“There’s a family Bible on the table,
Each page is worn and hard to read.
But the family Bible on the table
Will ever be my key to memories.”
When I was in eighth grade, I suddenly discovered that some of the music my grandparents had grown up listening to was amazing. I don’t remember exactly what triggered it, but I’m sure the fact that I had access to LimeWire was instrumental. Around this time I also learned that music used to be sold on slabs of plastic called vinyl, and that my grandmother, along with many other people her age, had hundreds of the seemingly obsolete artifacts tucked away in storage—and they wanted to get rid of them! So I spent a few afternoons with her going through stacks of albums, soaking up wistful stories about wine smuggled into concert venues, pot smoke wafting so thickly it was safer to sit on the ground, and how Kris Kristofferson used to tell the stories behind his songs while he retuned his guitar.
Family Bible was one of the (many, many) country albums given to me by my grandmother. At the time, I was more interested in the music that inspired some of my favorite indie rock acts, so, while I took all those country albums with me to please my grandmother, I didn’t listen to them very much.1 I relished the Beatles and the Beach Boys and let Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings collect dust.
It was sometime in college that I came around to country music. It’s funny, because I had all those albums sitting there and had listened to a few of them, but the idea of country that was firmly lodged in my mind was the trendy redneck bro country that has dominated pop country radio for so long. I don’t like that at all, and since it was called “country” I mistakenly assumed that I wouldn’t really enjoy the forerunners of that sound. But bro country is a far cry from the wildly creative and wide-ranging sounds of the “outlaw” country genre that Willie Nelson spearheaded, or even the smooth “Nashville sound” he and other pioneers were distancing themselves from. Their independent, outsider movement drew on a rich heritage of traditional blues, folk, gospel, and early rock ‘n roll that provided a firm foundation from which to launch their system-defying movement.
But my zeal for this period is only partially pertinent when discussing Nelson’s Family Bible, an album that came after that initial zeitgeist had birthed a slew of classic albums in the 1970s and then begun to fade. That movement gave Nelson and others the freedom to kick back and record whatever they wanted. For Nelson in 1980 that meant recording an unsophisticated album of old-timey standards; a slick half-hour of unpretentious gospel-tinged twang. It’s a minimalist piece that showcases two musicians in tune with one another and making music for the joy of it, something that working within the system would have precluded because these songs don’t lend themselves to radio play.
The song ‘Family Bible’ existed long before the album bearing its name. In the late 1950s Willie Nelson was in his twenties, working as a disc jockey in Washington state. He honed his singing and songwriting skills at local clubs, and even managed to record the non-album single ‘No Place for Me’ at the radio station where he worked in 1957. This initial release did not achieve much popularity and soon Nelson returned to his home state of Texas before reemerging a few years later with his debut album …And Then I Wrote (1962). During this early period, he also wrote a song called ‘Family Bible’. But as a struggling young songwriter, Nelson chose to sell the song to make ends meet. It was first released as a single in 1960 by Claude Gray, with Nelson eventually recording a version of it for his 1971 album Yesterday’s Wine.
Now, Willie Nelson has made a lot of albums of varying style and quality. He had recorded twenty-four of them before making Family Bible, which is like, five times more than the average musician makes in their careers.2 At a glance, Family Bible appears to be one of those mediocre throwaway albums that Nelson pumps out fairly often—it’s got an unassuming cover (compare it to the stylized covers of classics like Shotgun Willie or Red Headed Stranger), a brief tracklist of age-old standards and hymns, and only two performers. It may very well be true that Willie and his sister Bobbie cooked this up in a weekend. But considering they’ve played thousands of concerts together, their familiarity allows them to pull off a relaxed, back porch aesthetic with ease even though the ability to do something so simple yet so beautiful was earned through many years of hard work.
The sound is achieved exclusively by Willie’s famous guitar, Trigger, Bobbie’s piano, and their voices. It’s wonderfully modest, the kind of thing that can’t be done unless it’s earnest. The immediacy of the performance basically puts these two in your living room with you while the record spins, and the simple chords and sparse mix lend themselves to conveying the plaintive sense of yearning that the lyrics express. It’s essentially what would today be considered an “acoustic session” or something along those lines. Although it does not include the range or sophistication of some of Willie’s more well-regarded albums, I find that its themes of family, faith, and the passage of time, as well as its charming, homespun sound are resonant and make for splendid easy listening.
Favorite Tracks: Stand by Me; There Shall Be Showers of Blessings; Family Bible.
1. There were a few notable exceptions. I listened to a greatest hits compilation of Kris Kristofferson quite a bit before my grandmother and I went to see him live. I also took a liking to the punk attitude of Mr. Cash, as Walk the Line had come out only a couple years before my musical awakening and his star power has never really faded.
2. Never mind that Nelson is about to release his 71st studio album in early 2021.