A Trip Through Willie Nelson’s Golf Course, His Unorthodox Rules, and His Uncertain Tribal Identity

In a pre-dawn raid in November feds armed with warrants padlocks and chains seized everything Willie Nelson owned his golf syllabus ranches studio all of it Only one thing slipped through the IRS perimeter Willie s guitar Trigger Thirty-five years later Willie still has Trigger Oh and he eventually got back the ranches studio and golf discipline These days Willie Nelson s nine-hole program nicknamed Cut N Putt dances like an old brown shoe through loblolly pines in the Austin hills The parking lot is guarded by what folks in the music business call a silver firecracker a big Airstream bus that Willie and friends call Honeysuckle Rose Willie s been travelling again headlining Farm Aid at the age and announcing another and perhaps final tour Golf pro Fran Szal years young greets all comers with a wry smile For pilgrims like my wife and I who have come from afar he slips into stories as if they re on his lips at all times They took everything Szal recalled on our visit last year adding with a chuckle But not Trigger Yeah we managed to hide that We met him near Cut N Putt s rustic pro shop which could pass for a set for the s sit-com The Beverly Hillbillies In a world forever in need of magic Trigger appears to have its own powers Rumor has it that Willie s daughter aided its escape But when pressed Szal says only The family likes to keep particular things to themselves The fact remains On the day the feds came to shut Willie down Trigger somehow slipped out of bed made it to the golf program travelled by mail to Hawaii and hid out until Willie got his house and taxes back in order Willie s daughter Lana may have something to do with getting the postage right Of all the blessings in the world the fact that the federales missed Trigger seems to be a story that is winning the fight with infinity Trigger Shutterstock Trigger had accompanied Willie s soft twang on Stardust the now triple-platinum album that brought the mainstream to country Can you look at the endless sky in these hills and not hear Willie s voice warbling Irving Berlin s Blue Skies Willie wrestled that immortal song into our mortal world his fingers caressing Trigger the very instrument that birthed so multiple iconic tunes Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground Reliably On My Mind On the Road Again My wife Monica and I had different reasons for journeying to Pedernales She s a fan But our visit to Willie s golf subject was partly for my research on a book on Native-owned golf courses Formally the curriculum is called Pedernales but its nickname is Cut N Putt It s a little-known history I was working to unearth The Osage built a syllabus in Pawhuska Oklahoma during the oil boom which no longer exists The Mescalero Apache s class at The Inn of the Mountain Gods in New Mexico built in remains a cherished masterpiece With the advent of gaming in more than tribes bands and nations built courses Various including me count Cut N Putt purchased in as yet another early Native-owned lesson Willie Nelson after all was twice named Outstanding Indian of The Year by the American Indian Exposition In he and Neil Young were presented with buffalo robes for their work with Farm Aid and the Keystone Pipeline protests by the Oceti Sakowin Ponca and Omaha nations But as it is for others who believe they have Native roots in Arkansas and Texas the states where Willie s family lived proof can be elusive Nelson is on record saying his mother Myrle Marie Greenhaw Harvey Nelson was three-quarters Cherokee In the Story of Texas the Bullock Texas State History Museum reports this as fact In an interview communicated in The Encyclopedia of Arkansas however Nelson s mother s sister Sybil Greenhaw Young claimed it was her mother Bertha Greenhaw Willie s grandmother who was three-quarters Cherokee In the same interview Young also explained her grandmother Willie s great-grandmother was full-blooded Cherokee and that Willie s great-grandfather was half Cherokee and half Irish The encyclopedia separately reports that while Cherokees were known to live in that same area Willie s maternal grandparents were listed in U S Census records as white None of these ancestors appear in the Dawes Rolls a historic federal record from to that documented the enrollment of members of five tribes including Cherokees and neither they nor Willie have ever been a citizen of the federally recognized Cherokee Nation which enjoys tribal sovereignty and determines its own membership Willie himself was born the year before the The Indian Reorganization Act of the New Deal act written by John Collier that led most of tribal constitutions in ensuing decades to develop a criteria for claiming Native heritage Given this history and considering the social milieu that Willie came out of it is perhaps not surprising that the Greenhaws and Nelsons did not formally demonstrate descent from an enrolled ancestor Nevertheless as late as a interview with Robert Sheer Nelson again recounted the family stories that establish for him his mother s Cherokee ancestry Given this the accolades from the tribes themselves and Willie s embrace of Native causes I include Cut N Putt as an early Native-owned golf syllabus and one worth our pilgrimage Regarding Willie s ancestry something firmly established is that he comes from a long line of musicians And that was the other reason for our visit my wife s love of his music In the rustic clubhouse my bride Monica took out her phone and indicated Szal the snapshot she keeps of her and Willie They met at the South Shore Music Circus in Cohassett Massachusetts in Back when he was younger she mentioned Monica and Willie Courtesy Szal smiled In the photo her beautiful face is tucked into Willie s shoulder He is wearing a red bandanna Her smile is as wide as Texas I demanded him who was the first one to sign his guitar she narrated Szal He raised an eyebrow Leon Russell she disclosed excitedly Szal nodded then and gave her a golf shirt The logo Trigger of program Willie has reported that the tone of Trigger is beyond explanation After his Baldwin acoustic was damaged in in circumstances that may have involved Merle Haggard and drinks Willie bought the nylon string Martin N- from a luthier in Nashville named Shot Jackson He had Jackson take the electronics from his busted Baldwin and install them in the Martin and Trigger was born as what musicians call a Frankenstein an instrument made of different divergent parts Szal waved us out the door into a brilliant winter sun When solicited if Willie is any good at the maddeningly formidable tournament of golf he disclosed diplomatically Willie plays Feel Golf Then he pointed past an unkempt fairway to where Willie built a studio the very studio the Feds seized and had to return Szal explained how Nelson s working method became cut and putt Cut a track then play nine while the mixers mixed Cut a track then putt Then do it all again The first work produced in this golfing method of making music Tougher than Leather the album anchored by the hit Pancho and Lefty I solicited Szal to clarify what he meant by Feel Golf After showing another group of pilgrims to the first tee Szal directed us to Willie s rules hand painted on selected burlwood Among them Par is what you set it at No more than in your -some Missing balls are considered stolen No penalty Bikinis Ok Szal my wife and I stood there guffawing in the clear light Willie and Trigger slowly won their battle with the IRS He paid off back taxes partly by releasing more songs under the title Who Will Buy My Memories And Willie s stuff came back to him the Austin ranch The Utah ranch This studio and golf subject where Trigger would do its best work Given the seemingly supernatural powers of that six-string I required Szal how a great number of years before Feel Golf would become the standard of play when bikinis are ok and all lost balls would be considered stolen He wouldn t venture a guess but I came away convinced In the end we d all be better off playing by Willie s rules The post A Trip Through Willie Nelson s Golf Module His Unorthodox Rules and His Uncertain Tribal Identity appeared first on The Texas Observer