Stardust

First noticed as a songwriter in the early 1960s, Willie Nelson went on to build a career as a country singer and the leader of outlaw country. Yet his musical perspective might be called ‘all-American music,’ seen through the Texas outlook in which he grew up. Songs such as ‘Funny How Time Slips Away,’ which helped establish him as a songwriter, and ‘Crazy,’ famous through Patsy Cline, have a modern quality close to popular standards. ‘Night Life’ has a deeply rooted blues-and-soul feeling akin to Ray Charles. Texas, after all, is a place that nurtured many kinds of vernacular music: Western swing, blues and rough-edged honky-tonk among them.

Nelson's 1978 Stardust is a collection of standards, beginning with Hoagy Carmichael's title song and ‘Georgia on My Mind,’ and including work by Irving Berlin, Duke Ellington and the Gershwin brothers. These are not grand orchestral arrangements, however, but simple, everyday performances by Nelson and his regular band. Booker T. Jones produced. His organ lies through the spacious music like a comfortable thin sheet, while Nelson seems to spin each long-sung lyric anew. Different in flavour from a standards album by a jazz or popular singer, it lets time flow slowly, soothed by Southern hospitality.

For Nelson, it may have been a reaffirmation of country's history of gaining musical sophistication through jazz and popular music. His broad musical outlook also became known beyond the music world to the general public, raising his reputation dramatically. I recall that it was from this album onwards that people began to call him ‘the high priest.’