Willie Nelson ‘shook this country to its senses’ to help family farmers, rural Texas

AUSTIN — A lot of people don’t realize where their food comes from, Willie Nelson said Friday night on the front porch of the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library.

“When they had breakfast this morning, did your food come from a farmer out here who raised his own? Is he feeding you? Are you getting it from some farm-to-market? Or did some trucker drive it in from 150 miles away,” he said.

“These are things that you need to think about,” Nelson said. “How you can help the local communities, help the local farmer – because he’s trying to make it.”

That night the Texas music icon collected yet another honor – this time, for his efforts to save the family farm.

The star-studded, rain-threatened gala was a $1,000-a-plate fundraiser for a new rural studies and research program named in his honor at the LBJ School of Public Policy at the University of Texas at Austin.

Over the past half-century, Nelson probably has done more than any other political or cultural figure to raise awareness that rural areas need help, Johnson’s two daughters, Lynda Johnson Robb and Luci Baines Johnson, said in interviews with The Dallas Morning News.

“He made a difference in the whole country’s recognizing how we need to support all parts of it and not just people who live in the cities,” Robb said.

Forces such as corporate agriculture and large-scale farming methods are “massive” and continue to threaten the landscape, water supplies and economies of rural areas, Johnson said.

“Willie Nelson came and shook this country to its senses and said, ‘By gosh, we’ve got to care for the hand that feeds us.’ He reminded us how important they (farmers and ranchers) are,” she said.

At the gala, attended by politicians such as former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke and former Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes, Nelson held forth briefly on what it was like to grow up in the small, Central Texas town of Abbott, north of Waco.

Everyone knew everyone, he told presidential historian Mark K. Updegrove in a 10-minute conversation on a stage under a tent.

In 1933, when Willie Hugh Nelson was born, the cotton-farming hamlet had about 300 residents.

“The population never changed. Every time a baby was born, a man left town,” he said to laughter and applause.

‘Somebody had to do it’

When Updegrove credited Nelson with transcending the country’s current fissures of rural versus urban, Republican versus Democrat and conservative versus liberal, Nelson responded with another quip.

“Thank you. As far as Roe vs. Wade, I’d rather row than wade.”

Nelson recounted how he and two other famous musicians – Neil Young and John Mellencamp – founded Farm Aid in 1985. At the time, the number of family farms in the United States had plunged to 2 million, from 8 million, Nelson biographer Joe Nick Patoski has recounted.

The annual concerts, modeled on Live Aid events to assist Africa, have raised more than $70 million to sustain a family-farm model of agriculture.

“Farm Aid maybe had a lot to do with taking care of some of the farmers when they really needed help,” said Nelson, clad in pigtails and a black western shirt and suit. “Somebody had to do it. We were there. We did it.”

As a teen, Nelson “wore the distinctive blue Future Farmers of America jacket with pride,” Patoski wrote in his 2008 book Willie Nelson: An Epic Life. “If not for music, his involvement with Future Farmers of America in high school would have eventually led him down the agrarian path. The least he could do for all of the folks back home was help.”

At the LBJ School, the new Willie Nelson Endowment for Uplifting Rural Communities will fund research and student fellowships on sustainable agriculture and water, food insecurity, resilient energy and natural disaster recovery.

Just as Farm Aid raised popular awareness of rural America’s crisis, the new Nelson endowment hopes to plant seeds about overlooked regions with rising public-policy intellectuals, explained Sheila Olmstead, a professor of public affairs at the LBJ School.

Each year’s incoming class at the LBJ School includes 150 master’s degree candidates “who are just incredibly dynamic individuals who go on to make really important decisions in leadership positions in their communities,” she said.

Former Georgia gubernatorial hopeful Stacey Abrams, former Colorado Gov. Bill Owens, former Social Security Administration chief Kenneth Apfel and this year’s LBJ School commencement speaker, Securities and Exchange Commissioner Jaime Lizárraga, are among its alumni.

“The more that those young leaders know about the challenges of rural America, the better,” said Olmstead, an environmental economist who studies water and rural land use.

Policy research funding has been tilted in favor of urban issues, she noted, so the new Nelson endowment could help right the balance.

Nelson and his wife Annie D’Angelo listened as country-rock singer Eric Church opened the gala with renditions of “Funny How Time Slips Away” and “A Man Who Was Gonna Die Young.”

Though the Nelsons left the event early, country pop-R&B singer Sam Hunt, alt-country singer Elle King and famed Aggie crooner Lyle Lovett also performed.

Late last month, Nelson was fêted over two days at a Hollywood Bowl bash celebrating his 90th birthday and in Brooklyn on Nov. 3, he’ll be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Updegrove noted.

The historian asked Nelson whether when he was young he imagined he could make a living as a musician.

“I never did, really,” Nelson shot back. “My expenses keep going up.”