Red Bluff stranger

The guitar! I first saw it as I stood for the national anthem. A holy relic, a holey wreck, and me, wholly under its spell. The guitar! It was here, at Red Bluff’s fairgrounds, sitting on its little perch, waiting. And that’s when I got it; seeing that guitar for the first time, I felt the enormity of the event and understood what I was about to witness.

The night was perfect: The lights from the carnival spun and twisted, mimicking the subtle and fluid notes of Willie Nelson playing that guitar. And Nelson, having lost his muse for writing country songs some 20 years ago, filled the grandstands with his own brand of jazz. He doesn’t just interpret songs but reinvents them, so that even standards are nearly unrecognizable. Stamped with Nelson’s genius, “Me and Bobby McGee” became a double-time rocker, while “Pancho and Lefty” unfurled like a slow, tortured dream.

Of course, that is a purely academic analysis; his performances are too inclusive and populist to be jazz. Here’s an artist with the No. 1 song, "Whiskey for My Men, Beer for My Horses" on the No. 1 album in the county, and he’s willing to play that song twice in a row because the audience wants to hear it. He waved at fans and traded hats with them and was unembarrassed to please the audience in any way he could. A legend, and deservedly so.