I don’t remember when I decided I liked Willie Nelson.  Maybe it’s because I spent my Saturday afternoons at the Grand Theatre in Sullivan, Illinois watching western double features, sometimes with a serial and a cartoon or two, sitting next to my friend Chuck Woolen in a pair of seats that he had marked by cutting a small notch in the shared arm rest.

The last time I was in the old theatre, now called the Little Theatre on the Square where they do stage shows and musicals, that notch was still there.

I was a member of the Roy Rogers Riders Club and was distressed that a family trip caused me to miss that Saturday’s “meeting” and a chance to pick up the latest Roy Rogers souvenir—a drinking glass one day, as I recall.

It’s awfully hard to resist a good western movie—High Noon, Shane, the Searchers, The Gunfighter, 3:10 to Yuma, Broken Trail, Open Range, Tombstone/Wyatt Earp, Silverado and the ultimate television series—Lonesome Dove (the book grabbed me like no other with first line: “Augustus McCrae walked out onto the porch to discover his two pigs fighting over a dead rattlesnake.”)

I can’t think of another actor who was made to wear a battered cowboy hat better than Robert Duvall was—

Poe and Faulkner, Salinger and Fitzgerald, Vonnegut and Hawthorne and Melville and Hemingway, the Russian greats that I gave up on by the third page because I couldn’t pronounce their character’s names, and all those other high-faulutin’ writers my English professors thought I should adore never started a book that caught me like Lonesome Dove.  I’ve read stuff from most of those guys but none of them wrote about anybody like Gus McCrae.

The other day, I started thinking about two of Willie’s songs that I always have liked as a sad dialogue by a old cowboy wistfully evaluating his life—and also a gypsy touring artist wondering if he shouldn’t have listened to his mother.

Wonder what it would sound like if somebody did a mix of Willie singing the first part and Waylon singing the boldface lines—–

Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys
Don’t let ’em pick guitars and drive them old trucks
Make ’em be doctors and lawyers and such
Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys
‘Cause they’ll never stay home and they’re always alone
Even with someone they love

I grew up a-dreamin’ of bein’ a cowboy
And lovin’ the cowboy ways
Pursuin’ the life of my high-ridin’ heroes
I burned up my childhood days
I learned all the rules of a modern-day drifter
Don’t you hold on to nothin’ too long
Take what you need from the ladies, then leave them
With the words of a sad country song

Cowboys ain’t easy to love and they’re harder to hold
They’d rather give you a song than diamonds or gold
Lonestar belt buckles and old faded Levis
And each night begins a new day
If you don’t understand him, and he don’t die young
He’ll probably just ride away

Cowboys are special with their own brand of misery
From bein’ alone too long
You can die from the cold in the arms of a night man
Knowin’ well that your best days are gone.

Pickin’ up hookers instead of my pen
I let the words of my youth fade away
Old worn-out saddles, and old worn-out memories
With no one and no place to stay

Cowboys like smoky old pool rooms and clear mountain mornings
Little warm puppies and children and girls of the night
Them that don’t know him won’t like him and them that do
Sometimes won’t know how to take him
He ain’t wrong, he’s just different but his pride won’t let him
Do things to make you think he’s right.

My heroes have always been cowboys
And they still are, it seems
Sadly, in search of, and one step in back of
Themselves and their slow-movin’ dreams

Sadly, in search of, and one step in back of  themselves and their slow-movin’ dreams

Willie and Waylon sang them but Ed Bruce and his wife, Patsy, wrote “Mama…” He first recorded it in 1975 and his version hit number 15 on Billboard’s Hot Country Singles charts that year and into ’76. It’s one of the top 100 country songs of all time. Rolling Stone in 2024 ranked it 69^th on its 200 greatest country songs.

Waylon recorded “Heroes” in 1976 and Willie made it even more popular in 1980 as part of the soundtrack to the Robert Redford/Jane Fonda movie, The Electric Horseman.  Sharon Vaughn wrote it and Willie took it to number one on the country hit list. The Western Writers of America say it’s one of their 100 favorite western songs.

Regardless, my heroes always have been cowboys although I grew up to be one of those who became an “and such.”

Photo credits: Slaker Hats, Open Range)