Paul Begala on "Heartland"
The CNN political analyst discusses the two legends’ duet “Heartland,” the farm crisis that inspired it, and a kind turn Willie did for Begala’s mom.
By John Spong
Paul Begala.
Colin Young-Wolff/Invision/AP
Colin Young-Wolff/Invision/AP
Long before Paul Begala made his career in politics—before his multiple stints as an analyst on CNN, before he served as an adviser to President Bill Clinton in the White House—he was a Willie nerd. It started when he was ten years old, after his dad moved the family from New Jersey to Missouri City, Texas, to take an oil patch sales job. It grew in the eighties, when he studied government and law at the University of Texas at Austin, in the Capital City, where he recorded cassette tapes of Willie songs when they played on the radio and attended every show when Willie was back in town. “I always tell my folks up north,” says Begala, “where I come from, they got a word for you if you don’t believe in Willie: ‘atheist.’ ”
This week on One by Willie, Begala describes the convergence of his twin passions for Willie and politics, focusing on “Heartland,” a song Willie cowrote and recorded with Bob Dylan for his 1993 masterpiece Across the Borderline. Like Farm Aid, the nonprofit Willie cofounded in 1985, “Heartland” was inspired by the American farm crisis of the mid-eighties, a tragedy Begala saw firsthand as a young speechwriter crisscrossing Iowa on his first presidential campaign, for Congressman Dick Gephardt, in 1987 and ’88. It was an experience that’s still difficult for Begala to discuss, but also one that—along with a gracious moment Willie shared with Begala’s mom—helped him settle on what may be Willie’s greatest gift, empathy. With cameo appearances by Nelson Mandela, Elie Wiesel, and Parliament-Funkadelic.
One by Willie is produced by John Spong and PRX, in partnership with Texas Monthly. The PRX production team is Jocelyn Gonzales, Patrick Grant, Pedro Rafael Rosado, and project manager Edwin Ochoa. The Texas Monthly team is engineer Brian Standefer, producer Patrick Michels, and executive producer Megan Creydt, with graphic design by Emily Kimbro and Victoria Millner. And Dominic Welhouse provides invaluable research and editing help.
Transcript
John Spong (voice-over): Hey there. I’m John Spong, and this is One by Willie, a podcast in which I talk each week to one notable Willie Nelson fan about one Willie song that they really love.
The show is produced and distributed by PRX, and we are brought to you by Still Austin craft whiskey, with additional generous support from Tecovas boots.
This week, we talk to CNN political contributor Paul Begala, who, in addition to having been a key adviser to President Bill Clinton in the nineties, also happens to be a die-hard Willie nerd, going back to his college days in Austin in the late 1970s. And he’ll be a little bit of all three of those things when he talks about a deep cut off of Willie’s 1993 masterpiece Across the Borderline, “Heartland.”
That song, a duet and cowrite with Bob Dylan, was inspired by the American farm crisis of the 1980s, tragic events that Begala saw firsthand as he traveled the country on various campaigns. And it gets him musing on what he considers one of the keys to Willie’s life and music, empathy. From there, he’ll describe his fifty years of fandom, a preternaturally kind turn that Willie did for his mom, and something that Begala, the poli-sci professor, calls interactional synchrony. With brief cameos by Parliament-Funkadelic, Kurt Vonnegut, and Nelson Mandela.
So let’s do it.
[Willie Nelson performing “Heartland”]
John Spong: Your appreciation of Willie Nelson is well enough established, out in the world, that when Anderson Cooper teases an appearance by you on his show, he’ll jokingly ask ahead of time if anybody anticipates that you might quote a Willie lyric while you’re talking. It makes me think that you are . . . familiar with Willie’s catalog. But so, that being the case, tell me, then—“Heartland,” the song you chose to talk about, is not crazy obscure, but it wasn’t top of the charts. How come we’re talking about “Heartland”?
Paul Begala: Because it’s a heartbreak song that’s not about a relationship. It’s not about a woman and a man—it’s about a broken heart from an equally deep romance, right? This—he personifies folks who love America more than America loves them. And in this case, it’s family farmers. And same thing, by the way, could be said for Black folk, or Native Americans, or any number of people who I think Willie would be very comfortable getting in their story, as well. But it’s about heartbreak and betrayal and unrequited love. And that is a classic country topic, but he exports it to this crisis on the farm.
John Spong: Yeah.
Paul Begala: And I just think it’s brilliant. And it really moves me. I just, I love it. And the fact that he cowrote it and sang it with Bob Dylan?
John Spong: Yes!
Paul Begala: I mean, good God. Can you imagine? I don’t know—to be a fly on the wall of that studio.
John Spong: It’s like, if that had been the Mount Rushmore, there would have just been the two of them. There’s no need to add another face to that picture.
