Word: roading
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...after the songs had died away and most of the passengers' heads were nodding over their chests, that I got to know Janey Cray. I was sitting awake, thinking of my next day's story, and she was sitting awake in the seat across the aisle, watching the road. She was a grandmother, I found out, and she was traveling with three friends--a neighbor, a sister, and her best friend since second grade. She was overweight, she had deep crows' feet around her eyes, and her throat rasped when she laughed. But her clothes were put on carefully...
Willie Nelson, man of the road, pays a call at the White House...
...category they settled on was outlaw, and Willie and other road-hardened individualists like Waylon Jennings earned it in ways that went beyond unorthodox musicianship. They disdained the studded and rhinestoned outfits of Nashville stars for scruffy clothes. They ducked the record-company celebrity mills for a life of carousing and missed appointments. Willie also met and married a red-haired country singer named Shirley Collie. Though the marriage was to last ten years, it was nowhere near as harmonious as the records they occasionally cut together. Once when Willie came home drunk, Shirley, who knew a little kung...
Counting their Malibu Beach place, the Nelsons now have three residences, but Willie's true home is still the road. He travels 250 days a year, crisscrossing the country from bastions of the Bible Belt to glittering emporiums like Las Vegas' Golden Nugget, with forays to outposts like New Jersey's Meadowlands stadium, across the Hudson River from Manhattan, where he recently played before a youthful crowd of 62,000 (most of them fans of the headline act the Grateful Dead). He carries with him his "family" of 25 musicians, technicians and hangers-on, who use nicknames...
...which has made Willie a millionaire on paper. He could afford to ease off before risking a fall from the charts, to quit the road and spend more time with his family (he and Connie have daughters, ages 8 and 5, scarcely older than the four grandchildren that stem from his first marriage). But Willie knows the touring will never end. First and last he is a honky-tonk troubadour. To see him on a bandstand is to see a man truly in his element. He is hunched over his battered Martin acoustic guitar, nodding and smiling as the applause...