Album cover for Red Headed Stranger (1975)

Introduction

Taking up Willie Nelson’s iconic 1975 album Red Headed Stranger is a prospect both daunting and straightforward. It is the landmark murder ballad concept album, and launched Nelson into superstardom. Despite thematic and stylistic differences, it is like Marvin Gaye‘s What’s Going On? or Van Morrison‘s Astral Weeks, to the extent that it represents an artist’s determined focus on a singular and unlikely vision. All three artists challenged conventional wisdom–or at least the record company version thereof–with these works. All three gambled and won big. In a National Public Radio piece a few years ago Glen Hansard said of Morrison’s Astral Weeks, “It made me realize that so much of what makes music great is courage…” Nelson wasn’t on the ropes in the same way that Morrison was at the time, but artistic courage is part of what I hear in Red Headed Stranger. The other thing I hear is a murder “meta-ballad,” which is why we’re here.

Willie Nelson

There are other murder ballad albums, but most are collections, and not  a single, continuous story told through multiple songs. We’ve listened to Sheila Clark’s album length take on the Tom Dula legend, which is half songs directly about the Dula-Foster affair and half traditional ballads on similar themes. We’ve also drawn heavily in the past from Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads, a landmark recording in its own right, and more recently, we’ve found some excellent versions of a few ballads incorporated in Mark Erelli and Jeffrey Foucault’s Seven Curses.

Nelson takes a core murder ballad, “The Tale of the Red Headed Stranger,” written by Carl Stutz and Edith Lindeman, and creates the story behind the song–the story that isn’t there–developing a continuous narrative, through a mix of original compositions and borrowed songs. Nelson tells us what happened before and what happened after the Stranger’s deadly encounter with the yellow-haired lady.

Fred Rose

Red Headed Stranger draws out the common murder ballad themes of violence, remorse, repentance, and redemption, giving each its due. Songs with no obvious murder ballad in them get transformed in meaning through falling into this larger story. I was familiar with “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” written by Fred Rose, long before I was familiar with Red Headed Stranger. I never guessed, even in hearing some of Nelson’s performances of it, that it played such a role in an album-length murder ballad. I doubt I’m alone in that.

In today’s post, and we’ll introduce the album, and explain its genesis. We’ll also explore the core song that served as Nelson’s starting point. In the next post, we’ll explore the religious and gender themes that pervade the album. We’ll wrap up our post on Nelson’s work with a more recent interpretation of the entire album.

Now the preaching is over and the lesson’s begun

You can listen to the entire album as a YouTube playlist beginning here. The full lyrics to the album are here.

Poster art from the movie version of Red Headed Stranger

At the start, Nelson’s “Preacher,” who becomes the Red Headed Stranger, learns that his wife has begun an affair with another man. The Preacher struggles with this shattering revelation. He tries to forgive her, but fails, and tracks down his wife and her lover and kills them. Nelson’s storytelling style is rather spare, like his music here–all he says is that the wife and lover “died with their smiles on their faces.” Nelson doesn’t always avoid depicting violence, but he does a good job letting the listener fill in the gaps at the right times. This is ironic in some measure, in that the premise of the album is to fill in gaps in another songwriter’s story.

The Preacher descends into bitter remorse for what he’s done. He rides on (and, effectively, in to the original song). In town he meets a yellow-haired lady, who covets the bay horse the Preacher/Stranger trails behind his own “raging black stallion,” and chats him up at a saloon. As they leave the saloon, the lady makes a grab for the bay, and the Stranger shoots her dead. Her attempted horse theft exonerates the Stranger, and he rides on (and, effectively, out of the original song). He finds the redeeming love of a woman again in the later songs. This time he and the new woman “dance with smiles on their faces,’ paralleling the death of his lost wife and her lover.

The Making of Red Headed Stranger

Nelson learned the original core song of the album early in his career, working as an afternoon DJ in the mid-50’s at a radio station in Texas. He would play kids’ songs in the early afternoon, just before naptime, and Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith‘s “The Tale of the Red Headed Stranger” was a favorite for that crowd. It’s not set at a particularly soothing, pre-naptime tempo, if the 78 recording below is playing at the right speed, but you can hear how it might have been a favorite in the golden age of movie and radio Westerns. Nelson often sent the song out with an on-air dedication to his daughter, Lana.

