Willie Nelson - Red Headed Stranger

One of the most audacious gambles in the history of country music, and one of its greatest triumphs. When Willie Nelson delivered the finished recordings of Red Headed Stranger to Columbia Records in early 1975, the label's president thought he had been handed a demo. The album had cost just twenty thousand dollars to record at Autumn Sound Studios in Garland, Texas, with Nelson's seven-piece touring band. Columbia's Nashville producer Billy Sherrill called it "a piece of shit." An infuriated Waylon Jennings called the label's president a "tone-deaf, tin-eared sonofabitch." Nelson, who had negotiated complete creative control as a condition of signing with Columbia, insisted the record be released exactly as he had made it.

He was right. Red Headed Stranger hit number one on the Billboard Country Albums chart, its sparse, mournful recording of Fred Rose's 1947 standard "Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain" became Nelson's first number one single and crossed over to the pop charts at number 21, and the album went on to sell over two million copies and achieve double platinum certification. Texas Monthly called it "an album so remarkable that it calls for a redefinition of the term 'country music.'" CMJ later called it "the Sgt. Pepper's of country music, the first record to follow a coherent theme instead of merely compiling radio singles." In 2002 it was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

The album tells the story of a fugitive preacher on the run after killing his unfaithful wife and her lover, its brief poetic lyrics and spare arrangements drawing from older material by Fred Rose, Wolfe Gilbert, and Juventino Rosas alongside Nelson originals. Bobbie Nelson's piano and Mickey Raphael's harmonica are the only embellishments in a production so minimal it functions almost as negative space, the power of the music residing, as one critic observed, entirely between the lines. It is a Western saga, a folk record, a country album, and something that belongs to none of those categories entirely. Fifty years on, it still sounds unlike anything else.