From childhood, he has admired the straightlaced singing cowboy Gene Autry; he’s also the world’s most famous pot-smoking hippie. His band is called The Family, and he’s well known for his long-term friendships and deep loyalty; his own family life was often in shambles. He was instrumental in reviving an unpolished, rugged country style by rejecting the pop-music inspired “Nashville sound”; he also hit the top of the pop charts singing American songbook staples. 

There are often tensions and contradictions in the lives of creative geniuses. In the recently released authorized docuseries Willie Nelson and Family, one can follow the tension between Willie’s love of community and tradition on the one hand, and his unfettered individualism on the other. Throughout his life, Willie has appreciated the need for deep friendships, family, community, and the traditions—particularly musical ones—that are passed down by them. But flowing out of his hippie mentality, he also has a compelling drive to do things his own way and an inability to adjust himself to the expectations of others. That combination was just what country music needed when Willie first emerged.

Most people of my generation associate Willie primarily, or even exclusively, with marijuana—he’s known now as a symbol of his way of life as much as he is for his music. The series gives pot its due, as well as Willie’s unique persona and philosophy of life. But the story it tells leaves no doubt that Willie should be known and appreciated first and foremost as an incredible musician whose ambition, celebrity, and persona—though all strong—never overtook his simple love of singing a good song.

Willie’s childhood contained elements that would be with him the rest of his life—broken marriages, strong familial love that overcame them, and music. His parents split up shortly after his birth, giving up him and his older sister Bobbie (with whom he would form perhaps his strongest, lifelong bond) to their grandparents, who were not wealthy but were musical. They bought Willie his first guitar and Bobbie a piano, and they gave both of them opportunities to perform. Aside from singing gospel songs in church, Willie’s first gig was playing for a polka band in a dance hall. As he grew up, he played in a number of bands and also bounced from job to job until he found more regular work in radio stations. After some limited songwriting success, he moved to Nashville with his first wife and young children in 1960.

At the opening of the third episode, Willie explains that great music defies trends. It “never goes out fashion,” even if it undergoes surface changes like the seasons. The country music executives in the 1960s didn’t quite buy that. They were focused on following the fashion, and at that time, the fashion was “The Nashville Sound,” which mimicked popular music with effusive vocals, lush strings and choirs in the background, and comfortable lyrics that appealed to sophisticated middle-class listeners. When Willie arrived in Nashville, he was immediately put in that stultifying box. He found instant success as a songwriter (most importantly penning the existential “Hello Walls” and the Patsy Cline hit “Crazy”) but his own albums did not take off.

With his relaxed vocal phrasing, behind-the-beat manner of singing, and the unique sound of his classical guitar, Willie’s style called for less production and less pretension than Nashville was used to. But the record executives didn’t think anyone wanted to listen to simpler songs in the rougher folk, western, and honky-tonk styles that had defined country music in the preceding decades. It didn’t occur to the decision-makers that someone could restore that style of music by reinventing it and breathing new life into it. Willie had always loved old-school country stars like Autry, Jimmie Rodgers, and Ernest Tubb, but he had also been inspired by non-country artists. His guitar style was heavily influenced by Django Reinhardt, and his singing style by Frank Sinatra. Willie wanted to sing in the tradition of that old country music, but he was going to do it his own way.

His chance came after a move back to Texas in 1972, a (second) divorce, and a house fire shook him out of a period of creative complacency. In Austin, he found people more willing to experiment outside of the boxes developed by marketing gurus. It was a place where “the hippies and the rednecks got along,” thanks in part to shared love of a music that was a blend of rock, folk, and country sounds. Success came in direct proportion to the amount of control Willie got over his records. He was able to use fewer rental session musicians and more of his own band in his records (his sister Bobbie being one of the first and most important additions), and he was given the freedom to start making the kind of music he wanted. And after he signed a contract that gave him complete creative control, he immediately made his multi-platinum breakout album that is a perfect example of Willie’s traditionalism and innovation.

Red Headed Stranger is a concept album that tells the story of a preacher who, “in the year of ‘01” was driven out of his mind by a cheating wife. He murders her and her lover, and wanders (and kills again) on the road until, at a point of desperation, punctuated by an instrumental rendition of the redemptive hymn, “Just As I Am,” he finds peace again in a new love and a new home.

The series emphasizes the album’s sparse instrumentation and minimal production. “Ain’t nothing much on the record except a whole lot of soul,” observes Ray Benson. Willie recalls that he spent only $2,000 of his $60,000 recording budget. While the presenters are right to describe that approach as trailblazing and innovative, they don’t do much to stress how traditional of an album it is, too. Its simple, “man-with-guitar” sound was a throwback, and Willie has written elsewhere that he had country artists of the ’40s in mind when he recorded it. Many of the tracks on the record were traditional tunes or ones written decades earlier. The best example is one of Willie’s most recognizable songs—“Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” which was written in the ’40s and recorded by some well-known artists, including Roy Acuff and Hank Williams. But the song—and the style of music it came out of—was on its way to obscurity had Willie not picked it up, refashioned it, and made it timeless.

