Nelson actually started out as a poet of sorts. At age 6 in Depression-era Texas, he composed a verse in response to the looks he got when he picked his nose and got a nosebleed while standing in front of his church congregation.
“My poem was, ‘What are you looking at me for? I ain’t got nothin to say, if you don’t like the looks of me, look some other way,’” he recalled 84 years later. “That was the beginning.”
He started writing songs soon after.
When he became a superstar in middle age in the mid-1970s, Nelson would be best known for his dynamic live performances and his guitar and vocal stylings.
But as a young man in the 1950s and early ’60s, he was best known as one of the struggling songsmiths who spent their days and nights at Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge in Nashville.
In 1961, three of his songs became hits for other artists: Billy Walker’s “Funny How Time Slips Away,” Faron Young’s “Hello Walls” and, most importantly, Patsy Cline’s “Crazy,” a song that would become a signature for her and both a financial boon and an ego boost for him.
“Because Patsy liked it, I was poor no longer,” he writes in the book. “This particular ‘Crazy’ convinced me, at a time when I wasn’t a hundred percent sure of my writing talent, that I’d be crazy to stop writing.”
He would go on to make other writers’ songs his own in the same way. He didn’t write most of the biggest hits associated with him, which came in the 1970s and ’80s: “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” “Always on My Mind.”
He almost seemed to retire from songwriting when fame finally came to him in the Outlaw Country era, enjoying the chance to record his favorite old standards or the compositions of hot young writers.