matter how many people have called him a country singer, Willie Nelson is no such thing—he sings spiritual and scary stone-beer-joint blues. Indeed, he's the closest thing to a Ray Charles the white race has yet produced.

The fact that there once was no room in the music business for a white Ray Charles was an irony not lost on Nelson. Early on, the only door that appeared open to a slightly eccentric, Abbott, Texas, redneck who sang off the beat seemed to be the songwriting factories in Nashville. Consequently, for almost two decades, he languished in Tennessee, writing hit songs for other people. Now and then, they'd let him out of his cubicle to cut an album, just to prove to him that his own LPs wouldn't sell. Country singles were what they wanted, and Nelson could write them as well or better than anyone.

That some of his songs were too weird for the country market—songs about a man strangling his lover, for instance—was of no great import. Nashville protects its innocents and eccentrics, and Willie Nelson was both. While he raced through a series of wives and battalions of tequila bottles, Nelson, seldom speaking unless he was spoken to, naively clung to the belief that someday his genius would be recognized. Naturally, it was—just the way it always happens in the movies. (In fact, it'll soon be a movie. The singer now has a multipicture deal with Universal.)

No film, however, could depict the shadowy, haunted world created by Nelson's finest songs: a bleak, burned-out landscape where hope is only a joke, where love is no more than a stolen kiss on a dance floor and hollow betrayal after a night in a shabby motel room, where you're doomed to a life whose single truth seems to lurk in the bottom of a bottle, and where the only reality is the four walls of a honky-tonk. Willie Nelson captured it all in a single line: "I've got a wonderful future behind me." And, mister, he meant it. One can only imagine the sort of Edgar Allan Poe nightmares that seized him in those days when he was really suffering inside—he won't talk about it, and the only clues are those provided in some of his early tunes.

Nelson's emotional—as well as commercial—breakthrough and breakaway from that life came in 1975 with Red Headed Stranger, an album of such awesome depth and impact that I still find it hard to believe it's only a record. For