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A heavenly trip: Sister has been by Nelson's side for musical journey

A heavenly trip: Sister has been by Nelson's side for musical journey image A heavenly trip: Sister has been by Nelson's side for musical journey image
Parent Issue
Day
15
Month
June
Year
2008
Copyright
Copyright Protected
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Donated by the Ann Arbor News. © The Ann Arbor News.
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MUSIC

PREVIEW

Willie Nelson

Who: Iconic singer-songwriter, presented by the Ann Arbor Summer Festival. British neosoul man James Hunter opens.

What: Country music.

Where: Hill Auditorium, 825 N. University Ave.

When: 8 p.m. Thursday.

How much: $35-$70.

Details: 734-764-2538 or www.annarborsummerfestival.org.

Country legend Willie Nelson comes to Hill Auditorium on Thursday.

A heavenly trip

Sister has been by Nelson's side for musical journey

BY ROGER LELIEVRE

Ann Arbor News

What can we tell you about Willie Nelson you don’t already know?

Maybe a couple of things.

He turned 75 in April.

He’s just released two CDs’ worth of music, looking back at his musical legacy. The box set, “One Hell Of A Ride” (a four-disc, 100-song collection that chronicles recordings from 1954 to 2007) joins “The Very Best Of Outlaw Country” (20 tracks spanning the 1970s to 2007) in marking the career of the iconic American hitmaker.

His biography, “Willie Nelson: An Epic Life,” was also released this spring.

And finally, he performs Thursday night at the University of Michigan’s Hill Auditorium as part of the Ann Arbor Summer Festival. James Hunter opens.

Nelson politely declined the honor of talking to The News, but when his publicist offered us a chance to chat with his 77-year-old sister, Bobbie, who has played in his band for 35-plus years and who just released her debut CD, we couldn’t resist. She spoke to us from Texas, where she and the band were taking a break from touring in Europe before heading out on the road.

“It was all Willie’s idea,” Bobbie Nelson said of the CD. “Willie had written a couple of wonderful songs ... while we were off at Christmas time he said, ‘Let’s go into the studio and record these before we go back on the road.’” She agreed. The results can be heard on “Audiobiography,” out on Justice Records.

“I had been requested to do an autobiography but told the people I could best do it with music,” Bobbie Nelson explained. “My life and Willie’s life has been totally music. So that’s what we did.”

The disc includes boogie-woogie piano classics like “The House of Blue Lights” and such ragtime numbers as “12th Street Rag” and “Down Yonder.” She also offers her renditions of Johnny Mercer’s “Laura,” “Deep Purple” and Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust” as well as her new favorite tune, the Latin pop hit “Sabor a Mi.”

“Sister Bobbie, we can’t lose a note of this,” she recalls her brother saying after listening to tapes of the session, which included some of the tunes the Nelsons grew up with and played over the years.

“Music was just our way of life,” she said of her childhood with grandparents who were both students of music and taught music to her and her brother. “It was our entertainment. We worshiped with music. We socialized with music. It was everything.” By the time Willie and Bobbie were in their teens, they were playing honky-tonks together in a band with Bobbie’s husband and their guitarist dad, Ira Nelson. But when her husband died in a car accident, leaving Bobbie with three young sons to raise on her own, she gave up music to attend a college to learn secretarial skills.

In 1972, brother Willie, freshly signed to a recording deal with Atlantic Records, invited Bobbie to join him for a recoding session and then asked her to join his band. "I was just so happy to be playing music with Willie again," she recalled.

Despite having a solo CD to her credit, Nelson said she has no plans to mount her own tour:

"I'm pretty busy and I love playing with Willie. Gee, I don't to want miss a show ever in my life playing with Willie," she laughed. "I'm like everybody else - I adore him.

"Playing with Willie is like a trip to heaven," she said.

Roger LeLievre can be reached at 734-994-6848 or by e-mail at rlelievre@annarbornews.com