Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die by Willie Nelson

Willie Nelson’s new book, Roll Me Up And Smoke Me When I Die, takes us on an amusing romp through the past and present of one of country music’s oldest living stars. The memoir reflects the buoyant and straightforward, if slightly quirky, musical style of its writer … and it covers a lot of ground quickly and simply.

Sick of making his money by picking cotton in Abbott, Texas, Nelson started playing guitar. He performed everywhere and anywhere he could get a gig. He eventually headed to Nashville—“it was the marketplace,” he writes, for country music in the early ‘60s.

Nelson wrote a number of hits, scoring for Faron Young, Billy Walker and Patsy Cline. But Nashville focused on churning out soft, highly polished, heavily produced tunes that didn’t fit with the ascendant counterculture. Nelson’s pool of hits for others dried up, and he left Music City at the end of the ‘60s. He even left music for a while … and went into hog-farming.

“Why hogs?” asks Nelson, anticipating your—and any reader’s—question. As he tells it, “I had been raising hogs all my life. . . even won some blue ribbons.”

Maybe his heart wasn’t in it this time around. The animals escaped. He had to track them down one by one. Then he committed the mortal sin of “having the hog feeders and the water trough too close together in the hog pen.”

Let’s just say he wasn’t successful with his pigs.

But Willie Nelson could still write songs. In the early ‘70s, he helped spearhead a musical insurrection known as “outlaw country.” The Outlaws pointedly created a different sound from Nashville’s, a more bare-boned, less slickly produced music. With comrades-at-arms like Waylon Jennings, Nelson and the Outlaws also began to take full ownership of their creative process and produce their own albums.

With his image change and new freedom, Nelson’s work took on new vitality. In 1975, he released Red Headed Stranger, a remarkable concept album of sorts, complete with recycling themes. Most of the songs involve only Nelson’s clear, natural, slightly worn voice and guitar. By removing virtually every bit of extraneous sound, Nelson demonstrated the beauty that stems from simplicity. Many of the songs are so spare that when other instruments do appear—or even more surprising, other voices, suddenly flanking Nelson on a song like “Can I Sleep In Your Arms”—the listener finds a new richness in harmonica, piano or vocal harmony.

America loves its rebels, so it’s no surprise Outlaw country turned out to be a highly successful commercial move. Nelson and his friends consistently cracked the country Top 40. They occasionally crossed over to the pop charts too, and several of Nelson’s albums sold more than a million copies. Nelson showed a knack for successful collaborations (with country stars like Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash … and even pop stars like Julio Iglesias) and unusual ideas. He recorded Stardust, a collection of old standards, with the help of famed Memphis soul man Booker T. Jones.

During the next few decades, Nelson acted in movies and recorded at a prolific rate—in his lifetime, he’s put out more than 100 albums. His career encountered a hiccup when the IRS came looking for millions of dollars in unpaid taxes, but unlike The Rolling Stones, forced to flee England to avoid the taxman, Nelson stayed put (though he gave up a lot of his possessions). He kept recording, paid off his debts. Though his Outlaw affiliation made him a star, when bad times came, he used less romantic attributes—persistence, hard work, building relationships—to weather the storm.

Unlike many of those who give us pop star autobiographies or memoirs, Nelson pens a slim volume at 169 pages. He writes informally, talking about whatever pops into his head. If the reader doesn’t like something, he or she needn’t worry—Nelson will jump to something else shortly. He excels at free association, in fact. At one point, he starts a story about covering the Beatles’ song “Yesterday,” then moves along to tales about Julio Iglesias to Ray Charles to Leon Russell, all before you can say “outlaw.”