Paul Begala: And I’ve read—you know, Willie has written that that song just flowed. He couldn’t tell you what parts Dylan wrote, what part he wrote. Imagine being such a genius that you’re in such perfect sync with another genius. And it’s like, you know, I don’t know, Kobe and Shaq or something. You just, you find two [people], they just seamlessly—and each one’s a Hall of Famer on their own, but golly, you put them together.
John Spong: Yeah. Well, when we did one of these with Don Was a couple years ago, man, that was a—just to get to talk to that guy was a treat. But he produced the album that this is on, and when he talked about this song, he said Dylan comes in, because he and Willie are going to record something, and they decided they wanted to work on this, I think, and he said that the way the song had been written, he was recording a Dylan album—I forget which one—but he had been recording an album with Dylan a few years before, and that Dylan was in the studio between takes just noodling on this melody. And he says, “When Dylan’s in the studio, you do not stop recording, least of all if he’s got his guitar around his neck.”
And so, all the musicians rush in, they kind of work up this melody, but Dylan doesn’t have words for it. And so, supposedly, that was the start. Maybe Dylan had a couple of lines, but Dylan says he has no idea which ones. And so, eventually they decided they wanted to make it about this, as you say, crisis that was really important to both of them.
Paul Begala: That is just beautiful. And it speaks—the reason I love it so much is my own moral code. I’m a Christian; I’m a Catholic. I try my best to practice it. At the root of every good religion, though, and every good philosophy, is empathy, you know? For Christians, it’s the Golden Rule. But for everyone—the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him; the Buddha; Confucius; Moses—everybody tries to teach us, “Be good to other people, especially if they’re different from you.” And my old boss Bill Clinton used to say, “I feel your pain.”
I think empathy is the soul of morality. And how wonderful that a guy like Willie, a guy like Dylan, revered and multimillionaires—hell, Willie’s bus cost more than half the farms in America. And yet, they have this deep empathy, feeling the pain of other people. You know, I am a fan particularly of country music, and, you know, the trajectory—this was like Willie’s fortieth album. And he’s at the top of his game. But the trajectory very often for these guys is, the first album is about love and truth and beauty and Mama and whiskey. And the second album is, like, you know, pretty good. But the third album is all like, well, you know, “My Learjet ran out of Perrier, you know . . . and it’s so difficult being a millionaire and being on the road . . . ” Willie never had that. He’s never lost that empathy for what Bill Clinton used to call “walking-around folk.” Right?
John Spong: Yeah.
Paul Begala: Willie is the hero of walking-around folk, because he’s one of us. And he feels our pain, because he has felt it.
John Spong: That is a great jumping-off point to listen to the song. And, not that you need them, but I’ll pull up the lyrics, and let’s take in some poetry.
[Willie Nelson performing “Heartland”]
John Spong: Mmm, mmm, mmm.
Paul Begala: That’s some power.
John Spong: Yeah.
Paul Begala: You know, as a fan, it’s got all the elements of a great Willie song. It’s got Willie’s voice, Trigger’s guitar, and Mickey [Raphael]’s harmonica.
John Spong: Yeah.
Paul Begala: And then you add to that holy trinity Dylan.
John Spong: Yeah.
Paul Begala: But the content, it really speaks to me. For me, the line is—and Dylan sings it—“Don’t they know that I’m dying? And why ain’t nobody crying for me?”
John Spong: Yeah.
Paul Begala: And, you know, Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, the Holocaust survivor, he said, “The opposite of love is not hate. It is indifference.”
John Spong: Mm-hmm.
Paul Begala: And, you know, 1 percent of us feed the 99 percent of us.
John Spong: Yeah.
Paul Begala: And, I do think that we tend to take them [farmers] for granted—at best—and look askance at them. Look down on them, at worst. And Willie is such a voice for them, and I just love that. Because he’s making people care about somebody who’s not them. And that is—as I say, that’s the essence of morality.
John Spong: Yeah, and so, when they record this in ’93, Farm Aid starts in, I think, ’86 [Correction: 1985], and did, you know, supposedly start—they were doing Live Aid, and Dylan made a crack like, “Why aren’t we sending just a couple of million dollars to the American farmers? They’re the ones feeding us. They need it.” And so, suddenly, the idea comes to do Farm Aid. You in that window—’86 to ’93, and into the nineties too—are getting involved in campaigns around the country. And I think there was—there’s one in Pennsylvania; New Jersey. That’s farm country. Parts of it are. How dire was the situation? And did you meet people like—did you encounter people like the narrator of the song?
Paul Begala: Yeah, John, that’s exactly right. Probably the most formative was 1987 to ’88. I was working for Dick Gephardt. Dick’s from St. Louis and was running for president. He won the Iowa caucuses. And we went to all 99 counties in Iowa. And Dick used to say, “You know, they say there’s no mountains in Iowa, but there are mountains: mountains of corn, produced by these farmers.”
