Read Online Willie Nelson by Joe Nick Patoski - Free Book Online

Wills once said. The comments could have easily been dismissed as jealousy; by 1954 Thompson could brag twenty-one Top 20 country hit singles. The rhinestone sparkles on his western suit spelled the word STAR for a reason. His hottest streak began with “Wild Side of Life,” which would become his signature song, charting number 1 nationwide for three months in 1952.
    Bands like Thompson, the Lone Star Playboys featuring the Booker Brothers and Johnny Gimble, and the Texas Swingsters starring Doyle Brink gave Willie his musical cues. Zeke Varnon was his social mentor. Zeke got Willie to start carrying a pistol, and he roomed with Zeke at the Grandy Courts in Waco. Whenever he would pawn his guitar, Zeke would repay the loan plus interest on Friday so Willie could play the instrument over the weekend before he put it back in pawn again on Monday.
    Willie was riding shotgun in the old black ’34 Model T Ford that they had bought together on the night Zeke drove to the Lone Oak Drive-Inn on the Dallas Highway. The hot Spanish-looking carhop delivering hamburgers caught Willie’s eye. She wasn’t moving around on skates like the other carhops, and there was a pronounced sway to her hips as she walked.
    Martha Jewel Matthews was a looker, a ravishing brunette with a shapely figure, and a natural flirt. She was neither Spanish nor Mexican but rather full-blooded Cherokee. Her sharp facial features reminded Willie more than a little of his mother. She was only sixteen, but she looked old enough to buy beer and could hold her own when it came to tossing a few back. She had been around the block, married to a steel guitar player at age fourteen, only to be widowed at sixteen. She knew who Willie Nelson of Abbott was. They’d once talked at a dance he was playing in West, and they talked some more at the Sunday matinee dance at the 31 Club in Waco.
    But she refused Willie’s request to ride with him and Zeke. She wasn’t going to get in the car with two guys who appeared to be all liquored up. She would have to be properly wooed. “I’m going to come in here one of these nights and I am going to take you home,” Willie promised before they drove off. Two nights later, he pulled into the drive-in alone behind the wheel of the car he had borrowed from Bud Fletcher and drove her home.
    He was smitten. “She was a beautiful girl,” he said. “She had a lot of fire, I liked that. She had long black hair, and I was always a sucker for long-black-haired women.”
    In a matter of months, a justice of the peace at the Johnson County Courthouse in Cleburne married the couple. Willie was nineteen and ready to take on the world with his hot momma at his side.
    Their marriage was fermented in beer joints and honky-tonks. He played music. She loved to dance. They moved in with Mamma Nelson in Abbott while Willie picked up day jobs in Waco and played music at night. But being young and restless, the couple told a few lies so they could put down a deposit and take a drive-away car from Dallas to the West Coast. The experience made them both feel a little bit like the outlaws Bonnie and Clyde, and they drove all the way to Eugene, Oregon, where Willie showed off his bride to his mother and her second husband, Claude Sharpenstein.
    Willie enjoyed being around his mother. They’d never spent much time together when he was growing up, and this was an opportunity to catch up. He tried to plant roots in Eugene, briefly hiring on as a guitarist with Joe Massey and the Frontiersmen, a western band that appeared regularly on the Hayloft Jamboree, a barn-dance show broadcast on KUGN radio in Eugene. Myrle and Martha bonded. But Willie and Martha both missed Texas and left Eugene for Mamma Nelson, Abbott, and Waco.
    Like Myrle, Martha was not a woman to be trifled with, and she proved it time and again, stuffing a biscuit in her new husband’s mouth when she took umbrage at something he said at the breakfast table and, after he came home late and