To Lefty From Willie

Sound DNA

• Folk
• Singer-Songwriter

• warm
• laid-back
• southern

About

Maybe it’s just the stature of his myth, or the tragedy that suffused his life, but there are times when Hank Williams overshadows Lefty Frizzell just a little <i>too</i> much. So consider Willie Nelson’s slim but effective tribute to Frizzell—1977’s <i>To Lefty From Willie</i>—both as a testament to Frizzell’s genius, and as a canny expenditure of the cultural capital Nelson had earned with 1975’s best-selling <i>Red Headed Stranger</i>: Nelson was famous now—very, very famous—and planned to use some of that fame directing attention to a recently departed songwriter he felt needed more recognition. “Now’s the time to expand your market, not contract it,” Nelson’s record label would tell him, according to the singer’s memoir, <i>It’s a Long Story</i>. Were it not for Frizzell, Nelson said in response, he wouldn’t have a market in the first place. Some of the picks are inevitable (“Mom and Dad’s Waltz,” “Look What Thoughts Will Do,” “Always Late (With Your Kisses)”) and some are less so, including a few songs—“I Never Go Around Mirrors,” “That’s the Way Love Goes,” “Railroad Lady”—recorded in the dim and otherwise forgotten years just before Frizzell died. Anyone familiar with his music—both as a writer and interpreter—could probably understand what Nelson heard in him: Frizzell was sweeter than he was mischievous and funnier than he was blue, with a direct but lightly philosophical touch—<i>look what thoughts will do…</i>—that Nelson more than made his own. If Williams was the honky-tonk troublemaker, Frizzell was his companion grinning slyly from the bar—two sides of the same country-music coin. And, as with so many of Nelson’s album, what began as an impossible proposition from a market standpoint—<i>an album of Lefty Frizzell covers? In 1977?!</i>—became a regular, old-fashioned hit.

via Apple Music

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