Lana would often request that he sing the song to her at bedtime, perhaps contributing somewhat to Nelson’s more relaxed take on the tune.

Twenty years later, Willie was driving from Colorado to Texas with his wife, Connie, cooking up ideas for his next album. Having just wrapped up recording with Atlantic Records, he had a contract with Columbia, and an advance. The bright lights of Denver provided some of the initial inspiration, and the album took preliminary shape on that road trip. When they arrived in Austin they were ready to head into the studio. Nelson used a few studio musicians and minimal production on the album, even ordering the audio engineer to remove the audio equalization work he had done on Willie’s vocal tracks. Nelson spent about $4,000 of his $60,000 advance from Columbia on the record, deploying the rest of the money for other needs of his band.

Waylon Jennings

The recording industry executives and several others who heard the recording before release thought it was a demo tape. It didn’t rise to the production standards they were expecting, and they were not sure how to promote it. Others, including Waylon Jennings, championed Nelson’s work on the album, and it launched, rather stratospherically. It became his first album to go Gold, shooting past to Double Platinum, and rising to #1 on the Country Album Charts (#28 overall in the States). Not bad for a week in the studio. After some debate, “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” became the first single, and went on to become a signature classic for him.

Most of the songs on the original 15-track album had been written by others, and none of those were developed with the idea of further embellishing “The Tale of the Red Headed Stranger.” (List of tracks and songwriters here.) With the introduction of the “Time of the Preacher” theme and an astute ear for compatible material, Nelson put together a distinctive and powerful narrative of sin, suffering, romance and redemption. We’re going to turn to those themes in the next post.

“The Tale of the Red Headed Stranger”

Edith Lindeman Calisch

As I mentioned above, the original “Tale of the Red Headed Stranger” was written by Carl Stutz and Edith Lindeman. Stutz was a Richmond, Virigina radio announcer and Lindemen (Edith Elliott Lindeman Calisch) was an entertainment critic for the Richmond Times-Dispatch. They originally wrote the song for Perry Como, and it was one of a handful of songs they composed. Lindeman’s Times-Dispatch obituary from 1984 tells some of the story.

“I was just sitting at home one night, playing with the idea of colors,” Mrs. Calisch recalled. The redhead she had in mind was her husband. She set the ballad in Blue Rock, Montana, gave the hero a “raging black stallion” -and introduced him to a “yellow-haired lady” riding a bay.

Perry Como

It’s a rather innocuous, if colorful, beginning to a murder ballad, but the song presents enough romance and mystery to get us started–and, as we’ve noted before, death is an excellent plot device. Lindeman had started writing songs basically on a bet with her husband that she could do better than the radio tunes they were subjected to while driving through Kentucky on one particular roadtrip. The color scheme and the American West provided the starting point for the song. Whatever back story for the Stranger she had in mind, she mostly kept it to herself, but there was clearly ample range in which to roam.

Perry Como truly missed out, it seems, but others were ready to tell the tale. John D. Loudermilk, a cousin of The Louvin Brothers (Ira and Charlie Loudermilk) recorded the song in the late 50s, probably after Arthur Smith’s version. Spotify users outside the United States can listen to Loudermilk’s version. (I’m in the U.S., so I can’t.)

Rockabilly musician Glen Glenn recorded the song around the same time, with the same up-tempo take, which he acknowledges here:

Although a number of artists have played the song, and it has a certain currency within the Cowboy music genre, Nelson has effectively taken ownership of it. More broadly, however, Nelson has supplied the default narrative to what’s really going on in and around the song. Further attempts to embellish the story would have to reckon with Nelson’s in some way. This is ultimately the reason why I’m focusing this week on the album and not the song. However much this focus disrupts our normal m.o., it is the album that is novel and distinctive. The song is a solid Western, and ably tells its tale, but its full redemption lies in Nelson’s hands, as we’ll hear more about in our next post.

Notes

Willie Nelson: An Epic Life, by Joe Nick Patoski (2008: Back Bay Books) provides a more detailed account of the genesis of the album. Nelson also provides details in oral histories and interviews such as those here and here.