PICNIC:
Willie Nelson’s Fourth of July Tradition
Dave Dalton Thomas
Texas A&M University Press
Texas Music Series, Sponsored by the
Center for Texas Music History,
Texas State University
304 pages
There will never be enough books about Texas’ favorite son, Willie Nelson. Add a new one to your collection. Dave Dalton Thomas offers a previously overlooked chronology of Willie’s Fourth of July Picnics, with a thoroughly researched history of the signature concert. Thomas manages to cover every corner of each picnic, from the line-ups to the backstage backstories. He talks to promoters, from Eddie Wilson and Woody Roberts. Along the way he chronicles Willie’s rise and fall and rise again—and again—and again.
Having read every Willie Nelson book in print, I continue to maintain that Joe Nick Patoski’s Willie Nelson: An Epic Life is the definitive Willie Nelson biography, but Thomas’s Picnic offers a unique, if myopic, perspective of the icon’s career.
I felt as though I was reading a family history as familiar names and faces continued to pop up. Thomas combines photos, stories, lists of performers—even those who were on the bill but didn’t quite make it to the stage—and priceless interviews with just about everyone who had anything to do with any of the events. Countless never-before-published stage and audience photos by influential Texas music photographers like Scott Newton and members of the Austin-American Statesman staff add to the experience of the event. Thomas spent more than two decades researching, writing, and living this book. The chapters organize the picnics in chronological order. The reader has an inside look at how the epochal event evolved. It is a decidedly unique story of the progressive movement in American music, of lifelong friendships, career trajectories, and the dos and don’ts of sometimes-experimental business models that have kept the music going for more than 50 years.
Whether they have survived celebrating our nation’s independence in blistering heat and torrential rain, traveled to decades of Willie’s Picnic, or just dreamed of the experience, Picnic: Willie Nelson’s Fourth of July Tradition is a perfect gift for any music fan or pop culture aficionado on your holiday list.
– Diana Finlay Hendricks
Disclosure: In 1973, the summer before my junior year in high school, word spread about a big music show about 20 miles from San Marcos. I had a friend with a driver’s license and a car. We told our mothers we were going to a reunion out in Dripping Springs. We dressed in cut-offs and halter tops and got in her little red Karmann Ghia and headed west. I think we parked at least three miles from the stage. After the show, the music continued well into the early hours of the morning. We found our car some time before sunrise. And I had discovered the soundtrack of my life. I was lucky enough to go to a dozen or so more Picnics through the years, almost always through the back gate, and never had to look for my car again.