Well, we’ve come to the last 24 hours or so of voting in the 2023 Rock And Roll Hall of Fame “fan vote,” and I thought I’d start expanding my territory, so to speak, into talking more often about things other than politics, by taking a look at this year’s Rock Hall vote – in part because it’s a pretty fascinating class and the decision-making was definitely not easy.
Is there anyone in the western hemisphere who need to be told who Willie Nelson is or why he deserves to take his spot in the Rock Hall next to his colleagues like Elvis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee?
Nelson would arguably be a reasonable inductee if his career had ended before his first album, having written the staples “Hello Walls” for Faron Young and “Crazy” for Patsy Cline before he was ever taken seriously as a performer by record labels, but that was just the tip of the iceberg.
One of the reasons Nelson has likely been overlooked by the Rock Hall for so long is likely that he’s often seen primarily as a country artist, in spite of the fact that critics have been observing that he’s far more than just that for fifty years, particularly after “Always On My Mind” became a hit for Elvis Presley. After hooking up with Waylon Jennings at the Opry in the mid-1960s Nelson embarked on his “outlaw country” journey, refining (or perhaps one would better say “unrefining,” a similar path taken by his contemporaries comedians George Carlin and Richard Pryor around the same time in the mid to late 1960s) his image from blazer-and-tie standard-issue country artists of the early 60s to the rough-riding dusty laid-back rope-smoker we know and love today.
After making the first stab at a country-themed concept album in the mid-70s with “The Red-Headed Stranger,” Nelson’s next release “Stardust” featured a collection of jazz and blues standards including the title track and an extraordinarily well-received cover of “Georgia On my Mind.” Throughout this period, Nelson continued collaborating with Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, and other artists, eventually joining those two and Johnny Cash in an extraordinarily successful quartet called The Highwaymen, with whom he’d spend about a decade from the mid-80s to mid-90s among other work.
Included in that “other work” was the creation in 1985 of Farm Aid. Inspired by the 1985 Live Aid concert to help with famine in Ethiopia, Nelson along with John Mellencamp and Neil Young, got together and staged the first Farm Aid concert in late 1985. While organizers initially believed a single show would be enough to get the job done, they admitted later that they had woefully underestimated the complexity and scope of challenges facing American family farmerss, and the show became an irregularly scheduled ongoing event, almost-but-not-quite-annually, and has now been staged thirty-four times in the last thirty-eight years, with the thirty-fifth announced but not yet scheduled for 2023 and set to feature Nelson, Young, and Mellencamp along with current Farm Aid directors Dave Matthews and Margo Price and further acts TBA later this year.
With hundreds of songwriting credits to his name spanning across seven decades and two centuries there are few artists alive or dead who have had a bigger impact on rock and roll, and to this day Nelson remains a fan and performer of rock, recording (as one example) a stellar cover of Pearl Jam’s hit “Just Breathe” with son Lukas in 2012 (included below).
It’s honestly ludicrous that Nelson wasn’t in the hall thirty years ago, and long past time that oversight was corrected. Happy to cast my vote for him.
