Long before he was "The Red Headed Stranger," famous Texan Willie Nelson was knocking out tunes on Music Row in Nashville, Tennessee. Nelson wrote the title song to Pretty Paper (Columbia, 1979), his inaugural holiday album, way back in 1963 for rocker Roy Orbison, who took it all the way to #15 on the pop charts. Willie himself recorded the song in 1964, releasing it as a single on RCA. Nelson's version is essentially a countrified interpretation of the arrangement that Orbison recorded a year earlier. But where Orbison approached the song with arch melodrama, in Nelson's hands "Pretty Paper" is a classic country weeper - the story of a lonely (probably drunk, possibly homeless) man, set during Christmas. "He sits all alone on the sidewalk," observes Willie, "hoping that you won't pass him by." But we are much too busy to notice the poor wretch, too busy buying that pretty paper to wrap our Christmas presents. "In the midst of the laughter he cries," Willie warbles as the curtain falls, leaving his protagonist's fate unresolved.

"Pretty Paper" became a holiday standard, covered by artists as diverse as Glen Campbell (1968), Mickey Gilley (1976), Freddy Fender (1977), Carly Simon (2002), Chris Isaak (2004), Reverend Horton Heat (2005), and Asleep at the Wheel (2007). Willie's 1964 version, by the way, isn't easy to come by, though it appears on Rhino's Hillbilly Holiday compilation. Its b-side, however, is even tougher. "What A Merry Christmas This Could Be" was written by noted Nashville tunesmiths Harlan Howard and Hank Cochran, and Nelson never recorded it again (though Ray Price and George Strait did). Both "Pretty Paper" and its flipside appear on Bear Family's boxed set survey of Willie's early years, Nashville Was The Roughest - for a hefty price tag.

Anyway, while Willie's 1964 edition of "Pretty Paper" is fine, I think the definitive version is the solemn rendition he waxed for the Pretty Paper LP, produced by Booker T. Jones (of Booker T. & The MG's). Nelson and Jones had already worked together on Stardust (1978), a collection of Tin Pan Alley standards, and Pretty Paper fits within the same dignified, spare template Jones designed for the earlier album. The title track and a few others (especially "White Christmas" and "Silent Night") are served well by the austere arrangements - often little more than Booker's gentle Hammond organ and Willie's signature nylon-string guitar. After awhile, however, the album drags. Weighed down by the usual holiday standards, Willie starts to sound rote and joyless - never a good sign on a Christmas album.

Basically, I was expecting more than reverence and quietude from this legendary hell-raiser. A jaunty "Blue Christmas" comes close, but ultimately I was disappointed. The closing number, "Christmas Blues," is an instrumental written by Nelson and Jones - the only original song on Pretty Paper other than the 25-year-old title track. It's pleasant but unexceptional, and it fails to rescue the album - for me, at least, if not for Willie's devoted following.

In 1984, Willie recorded another version of "Silent Night" (this one altogether solo) for a series of local Austin charity albums (read more), later reissued as The Texas Christmas Collection (1991). Then in 1995 Columbia compiled Pancho, Lefty, and Rudolph from Nelson's Pretty Paper and Merle Haggard's 1982 album, Goin' Home For Christmas. But, Nelson didn't record an all-new holiday album until 1997, when he collaborated with his piano-playing older sister, Bobbie, on Hill Country Christmas (released on indie label Finer Arts).

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Important Albums

• Pretty Paper (1979)
• Pancho, Lefty, and Rudolph (with Merle Haggard, 1995)
• Hill Country Christmas (with Bobbie Nelson, 1997)
• Christmas With Willie Nelson (1998)
• The Christmas Album (2000)
• 20th Century Masters: Christmas Collection (2006)

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Essential Songs

• Blue Christmas (1979)
• Christmas In Prison (2006)
• El Niño (1997)
• Please Come Home For Christmas (2003)
• Pretty Paper
  • RCA version (1964)
  • Columbia version (1979)
  • Finer Arts version (1997)
• Silent Night (1979)
• What A Merry Christmas This Could Be (1964)
• White Christmas (1979)

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Further Listening

• Christmas Time In The Valley (Freddy Fender, 1977)
• Hillbilly Holiday (various artists, 1988)
• Texas Christmas Collection (various artists, 1991)
• A Very Special Acoustic Christmas (various artists, 2003)

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