On April 17, Willie Nelson and agricultural advocate David Senter published an open letter to America's farmers, who stand to be financially impacted by the president's budget and staffing cuts, tariffs and looming trade war. Nelson and Senter express solidarity with anxious young farmers and encourage workers of all ages and political affiliations to stand together and protest against the administration's agricultural funding freeze.
"All farmers — no matter their age, background, politics, location, size, type or production methods — must call on each other in these challenging times," the authors write. "We invite you to call on us, and hope that you will answer when we call on you. We're in this together and it's only together that we will get through."
For Nelson, who turned 92 this week, this solidarity with America's farmers honors a pledge he'd first made four decades ago, when he co-founded Farm Aid with John Mellencamp and Neil Young — the advocacy organization and benefit concert held annually since 1985. By using his celebrity platform and his status as a national icon and treasure to speak out in support of struggling family farms, Nelson is merely continuing to do what he's always done in his nearly seven decades as a professional musician. But though his left-leaning values have long been at odds with traditionally conservative family farmers and the country music hoi polloi, Nelson's ongoing commitment to inclusion and civility is even more imperative in today's highly polarized and divisive climate.
Last Friday, Nelson released his latest record, Oh What a Beautiful World — his 77th solo album and, astonishingly, his 154th overall studio album. A collection of 12 tracks written by veteran songwriter Rodney Crowell, Oh What a Beautiful World finds Nelson in familiar territory: wistful country ballads of love lost and found, open roads and dusty plains. But as it arrives at a moment of geopolitical anxiety, conflict and distrust —when the world seems anything but beautiful — an album of simple, sentimental ballads risks coming across as anachronistic or tone-deaf. Nelson, however, has always strived to represent the nation's highest ideals and to remind his listeners of the beauty and promise of America, even (especially) during times of national crisis.
While country singers have long been preoccupied with God, family and country (with a healthy dose of hard drinking, hard loving and hard living), in the years following 9/11, country music saw a rise of jingoism, chauvinism and racism, as evinced by the appearance of Confederate flags at concerts and festivals. A musical genre that was forged from the collaboration of rural white and Black musicians had come to be associated with racial intolerance. Instruments and storytelling traditions brought to the United States by immigrants from Ireland, Scotland, Britain, West Africa and Mexico were exploited in the name of nationalism and xenophobia.
Country music has historically reflected what is happening in the streets, factories and living rooms of America. From the turbulent protests against the Vietnam War to the suspension of civil liberties during the so-called "War on Terror," country singers from Merle Haggard to Toby Keith could be counted on to speak up for the mythical "real American," who venerated the flag and belittled supposed dissidents. (That Haggard shared common cause with the dope-smoking hippies he parodied in his famous song was mostly lost on his audiences.)
Despite a few, boat-rocking moments — Johnny Cash's Bitter Tears and Loretta Lynn's "The Pill," for example — country musicians have largely toed the traditionalist line, appeasing their overwhelmingly white, Southern and conservative base. Not so Willie Nelson. Throughout his long life in entertainment, Nelson has doggedly challenged country music's rigid obstinacy. He's planted a kiss on the lips of Black country singer Charley Pride onstage in front of a crowd of irate Texans in the late-1960s, condemned the war in Iraq and supported Democratic presidential candidates. He's raised awareness about formerly incarcerated Native American activist Leonard Peltier, supported LGBTQ rights and marriage equality, protested the Keystone XL pipeline and warned about the threat of climate change. Whether criticizing the first Trump administration's policy of family separation at the southern border or promoting the decriminalization of cannabis, Nelson has been consistently to the left of his peers.
Nelson has weathered near-bankruptcy, endured an embarrassing public feud with the IRS and outlived all of his fellow Outlaws and Highwaymen, including (remarkably) Waylon Jennings. He has not become any less of a liberal raconteur in his advanced age, nor has he shied away from associations that are still considered controversial to the country music gatekeepers: endorsing progressive Democratic candidate Beto O'Rourke's 2018 challenge against Republican Ted Cruz for the U.S. Senate, lending his voice to Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter and duetting with Orville Peck in 2024 on the "gay cowboy anthem" "Cowboys are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other."
Despite his long commitment to social justice and political engagement, however, Nelson's music is itself rarely political. 2018's "Vote 'Em Out" is perhaps his only baldly political song, and he's written only two songs in his career that he considers to be "protest songs": the anti-war missives "Jimmy's Road" and "Whatever Happened to Peace on Earth?"
Oh What a Beautiful World does not depart from convention. It is not a political album; it does not attempt to "speak to the moment." The 12 compositions — most of them recorded by Crowell or other artists over multiple decades — find Nelson singing about love affairs and regrets ("I Wouldn't Be Me Without You"), youth and lost innocence ("Banks of the Old Bandera"), and life's simple, durable pleasures ("Stuff that Works," co-written with Guy Clark). The sole lyric on the album that could be considered at all "political" comes on the "Forever Young"-indebted "The Fly Boy & the Kid," with its line: "May you always stay in touch with the things that keep you young / When you're staring at injustice, may you never bite your tongue."
Musically, Oh What a Beautiful World adheres to the style of adult contemporary country/country-lite that has long been Crowell's mainstay, with slick production by celebrated Nashville producer Buddy Cannon and a team of Nashville studio musicians. The heart of these songs is in Nelson's deft, jazz-inflected guitar picking and his distinctive, mellifluous voice — which has lost none of its warmth or sincerity despite getting a little raspier with age. While on his previous studio album, Last Leaf on the Tree, Nelson sounded as though he were sitting face to face with death, Oh What a Beautiful World gives the impression that Nelson may very well have a dozen or so more albums under his belt.
But what does it mean, in this moment of pervasive dread and apprehension, to record an album of contemplative songs about love and longing? To sing the words, "I'm gonna be here for you, baby / I'll be a man of my word," as Nelson does on "Making Memories of Us"? To declare the world to be "beautiful"? By offering, at this time, an unabashedly saccharine collection of songs, Nelson hopes to remind listeners that, despite it all, the world remains wondrous and perpetually capable of healing, that the nation is better than its worst moments, and as he writes in his recent letter, "we're in this together and it's only together that we will get through."
Nelson's substantial oeuvre, from "Crazy" to Oh What a Beautiful World, has always been inextricable from his personal values and ideals. His songs are timeless precisely because they do not speak to a particular "moment"; they speak to the common hopes, fears and aspirations of all Americans. His music represents the moral ideal that many Americans strive toward but usually fall short of. Though it typically avoids the overtly political, Nelson has nonetheless always asked Americans to remember their collective responsibilities to each other, to challenge the status quo and to confront injustice.
This summer, Nelson will embark on his long-running Outlaw Music Festival Tour with Bob Dylan and others, visiting 35 American cities, from Los Angeles to Bangor, Maine. As with his annual Farm Aid and 4th of July Picnic concerts, Nelson will find himself facing a mixed audience of fans who have either discovered him only recently or followed him since his Shotgun Willie era. He'll see farmers, freaks, cowboys and environmentalists. What he'll see, above all, is a changed country music landscape, one that is more diverse and accepting — thanks, in part, to his years-long efforts.
Country music, like the country itself, has and will continue to undergo myriad disputes, upheavals and adversities. There will always be those who claim to speak for "real country music," just as there will be those who claim to represent the "real America." Willie Nelson, conversely, represents an ideal of country music and America that is less exclusionary or obstinate and more welcoming, curious and compassionate, where sometimes the most radical act of resistance is to sing some sad love songs, to look out for each other, and to take a second to appreciate the beauty we take for granted.
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