Willie Nelson
With a six-decade career, Nelson has a catalog of more than 200 albums to his credit and is a seven-time Grammy winner. The Texas singer-songwriter earned a permanent position in pop music’s pantheon with songs that combine the sophistication of Tin Pan Alley with the rough-and-tumble grit and emotional honesty of country music. He brought pop and country together on the radio in the early 1960s with unforgettable songs like “Crazy” (Patsy Cline), “Hello Walls” (Faron Young) and others, and by the mid-1970s had become a superstar in his own right as a prime mover of a revolutionary and thriving outlaw country music scene. Nelson’s first album for Columbia Records in 1975, The Red Headed Stranger, catapulted him to stardom around the world. 2013 is shaping up as a banner year for Nelson as his memoir “Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die – Musings From the Road,” published last year, recently made the New York Times’ best-seller list.