And the farm crisis was so acute in ’87 to ’88, you heard this: Farmers would go into the bank and die by suicide. In the bank. They’d sit down with the loan officer and die by suicide. Because they were so distraught and abandoned and crushed. And, boy, you have to have a heart of stone to not be moved by that.
And everywhere we went, we heard about this. About the desperation. The abandonment. And it’s ongoing. It’s better today, frankly, than—but yes, you, you really . . . You know, I grew up in a small town. We were not farmers at all; my dad was a salesman. But you can’t help but be moved by that when you hear stories like that.
John Spong: Yeah.
Paul Begala: And, you know, with Clinton, I traveled the whole country. We went to, I think, 48 states together. And you sure see that. And feeling their pain. Giving a damn, you know. That’s the beginning. And in more modern, more recent times, we’re losing 100,000 people a year to opioids. Okay, we lost 58,000 in twenty years in Vietnam; we’re losing 100,000, and they’re disproportionately poor, they’re disproportionately working class, they’re disproportionately rural. And, you know, I just don’t think—“Ain’t nobody crying for them.”
John Spong: Yeah.
Paul Begala: So I love this—this is why I love this song. It speaks to pain. And, by the way, how it expresses that pain is not, “I’m gonna go shoot a banker!” It doesn’t answer with rage. It just calls for empathy, which is much more powerful and much more difficult to trigger. I’ve written a thousand political speeches—probably a lot more. It is really easy to divide this country—to say, “Hey, they’re different from you; let’s go hate on them.” Willie can’t do that because he’s Willie. He has to get you in their cowboy boots and start thinking about how they feel. And it’s a really empowering thing to engender empathy.
John Spong: In his book about songs he’s written, one of his comments on this song is, “To give voice to the voiceless is a priceless privilege that comes with being a writer.”
Paul Begala: God bless him. And, you know, this is me being negative, but the airways are filled with just bullshit country music about hating people who are different from you. “Oh, city people suck!” You know, I was riding around—well, I’ve spent like half my life on a farm. We have a little farm in the Shenandoah Valley. Corn and beans and hay. Couple of Texas Longhorn steers. Some chickens and goats. And it’s a hobby. I’m not a real farmer, but it gives me some appreciation for that life. And during COVID, I was full-time on the farm. So I’m driving around with one of my many sons, the only one who’s a hip-hop fan. So he wants to put hip-hop on. I was like, “No, no, we’re in Daddy’s car. We’re going to listen to outlaw country.” And we’re listening, and he says, “You know, dad, a lot of your kinda redneck music is all about how city people suck, and city life is bad.” And I said, “Well, Charlie, yes, there is a pronounced postlapsarian ethos in country music. That we view, you know, the farm as Eden, and somehow we become corrupted when we become more sophisticated.” And he kind of let that roll off and said, “Well, I can tell you this: They ain’t no hip-hop songs about how country people suck.” And I thought, “Wow, that’s really important.” So the pain is the same. You know, if you’re stuck in some inner-city neighborhood where, you know, you don’t have good health care, and your school doesn’t work, and there are no jobs, you have the same pain as these farmers who’ve lost everything through no fault of their own.
John Spong: Yeah.
Paul Begala: But what pisses me off is these hucksters who take that rural pain and use it to hate on people who look different from them. And again, Willie does the exact opposite. It’s much more difficult to do. I mean, hell, I could write a hit country song about how city people suck.
John Spong: Well, yeah—Willie has got his sights set higher.
Paul Begala: Yeah.
[Willie Nelson performing “Heartland”]
John Spong: How did you become such a fan of Willie’s? You’re born in New Jersey; you get to Texas when you’re ten?
Paul Begala: Yeah. Dad was a salesman in the oil patch. And so he and my mother were from New Jersey, but they wound up pretty quickly in Missouri City. Which then was, I wouldn’t say rural, but kind of exurban.
John Spong: Mm-hmm.
Paul Begala: It’s only maybe thirty miles from you. Houston has completely overwhelmed it now. But back then it was a small town. We didn’t even have a high school. I went to high school in Sugar Land.
John Spong: Right.
Paul Begala: And, you know, we were integrated. It was the seventies. But, you know, so, the two kinds of music that I enjoyed—well, the three—were the conjunto, with all the Mexican American friends; it was funk, soul, really: this is Parliament-Funkadelic, Commodores, I mean, I love—Isley Brothers—love that; and then the kind of Austin, you know, redneck, outlaw country. Not the—with all respect, not Porter Wagoner. Okay.
John Spong: Yeah.
