide; instead, it was a launching pad to stardom, propelled by the up-and-coming hippie movement and the strength of his groundbreaking album Red Headed Stranger. Patoski conducted over a hundred interviews for this thorough, well-noted "epic," peopling it with "pickers, gypsies, pirates, vagabonds, wanderers and carneys," including fellow performers like Kris Kristofferson, Kinky Friedman and Leona Williams. Writing with an affectionate country twang, Patoski gives his subject the consideration he deserves in a fine, fluid piece of storytelling that any Nelson fan will appreciate. 8 pages b&w photos.
Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
March 15, 2008
Country singer-songwriter Nelsons performing life turned 50, so to speak, at least a decade back and has been so closely coterminous with his biological being that Patoskis biography basically just chronicles gig after gig and session after session. Spaces between professional musicmaking are filled mostly by driving between them, deal-making, collecting performance fees, and jamming with confreres. The ordinaries of most peoples adult livesmarriage and family, householdingreceive the least attention, apparently because they always got the short end of Nelsons stick. He has been happiest on the road, as he admits, and those who went with him, blood-related or not, came to be his family. As Patoski relates it, Nelsons way is harder on everyone else than it is on him. They succumb to the booze, drugs, bad food, sleep deprivation, and violence of the road. Nelson breezes along, the calm center of a ceaseless storm. Those who cherish his voice will tell you thats how he sounds, too; since such are legion, this book will immediately grab a sizable readership. Those who know only his name may be bored by Patoskis naming of every person who ever impinged on Willie, every country music club in every Texas town Willie has played, every track Willie has laid downbut evoking precious few of them.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)