Red Headed Stranger Willie Nelson

• 1 Time of the Preacher 02:26
• 2 I Couldn't Believe It Was True 01:32
• 3 Time of the Preacher Theme 01:13
• 4 Medley: Blue Rock Montana / Red Headed Stranger 01:35
• 5 Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain 02:18
• 6 Red Headed Stranger 03:59
• 7 Time of the Preacher Theme 00:27
• 8 Just as I Am 01:46
• 9 Denver 00:53
• 10 O'er the Waves 00:47
• 11 Down Yonder 01:53
• 12 Can I Sleep in Your Arms 05:21
• 13 Remember Me (When the Candle Lights Are Gleaming) 02:50
• 14 Hands on the Wheel 04:21
• 15 Bandera 02:16
• Total Runtime 33:37

Info for Red Headed Stranger

THE outlaw country album, Red Headed Stranger's bare-bones sound was the perfect antidote to the glitzy Nashville Sound dominating the airwaves in the mid-'70s, and lent an understated majesty to this tale of a wandering preacher in the Old West.

„Willie Nelson's Red Headed Stranger perhaps is the strangest blockbuster country produced, a concept album about a preacher on the run after murdering his departed wife and her new lover, told entirely with brief song-poems and utterly minimal backing. It's defiantly anticommercial and it demands intense concentration -- all reasons why nobody thought it would be a hit, a story related in Chet Flippo's liner notes to the 2000 reissue. It was a phenomenal blockbuster, though, selling millions of copies, establishing Nelson as a superstar recording artist in its own right. For all its success, it still remains a prickly, difficult album, though, making the interspersed concept of Phases and Stages sound shiny in comparison. It's difficult because it's old-fashioned, sounding like a tale told around a cowboy campfire. Now, this all reads well on paper, and there's much to admire in Nelson's intimate gamble, but it's really elusive, as the themes get a little muddled and the tunes themselves are a bit bare. It's undoubtedly distinctive -- and it sounds more distinctive with each passing year -- but it's strictly an intellectual triumph and, after a pair of albums that were musically and intellectually sound, it's a bit of a letdown, no matter how successful it was.“ (Stephen Thomas Erlewine, AMG)

Willie Nelson, vocals, guitar
Bobbie Nelson, piano
Mickey Raphael, harmonica
Bucky Meadows, guitar
Jody Payne, guitars, mandolin
Bee Spears, bass
Paul English, drums
Billy English, drums

Recorded January 1975 at Autumn Sound Studios, Garland, Texas
Engineered by Phil York, Eric Paul
Produced by Willie Nelson

Digitally remastered

Willie Nelson
With a six-decade career and a catalog of more than 200 albums to his credit, the iconic Texas singer-songwriter Willie Nelsonhas earned a permanent position in pop music’s pantheon with songs combining 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), “Funny How Time Slips Away” (Billy Walker), “Night Life” (Ray Price) 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. The Red Headed Stranger, Willie’s first album for Columbia Records in 1975, catapulted the artist to the front ranks of popularity, making his a name familiar in country and city households across America and around-the-world.

A seven-time Grammy Award winner, Willie Nelson has received numerous accolades including American Music Awards, Academy of Country Music Awards, Country Music Association Awards and others. He is a co-founder of Farm Aid, an annual series of fundraising events which began as an all-star benefit concert in 1985 to raise money for American family farmers. He continues to lobby against horse slaughter and produces his own blend of biodiesel fuel. An old-school road-dog troubadour with new school wheels, Willie plays concerts year-round, tirelessly touring on Honeysuckle Rose III (he rode his first two buses into the ground), taking his music and fans to places that are always worth the ride.

The very first musician to perform on the premiere episode of Austin City Limits in 1974, Willie Nelson was inducted into the inaugural class of the Austin City Limits Hall of Fame by fellow Texan Matthew McConaughey on Saturday, April 26, 2014. “There would be no Austin City Limits without Willie Nelson,” McConaughey told the audience assembled at the University of Texas at Austin, the original home of what is now America’s longest-running televised music program.

Willie Nelson, who turned 81 on April 29/April 30, is an American original, a sublime singer, master tunesmith and outlaw country’s most enduring archetype.

This album contains no booklet.