Red Headed Stranger

As a songwriter and performer, Willie Nelson played a vital role in post-rock & roll country music. Although he didn't become a star until the mid-'70s, Nelson spent the '60s writing songs that became hits for stars like Ray Price ("Night Life"), Patsy Cline ("Crazy"), Faron Young ("Hello Walls"), and Billy Walker ("Funny How Time Slips Away"), as well as releasing a series of records on Liberty and RCA that earned him a small but devoted cult following.

Recorded at Lake Tahoe in 1978, WILLIE AND FAMILY LIVE effectively documents the laid-back, freewheeling approach Nelson and his band take to live performances. Unlike many country acts that strive to play the same set with the same note-for-note precision every night, Nelson's band prefers to live on the edge, wringing surprises out of every note and beat. This "free jam" aesthetic explains why Nelson is popular among Grateful Dead fans, and aficionados of this musical approach will be most likely to enjoy WILLIE AND FAMILY LIVE.

Greatest Hits (& Some That Will Be) was released in the fall of 1981, summarizing a remarkable seven-year stretch of extraordinary success that began when the iconoclastic Red Headed Stranger, Willie Nelson's first album for Columbia, became a smash hit not long after its 1975 release. From that point on, Nelson became an American popular music icon and a fixture at the top of the country charts, something that was all the more remarkable because he rarely played it safe: he sang pop standards, jammed like the Grateful Dead, recorded tributes to heroes like Lefty Frizzell, and did duet albums with both mentor Ray Price and fellow maverick Leon Russell.

Pioneer of the anti-establishment outlaw image, who wrote hundreds of songs and became a spectacular country showman.