From his first performance at the age of five, Willie Nelson has been driven to make music and live life on his own terms. But though he is a songwriter of exceptional depth - CRAZY was one of his classics - Willie found success only after abandoning Nashville and moving to Austin, Texas, where he created an instantly recognisable new country music. A craggy-faced, pot-smoking philosopher-romantic easily identified by his signature bandanna, pigtails and battered guitar, Wilie Nelson is one of America’s greatest country singers.

Joe Nick Patoski draws on more than one hundred interviews with Willie and his family, band and friends to tell Nelson’s story from his humble Depression-era roots picking cotton and being raised by his grandparents, to his music education and his flirtations with whiskey, women and weed, from his triumph with million-copy selling albums to his nearly career- ending battles with debt and the IRS and to his ultimate redemption and ascension to American hero.