With Willie having turned 80 on April 30, and every aspect of his career getting a reverential look, it’s worth noting that for half his life, 40 years, he’s had his sister in his band — and in the first 40 years she was there to practice with, to work out arrangements with him.

Grandfather gave the little 4-year-old boy a guitar and grandmother showed the girl, two years older than her brother, how to make chords on the piano. The kids were shown how to play the country gospel number “The Great Speckled Bird,” and when Willie strummed the guitar and Bobbie pressed her fingers on the keys, they looked at each other and smiled. They were playing music.
And they’ve never stopped. Seventy-six years later, Willie and Bobbie Nelson still play together almost every day. They perform in clubs, casinos and concert halls and then, back in their tour bus hurdling through the night to the next destination, they make music together some more. Bobbie slides a keyboard out from under her bunk and Willie sits on the loveseat, these two octogenarians, and they sing gospel songs they learned growing up in the Depression. Almost every night of the week, the most soul-connecting music in America is being played in the back of a bus on the interstate.

She calls him “Hughtie” after his middle name, Hugh. He calls her Sister. What a beautiful word.

Willie and Bobbie turned to music for consolation, for understanding, when she was 9 and he 7 and their grandfather died. “He was the sweetest man we’d ever known,” Bobbie told me in 2007. I had come up to Farm Aid at Randall’s Island in New York to interview her, expecting 20 minutes in the back of a foggy bus, but when Neil Young and Dave Matthews and their friends showed up for a smoke, the place started getting crowded and Sister Bobbie needed a break. Willie’s body man David Anderson escorted her to an empty portable building with the air conditioning blasting, and that’s where we talked for the next two hours. I didn’t care who was onstage.

“Playing music made us realize that there was something bigger out there, something more than human life,” she said of the therapy she and Willie found after “Daddy” died. God is everywhere. He’s inside all of us and is all-knowing, all-powerful. The Nelsons seem put on earth to remind us that God is music. Willie and Bobbie are almost evidence of an afterlife because they deserve to live forever.

“Everyday is so precious,” Bobbie said in 2005, soon after having heart surgery to insert a pacemaker. “Every time I play with Willie is a gift. We are just so blessed to be doing what we’re doing after all these years.”

After Willie signed with Atlantic Records and booked studio time in New York City in February 1973, he decided to record a gospel record on the first day and sent for Sister. She was always his rock, both musically and spiritually. It was the first-ever airplane ride for a 42-year-old Bobbie, who brought her kid brother back to why he started playing music in the first place. After recording The Troublemaker, Willie asked Bobbie to stick around for Shotgun Willie, the album that gave the world “Whiskey River” and the new Nashville-to-Austin Willie.

It was Bobbie, not Willie, who moved to Austin first. She came down in 1965 to demonstrate Hammond organs for a company in Fort Worth. When she played the one recently installed at the El Chico restaurant in the brand new Hancock Center, she was offered a job playing there six nights a week.

At the time, Willie was a highly successful Nashville songwriter, penning hit singles for Patsy Cline (“Crazy”), Faron Young (“Hello Walls”) and Billy Walker (“Ain’t It Funny How Time Slips Away”) in quick succession. But his career as a performer went nowhere. His voice and his phrasing were too weird for country radio.

To have such unconditional support from Sister Bobbie was a godsend after so much Nashville rejection.

Bobbie married Bud Fletcher when she was a senior in high school and he was a 21-year-old ex-G.I. Recognizing the talents of his bride and her red-headed brother, Bud started a Western swing band called Bud Fletcher and the Texans to gig in Hillsboro, West and Waco. When Willie left for Fort Worth the band wasn’t as fun for Bobbie. But she probably missed the offstage music with her brother even more. When you’ve just played to 5,000 people hootin’ and a hollerin’ and chanting your name and you still pull out the guitar and portable keyboard to play some more when no one is watching, that’s the definition of art.

Me and dozens of other Austin Access TV watchers got a glimpse of that easy magic on May 31, 1997, when Willie and Bobbie showed up at the Rogers & Hammerhead Show, hosted by their friends Freddy Powers and Bill McDavid. They played for an hour at the cheap, one-camera shoot, doing old gospel numbers, pop standards, Willie originals. Just pulling out whatever songs struck them, like they were back in the bus, driving to Tulsa. I got goosebumps in Texas on the day before June.

I’ve been talking about that show for years and have sorta halfheartedly searched for a copy. The Austin History Center didn’t have one and nobody connected with Access TV had any clue about where the old shows went. I finally got ahold of Freddy Powers’ wife Catherine, and she said episodes of Rogers & Hammerhead were donated to Texas State’s Wittliff Collection as part of the Freddy Powers Archives.

The good news is that the R&H episode featuring Willie and Bobbie has been located. But the show was on U-Matic tape and there’s a danger of damaging it during playback on those old machines. The show is on its way to be digitized, preserved for posterity. I can’t wait to see that show again.

But, you know what would be even better? Getting to see the brother and sister, both in their 80s, come onstage together — just the two of them. Forget a Replacements reunion or a band without John Bonham calling themselves Led Zeppelin: the tour I want to see is Hughtie and Sister, seated behind Trigger and the Bosendorfer piano the IRS seized in 1991, which friends bought at auction and gave back to Bobbie Lee. Just Willie and Bobbie on a tour of gorgeous old theaters.

Music is bigger than life is what these kids learned in 1940. All the answers are in the songs, and when you listen and respond, the people who deserve to live forever do.