Willie Nelson: It was like the song was written for her
From The Indy archive, 2003: Robert Webb on how Patsy Cline’s 1961 hit ‘Crazy’ was almost lost to music history
Late one night in 1961, Charlie Dick brought a demo of “Crazy” home to his wife, the country singer Patsy Cline. The song’s composer, Willie Nelson (then known as Hugh Nelson), waited anxiously in the car. “I didn’t wanna go in. Of course, Charlie and I had been out drinking, and it was one o’clock in the morning, and I shouldn’t have been there in the first place,” he recalled in an interview. “I’d never met Patsy, but I knew what my wife would have said if we’d come sailin’ in there at one o’clock in the morning, drunk, and said, ‘Hey here’s a songwriter – we’ve got a song for ya’.”
Nelson had a long wait: Dick kept his wife up all night, playing the disc again and again. Despite Nelson’s anxiety, the song had come easily to the struggling writer. “I wrote three songs, ‘Funny How Time Slips Away’, ‘Crazy’ and ‘Nightlife’ all in one week,” he later said. On the first hearing, Cline disliked “Crazy” – especially the way Nelson tugged at the tempo, almost talking his way through it. When her producer, Owen Bradley, suggested that she record it, she retorted: “I’ve heard Patsy Cline, ‘I’ve heard enough of that damn Hugh Nelson’, enough of that damn Hugh Nelson!”
Eventually, she agreed, and she went into the recording studio one sticky August evening. It proved a difficult number to get right. Cline was recovering from a car accident and couldn’t sustain notes. “Her ribcage was real sore, so she couldn’t sing, so we worked on that track for four hours, which was unheard of in those days,” Bradley recalled. “She finally had to surrender and say, ‘I can’t do it’. A few weeks later, she came in and did the vocal in one take.” When Nelson heard his song rearranged around Cline’s crystalline voice, he knew she had cracked it: “It was like it was written for her. You can always tell when it’s been nailed.” The song was pivotal for both the writer and the artist, and is a cornerstone of modern country music.
Cline died two years later when the Piper Comanche taking her home from Kansas City dived into a Tennessee marsh. Before boarding, according to legend, she ordered an iced tea and a shrimp salad in the airport coffee shop. Those who were there swear that the song playing on the jukebox was “Crazy”.