Willie Nelson: Pretty Paper, 1979

The red-headed stranger played it straight on his first Christmas record

Willie Nelson became an instant country superstar with 1975’s Red Headed Stranger, and notched up five consecutive top two country albums in less than three years with his traditional-ish sound. He then made a hard left turn with 1978’s Stardust, a collection of American songbook standards produced by Booker T. Jones, which became a monster smash, hitting #1 and spending, I kid you not, an entire decade on the country albums chart. For his first Christmas album, the following year’s Pretty Paper, Nelson went back to Jones in the captain’s chair — fitting, since apart from Nelson’s own title track, a 1964 hit for Roy Orbison, and the closing Nelson/Jones instrumental “Christmas Blues,”  the album is nothing but holiday standards. They kept the same approach, too, a hushed, acoustic, jazz-combo-meets-country instrumentation: lots of piano, a little harmonica — by now, it’s nearly a Nelson trademark. Nelson’s inimitable skills as a singer and interpreter are on sterling display here, as he takes the title track back from Orbison and nearly makes many of these standards his own: “White Christmas,” on which his primary backing is from a church organ, is much warmer than usual, while “Blue Christmas” gets an almost-jaunty Western swing take. Independent of the holidays even, this is one of the strongest entries in Nelson’s massive catalog.

[Originally written for Rock and Roll Globe in 2019.]