All the King's Men

And in a fifty-mile-an-hour wind it would still have been perfect. I found out later that he'd been driving around because he was a bit nervous about working with me. He'd been doing some reading up and was uncertain of meeting me. On the country end, Willie Nelson and I are close, and Merle Haggard too. I've done three or four TV shows with Merle and Willie. Willie's fantastic. He has a guy with a turned-over Frisbee, rolling, rolling, rolling. A beautiful weedhead, is Willie. I mean straight out of bed. At least I wait ten minutes in the morning. What a songwriter. He's one of the best. From Texas too. Willie and I just get along. I know that he's very concerned about the agriculture of America and the small farmer. Most of the stuff that I've done with him has been in that cause. The conglomerates are taking over, that's what he's fighting and he's putting up a damn good fight. Willie's a true heart. Unfazed, unswerving and true to his cause, no matter what. I slowly realized I grew up listening to his music, because he was a songwriter way before he started performing--"Crazy" and "Funny How Time Slips Away." I've always been slightly in awe, in a way, to be asked by people like that, that I've already been on my knees before, "Hey, you want to play with me?" Are you kidding? A case in point was the great sessions at Levon Helm's home in Woodstock, New York, in 1996 to play on All the King's Men, with Scotty Moore, Elvis's guitar player, and D. J ...»