It wasn’t only a nation album. It was the nation album. It ended one period in nation music, and started a brand new one, whereas occurring to outline the period it based, and to outline nation music for generations. It revolutionized the nation style, and continues to revolutionize the style at the moment, nonetheless performing as a main affect and a compass level for numerous nation artists. It was each groundbreaking in its scope, and aggressively and delightfully easy in its imaginative and prescient.
It was Willie Nelson’s 1975 album Crimson Headed Stranger. And to many, it’s thought of the best nation music album of all time.
Fifty years in the past this month is when the world was first handed a replica of Willie Nelson’s magnum opus, although it’s truthful to say that the world didn’t precisely know what to do with it firstly. It could take some time for nation music to get up to the genius of the work. However as soon as it did, one thing nearing a common consensuses behind the significance of the album emerged.
Willie Nelson first received a stage of artistic autonomy by shifting on from RCA Information in Nashville to the rock label Atlantic the place he launched the albums Shotgun Willie (1973) and Phases and Levels (1974). Then Willie moved to Columbia Information the place he was given full artistic management, thanks partly to the savvy work of his supervisor and lawyer Neil Reshen. With that newfound freedom, Willie Nelson wished to keep away from any affect of Nashville on his new album, and determined to file at a small studio in Garland, TX known as Autumn Sound.
The primary session on the studio was truly free since Autumn Sound was trying to increase its publicity on the time. After 5 extra days of recording and a further day of blending, the whole studio price got here to $4,000—a fraction of what labels have been used to spending on the time. As a substitute of going with a giant manufacturing, Willie acted as producer himself, stripped the whole lot again to his singing, his guitar Set off, sister Bobbie Nelson on piano, and sparse contributions from his backing band of Bee Spears (bass), Mickey Raphael (harmonica), Jody Payne (guitar and mandolin), and Paul English (drums).
When Willie Nelson turned the file into Columbia, they notoriously informed him it sounded unfinished, and like a demo. Columbia president Bruce Lundvall despatched the album to Nashville producer Billy Sherrill so as to add further instrumentation and polish to it. Sherrill remarked, “Did he make this in his front room? It’s a bit of s–t! It feels like he did this for about two bucks. It’s not produced.”
Supervisor Neil Reshen and Waylon Jennings traveled to New York Metropolis to fulfill with Bruce Lundvall personally and act as emissaries for Willie and Crimson Headed Stranger, with Waylon calling Lundvall a “tone-deaf, tin-eared sonofabitch” for not understanding Willie’s imaginative and prescient.
However regardless of Columbia’s protests, Willie Nelson insisted it was the completed product, and resulting from his 100% artistic management, Columbia needed to acquiesce. Crimson Headed Stranger was launched to the general public, nonetheless reluctantly. Although some pin the discharge date as Might 1st, all we all know for positive is that it was launched in Might of 1975, and maybe nearer to the center of the month. Promotion wasn’t precisely sturdy since Columbia was satisfied they have been sitting on a dud.
A dud it was not. The understated, stripped-down nature of the album stoked the creativeness of nation followers, provided an alternative choice to the overproduced “Countrypolitan” sound of nation music on the time, and even received an viewers past nation music as effectively. Although the album is given credit score as a landmark launch of nation’s “Outlaw” period, in whole Crimson Headed Stranger is a decidedly traditionalist album.
Crimson Headed Stranger wasn’t nation music’s first idea album—and even the primary idea album in Willie Nelson’s personal catalog—however it was the primary time many nation followers have been launched to a liner story unfolding in a rustic album. It adopted a preacher who discovered that his spouse had been dishonest on him, and so he enacted revenge earlier than discovering redemption. Willie dreamed up the idea after a visit to Colorado.
One attention-grabbing wrinkle to the album is that Willie Nelson used largely previously-written materials to flesh out his idea. Although he was already well-known as a songwriter at the moment for writing nation requirements comparable to “Good day Partitions” and “Loopy,” Willie selected nation classics like Fred Rose’s “Blue Eyes Crying within the Rain,” Eddy Arnold’s “I Couldn’t Consider It Was True,” and Hank Cochran’s music “Can I Sleep in Your Arms” to inform the story. Willie wrote only a few of the album’s tracks.
The outcomes spoke for themselves. “Blue Eyes Crying within the Rain” turned Willie Nelson’s first #1 music. Crimson Headed Stranger turned his first #1 album. Although Willie had been round for a few years, the world lastly woke as much as him by way of the album, and when Willie had entered his 40s.
In 1986, a movie based mostly off of the album starring Willie Nelson was launched. It was the manufacturing of the movie when Willie constructed his Luck, TX Western city on his property simply west of Austin.
50 years later and on the age of 92, Willie Nelson continues to be releasing data. However arguably none of them have topped Crimson Headed Stranger, from Willie Nelson or anybody else. Every time any “Best Nation Albums of All Time” listing is populated, you’ll be able to depend on Crimson Headed Stranger being at or close to the highest. And there’s no purpose to imagine that fifty years from now, this received’t nonetheless be the case.
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Buy Willie Nelson’s Crimson Headed Stranger
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