Willie Nelson: The Song He Sold for Fifty Dollars

Sometime in the late 1950s, broke and working as a radio DJ and part-time music teacher around Houston, Willie Nelson sang his guitar teacher, Paul Buskirk, a song called "Family Bible." Nelson needed money more than he needed the song. He sold it to Buskirk outright for fifty dollars and the settling of a bill he owed him, no royalties, no ongoing credit. Buskirk got singer Claude Gray to record it in 1960, and it went to number one on the country chart. Nelson didn't see a dime of the publishing, and for years his name wasn't even officially attached to the writing credit.

He's said since that he had no real regrets about it, that if he could write one hit he figured he could write another. He turned out to be right, and that's the part of the story worth sitting with: a songwriter who sold away one of his best songs for grocery money and then simply kept writing better ones. It's also as blunt an argument as exists for understanding what you're signing before you sign it, a lesson plenty of songwriters learn the expensive way.

A publishing deal, not a record deal

Nelson moved to Nashville in 1960 hoping to get signed as a recording artist. Instead, the door that opened was a songwriting contract with Pamper Music, and for the next few years his real success came from other people's voices, not his own. Faron Young took "Hello Walls" to number one for nine weeks in 1961. Ray Price, whose band the Cherokee Cowboys Nelson had joined as a bassist, recorded "Night Life." And "Crazy," a ballad Nelson reportedly pitched at Tootsie's Orchid Lounge to Charlie Dick, husband of Patsy Cline, became one of the defining vocal performances in country music when Cline recorded it in 1961. It remains one of the most-played jukebox songs of all time.

If you're a songwriter whose own performing career hasn't taken off yet, Nelson's early Nashville years are a useful reminder that writing hits for other people's voices isn't a consolation prize. It's a real skill, and for Nelson it paid the bills for a decade before anyone outside the industry knew his own name.

A voice Nashville didn't know what to do with

The strange part of Nelson's early career is that the town happy to record his songs had no idea what to do with him as a singer. His phrasing sat behind the beat in a way that felt closer to jazz than to the polished, string-laden Nashville Sound producers wanted, and his own records through the sixties sold modestly at best. Labels kept trying to smooth him into something more conventional. It never quite worked, on either side.

A burned-down house and a way out

In 1969, Nelson's house in Ridgetop, Tennessee, burned to the ground. By his own account he ran back into the fire mainly to save his guitar, the nylon-string Martin he'd already nicknamed Trigger. Rather than rebuild in Nashville, he took the fire as a kind of permission and moved back to Texas, where the audiences and the musicians around him cared less about matching a house sound. Albums like "Shotgun Willie" in 1973 and "Red Headed Stranger" in 1975, a stripped-down concept record Nelson largely self-produced against label objections, became the foundation of what got called outlaw country, alongside Waylon Jennings and later Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson. It was, in effect, Nelson finally recording in the phrasing and space that Nashville had spent a decade trying to iron out of him. It made him a star in his own right at forty-two, on songs and a sound he'd been trying to get people to hear for years.

Losing almost everything to the IRS, and writing his way through it

In 1990, the IRS hit Nelson with a bill for roughly $32 million in back taxes, tied in part to a failed tax shelter his advisors had put him in years earlier. The agency seized instruments, master tapes, real estate, and other assets, though notably not Trigger, which friends reportedly hid before it could be taken. Nelson's response was to keep working: he released "The IRS Tapes: Who'll Buy My Memories" in 1992, an album whose proceeds went directly toward the debt, effectively selling his own recordings back to pay off the government. The case finally settled in February 1993.

It's an extreme version of a problem plenty of working musicians know in smaller form: a career built on royalties and touring income can look solid for years and still come apart fast if the business side isn't handled with the same care as the songs. Nelson's way through it wasn't legal maneuvering so much as doing what he'd always done, writing and recording, and letting the work itself cover the debt.

What's worth taking from his career

Nelson has spent close to seventy years writing in a voice that mostly refused to bend toward whatever the industry around him wanted at the time, whether that meant a Nashville producer trying to polish his phrasing or an IRS bill trying to take the guitar out of his hands. He's still touring and recording into his nineties, still playing the same battered Martin he pulled out of a burning house.

If there's one thing to take from him as a songwriter, it might be this: know the value of what you've written before somebody else decides it for you, and if you do end up giving a song away too cheap, the answer isn't to stop writing, it's to write the next one. If you've got a song you know is worth more than fifty dollars and need the right partner to help you prove it, go find your co-writer.

Sources: Songwriters Hall of Fame: Willie Nelson, Britannica: Willie Nelson, Wikipedia: Family Bible (song), Wikipedia: Crazy (Willie Nelson song), Wikipedia: Shotgun Willie, Rolling Stone: Flashback, Willie Nelson Settles IRS Tax Debt