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Remembrances of Willie Nelson's 4th of July Picnics
Willie Nelson, born April 30, 1933 in Abbott, Texas, had been struggling to make it as a songwriter in Nashville, with moderate success, when his house burned down, prompting him to move back to Texas. But there weren't enough successful musicians buying songs in Texas in those days, so Willie was obliged to start performing his own music to make ends meet. In the early 1970s in Austin, he swung a gig at the Armadillo World Headquarters, a rock 'n' roll venue, and amazed everyone with the positive response he received from the longhaired hippies in attendance. Perceiving a new audience/market, Willie invited his friend Waylon Jennings to share the stage with him in Austin, and amid the applause of rockers the Progressive Country Movement was born.
A true visionary, Willie sought to bring his diverse fan base all together for one big party, and so in 1973 threw the first Willie Nelson Fourth of July Family Picnic, a three-day event held on a piece of land beside the Hill Country town of Dripping Springs, Texas. The music he presented there was incredible. Besides his own band of sister Bobbie Nelson, Paul English, Bee Spears, Jody Payne and Mickey Raphael, Willie invited country music luminaries/friends who became staples of the picnic lineup: Waylon Jennings, Leon Russell, Kris Kristofferson and Rita Coolidge, Jerry Lee Lewis, Jerry Jeff Walker, and many others who kept the music going till dawn.
The free spirits of the hippies and rockers turned the picnic into a Woodstock-like event, with unabashed nudity, sex and drug use, enticing many a straight-arrow cowboy to smoke their first doobie and join in the skinnydipping at the waterhole. Violence was at a minimum, with the rednecks and peaceniks showing a surprisingly high tolerance for the other's culture.
The July 4th picnics became an annual, increasingly popular event, with subsequent picnics held in the South Texas towns of College Station, Liberty Hill and Gonzales, and another at the truck stop-turned-town called Carl's Corner. Now a Texas institution that even sparked a national awareness of Lone Star beer, the picnics and their father were honored by the Texas Senate in 1975, who renamed the Fourth of July Willie Nelson Day. The picnics were literally the biggest parties in Texas, and would have gone on forever as such, but as Willie's popularity became national, he did the unthinkable and moved the picnic to New Jersey one year. After that Willie decided to use the earning potential of the "picnic" to help financially strapped farmers, and founded Farm Aid, along with John Mellencamp and others. Farm Aid replaced the picnic for several years, and was held in various Midwestern locations. But at long last the picnic came back to Texas, and this year, 2003, the 30th Annual Willie Nelson Fourth of July Family Picnic is scheduled to occur at Two Rivers Canyon near Spicewood Springs, Texas. I'll be there!
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