Growing up with Willie.......................

     Music in the blood.  Music in the house and music in the fields.  Music in the air, in the songs sung by the birds flying through the clear blue Texas sky, in the sound of the wind and the thundering rain.  Music in the heart of my father, a fine fiddler, and my mother, a beautiful singer, who gave birth first to my sister, Bobbie, and wonder child of music, before two years later giving birth to me.
     Mother was Myrle, three-quarters Cherokee Indian, who'd traveled down from dirt-poor Arkansas with Ira, my father, who had followed his father, Alfred, and his mother, Nancy, to Abbott, Texas, where the land was dark and fertile and the farmland offered a degree of hope.
     When I came into this world on April 29, 1933, hope was a sparse commodity.  The Great Depression had hit the homeland hard.  As an adult, I realized that I had grown up in rural Texas during one of the worst periods in American economic history.  But that was something I learned out of books.  What I learned out of life was something entirely different.  What I learned was love.  Like music, love was everywhere I looked and everything I felt.  Fact is, I equated music with love, 'cause to hear or play or sing a song put me in a loving mood.

-Willie Nelson,  It's A Long Story:  My Life