The documentary’s treatment of Red Headed Stranger is somewhat odd, presenting it out of chronological order so it can be used to describe Willie’s musical style. But that approach loses the sense of drama you get when you’ve just followed Willie out of Nashville to find his own sound. The series also downplays the controversy that the album sparked. One Columbia executive called it “a piece of shit” that sounded like it had been recorded in a “living room,” and there was some resistance to releasing it.

The Troublemaker is another album highlighted in the series that serves as a great example of Willie’s imaginative engagement with the tradition he inherited. The gospel album was a staple of any country recording artist of the ’60s and ’70s. But these records were often phoned-in affairs that checked off the “gospel” box; none of them had the life and freshness of The Troublemaker. The album came out of a New York City recording session, the first to feature his sister Bobbie on piano. As they relate in the interviews, the two were singing songs they had sung in their grandparents’ home as children, but the songs were given the Willie treatment—rendered in a honky-tonk style with an instrumentation (Bobbie on piano and Mickey Raphael on harmonica) that would define his sound. The album alternates between up-tempo numbers that sound like they’re coming out of a particularly spirit-filled revival tent, and slow and ponderous ones reflective of a man looking for peace, with a cheeky original song in the middle poking fun at those who wouldn’t want a long-haired hippie singing about Jesus. Willie had found a way to get a record full of Baptist hymns not only to the top of the country charts, but also onto the Billboard 200 pop charts.

The success of albums like these was a sign of the new life and new direction the traditional country sound was starting to find. For a tradition to be more than stale repetition, it needs imagination that can find fresh ways to bring out its merits and make it new each morning. Artists like Willie, Waylon Jennings, and others showed that they could find commercial and artistic success they were free to experiment, to incorporate elements of blues and rock and roll, and to bring their individual musical identities into conversation with folk, honky-tonk, and western swing styles. It was music that sounded authentically country, but also new and exciting. Needing a catchy name for the trend, marketers called it “outlaw country,” a term Willie didn’t care for, as it seemed designed simply to put him in a different box. The series perhaps doesn’t dwell quite as much on the Willie and Waylon era as one would expect. The producers seem eager to show how Willie went on to transcend country. But his contributions to the genre, which always seems to have trouble with its identity, can’t be understated.

Given that Willie had rebelled against the pop-music-inspired sounds of Nashville, it is ironic that he would go on to find as much cross-over success as any country artist of his time in the late ’70s and ’80s. He recorded American songbook staples on his Stardust album (which again infuriated the record bosses, who wanted “more of that outlaw shit,” now that they knew it would sell) and then covered several pop and rock songs on Always on My Mind. The key to his success was that he never tried to mimic anyone else’s sound or become a pop musician—whatever he was singing, it was authentically Willie. He never ceased to be a country artist; he just showed that a country artist could sing a good song, no matter where it came from.

“The life I love is making music with my friends”: so goes Willie’s 1980 hit “On the Road Again.” The second half of the series focuses heavily on the “friends.” As he found success, Willie brought his friends up with him. Unlike so many music stars, there are no great falling outs to be covered, but many lasting bonds. He recorded a multitude of duets—with country superstars like Merle Haggard, old friends whose moment had long passed, like Hank Snow, and pop stars like Julio Iglesias. And of course, he and his buddies (who also happened to be the “Mount Rushmore of country music”) combined to form the super-group, The Highwaymen.

He also found new, lasting friendships in this period. After recording “Seven Spanish Angels” with Ray Charles, the two became very close. (Willie recalls the difficulty of trying to play chess with Charles, since both sets of pieces in Charles’s set were the same color!) Willie is shown visibly moved as Charles, nearing the end of his life, sang at Willie’s 70th birthday concert. At Charles’s request, Willie sang “Georgia on My Mind” at his funeral.

It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that Willie’s friends also came out of the woodwork for him during his headline-making trouble with the IRS. When the government auctioned off his belongings, many items were purchased by old friends (even the tour bus driver) and given back to him. Of course, Willie ended up getting out of the debt by doing the thing he did best—singing songs.

Neither emphasized nor ignored in the series is how the other side of Willie’s character—his independence and unwillingness to change for others—contributed to his rocky family life. He had three divorces, all brought on because Willie had moved on to a new love. His second wife found out about a longstanding affair only when she received a hospital bill for the birth of Paula Nelson. And an unsteady upbringing may have contributed to the alcoholism of his son Billy, who took his own life in 1990. That is just one example of the good amount of pain in Willie’s life, despite his carefree persona.

The waltz through Willie’s life includes many other interesting vignettes on all the things one would expect—his legendary guitar, Trigger (so worn that it now has a second sound hold), his smoke-filled tour bus (his regular quantity of weed was so high that it once got him suspected of trafficking), and his creation of Farm Aid. And there is mercifully little about his very progressive politics. The producers wisely chose to focus on stories that all, in some form, revolve around the bigger, unifying theme of his life—making music with his friends.

When Willie came onto the scene, country music needed someone who appreciated a song more than a production. It needed someone who loved the distinctive country tradition. And it needed someone with the imagination to innovate outside of the established boundaries. As odd as it may have seemed, country music needed a hippie.