Ten years ago, [Willie Nelson] couldn't even get himself arrested in Nashville, despite the fact that he was the best songwriter to hit Music Row since Hank Williams, the king of them all. Everybody else was having hits with Willie's songs … but Willie's own records went nowhere. Good writer, no singer, said Nashville's establishment.

Now he rules country music. Oddly, the album that brought him the wide audience he now enjoys was not composed entirely by him. He wrote only five of the fifteen cuts on Red Headed Stranger, the brilliant allegorical album that forever changed Nashville's idea of what is and is not country music. (pp. 45-6)

Willie has compressed a fair amount of history in what I think is his best work—his three "concept" or storytelling albums. The first, the early-Seventies Yesterday's Wine, is an obscure masterpiece. Wine was so far beyond anything out of...