R.I.P. Bobbie Nelson, country music pianist, sister to Willie
"The best musician on stage," Willie Nelson said of his sister and frequent collaborator
Bobbie Nelson, country music pianist and older sister to Willie, has died.
Nelson was born on January 1, 1931. She and Willie were raised by their paternal grandparents in Abbot, Texas, who began educating the duo in music at a young age. Bobbie’s grandmother taught the young girl how to play piano on a pump organ and her grandfather bought her her first piano at six years old for $35, selling the family cow to pay for it.
“I remember when I got my first piano. I thought, ‘I’ll never be lonely again,” Nelson told the Austin American-Statesman in 2017.
Her grandfather had her singing gospel at conventions in Hillsboro which would lead to the teenager traveling with evangelists around Austin and all around Texas before marrying Bud Fletcher. Fletcher formed Bud Fletcher and the Texans, a honky-tonk outfit inspired by Western swing sounds. He couldn’t play a lick, so simply directed the band which featured sixteen-year-old Bobbie on piano and her fourteen-year-old brother Willie on vocals and guitar. Bobbie divorced Fletcher, the group disbanded, and in 1961, Fletcher would die in a car crash.
It was perceived as scandalous that Nelson was playing country music in bars nightly, leading Fletcher’s parents to take custody of her three children—Randy, Michael, and Freddy—after his death. Nelson wanted nothing more than to get her children back, so she put aside the music game and enrolled in business college.
After graduation, she landed a gig demonstrating instruments at the Hammond Organ Co. in Fort Worth, and after retrieving custody of her three sons, she moved to Austin, Texas while her brother was establishing himself as a successful songwriter in the “Nashville system.”