Willie Nelson 2008

Willie Nelson 2008, age 75, hand-drawn, holding his cherished Martin N-20 Classical guitar sold to him by Shot Jackson from Nashville in 1969.

He named it “Trigger” after Roy Rogers’ horse.
Constant strumming with a guitar pick over the decades has worn a large sweeping hole into the guitar’s body near the sound hole. The N-20 has no pick-guard since classical guitars are meant to be played fingerstyle instead of with picks. Its soundboard has been signed by over a hundred of Nelson’s friends and associates, ranging from fellow musicians to lawyers and football coaches. The first signature on the guitar was Leon Russell’s.

Willie Hugh Nelson (born April 29, 1933) is an American musician, singer, songwriter, author, poet, actor, and activist. The critical success of the album Shotgun Willie (1973), combined with the critical and commercial success of Red Headed Stranger (1975) and Stardust (1978), made Nelson one of the most recognized artists in country music. He was one of the main figures of outlaw country, a subgenre of country music that developed in the late 1960s as a reaction to the conservative restrictions of the Nashville sound. Nelson has acted in over 30 films, co-authored several books, and has been involved in activism for the use of biofuels and the legalization of marijuana.

In the 1950s he worked as a disc jockey in Texas radio stations and a singer in honky-tonks. During that time, he wrote songs that would become country standards, including “Funny How Time Slips Away”, “Hello Walls”, “Pretty Paper”, and “Crazy”.

During the mid-1980s, while creating hit albums like “Honeysuckle Rose” and recording hit songs like “On the Road Again”, “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before”, and “Pancho and Lefty”, he joined the country supergroup The Highwaymen, along with fellow singers Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson.

Nelson is widely recognized as an American icon.

He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1993, and he received the Kennedy Center Honors in 1998.
In 2011, Nelson was inducted to the National Agricultural Hall of Fame, for his labor in Farm Aid and other fund raisers to benefit farmers.
In 2015 Nelson won the Gershwin Prize, the lifetime award of the Library of Congress.

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