Paul Begala: It was Willie and Waylon and the boys. And so I was blessed to be in all three cultures as a kid, because our school was completely integrated, and, you know, my friends were all into these different kinds of music. And Willie really stood out. I mean, this is at the height—I graduated high school in ’79—so that’s the real height of the . . . [Steven] Fromholz used to have a name for it . . . the great . . .
John Spong: Oh, the great progressive country music scare.
Paul Begala: That was it! So you couldn’t help be, like, my age and in my place and not be a Willie Nelson fan. I always tell my folks up north, “Where I come from, they got a word for you if you don’t believe in Willie: ‘atheist.’ ”
John Spong: Well, then you—well, then, I guess going to UT . . .
Paul Begala: Right.
John Spong: . . . is kind of like going to seminary. I mean, you’re going for the full immersion, because that’s in Austin in ’79.
Paul Begala: And [I] went to the Fourth of July Picnic, and, you know, I lived out—went to Soap Creek, and the Austin Outhouse, and all those great old bars. I still—I lost it, but I used to have a Blaze Foley poster. I loved Blaze Foley.
John Spong: Wow.
Paul Begala: And Townes [Van Zandt], and all those guys. And Willie was at the apex then, too. You know, Willie and Jerry Jeff [Walker]. I never met any of them, of course, but I went all the time. Just loved it. We had great—it was a really, really great music scene, in Austin in the seventies and eighties.
John Spong: What Willie records are you listening to? What’s the evolution of the fandom? Are you one of those guys that, like, goes deep and learns the records up and down? Or was it radio Willie hits, or . . . ?
Paul Begala: Well, back before I had money, I’d record it, you know, on my cassette, when a station would play an album. And now it’s all streaming, and so it gets more jumbled. But even the newest stuff is still so powerful.
John Spong: Yeah.
Paul Begala: I mean, as—now that I’m a dad, my kids are in their twenties, and one’s over thirty. [If] you listen to Willie and Lukas [Nelson] sing “[Just] Breathe” . . .
John Spong: Yeah.
Paul Begala: If you just don’t weep, as a dad. I’ve seen—I mean, it’s just perfect. So it is an astonishing thing. That the guy’s at the top of his game, and he keeps getting deeper. This whole notion of “energy follows thought”? That is so zen and so powerful. So be careful what you think.
[Willie Nelson performing “Energy Follows Thought”]
Paul Begala: You know, Vonnegut said that. Vonnegut said, “Be careful what you pretend to be, because you will become that.” You know, Willie made it more concise.
John Spong: Right? Well, it’s—if anybody doesn’t have much recent-vintage Willie, “Energy Follows Thought” was a song, I want to say, three records ago. I think it was on that album A Beautiful Time. And one of the things I loved about that, to just go completely in-the-weeds nerd—and correct me if this strikes you as off; I love getting corrected on this s—, for real—but that sentiment, you know, “Be careful what you think, because energy follows thought,” it completed a circle for me. Because on Willie’s album Yesterday’s Wine, from, I think, ’71—which is the weirdest album ever, you know, all about God sending imperfect man down to be the new example of how to have faith lead you through difficult times and lead you through life. And Willie is that imperfect man. But he talks a lot in it about his own faith. And there’s a line in one of the songs. [singing] “Never think evil thoughts of anyone. It’s just as wrong to think as to say.” I met that album, got to know that album, when I was a younger person, and I never quite understood that line. “Never think evil thoughts about anyone. It’s as wrong to think as to say.” It does kind of jibe with my Episcopalianism, for one thing, that I grew up on, but I didn’t quite get it. But then here comes this song, s—, fifty years later—
Paul Begala: Yeah, that’s amazing, John.
John Spong: —that spells it out. Energy follows thought.
Paul Begala: That’s so—it’s so powerful, and I think that may be a secret to longevity, as a human. Not just as an artist, as a soul. Because, you know, being in politics, there’s a lot of hate. And I love negative campaigning—I love, love, love it, okay? I do. It’s my favorite part of the job. But I want it to be about public issues and public record, not personal lives and personal attacks, right? So if somebody wants to raise taxes or cut taxes, whatever. So I love fighting. I really do. Hell, I hosted Crossfire. But when you cross that line from “I’m right; you’re wrong” to “I’m good; you’re evil,” that’s not a debate any longer. That’s a judgment.
And by proxy, I learned this from another Mount Rushmore person. When Bill Clinton was going through his troubles—and, you know, he was angry and bitter at Ken Starr and the other people who were persecuting him—he had the gift of a close friendship with Nelson Mandela.
John Spong: Mm-hmm.
Paul Begala: Mandela says to him—Mandela! Twenty-seven years in Robben Island prison, you know? [Correction: Eighteen of the 27 years in prison were spent on Robben Island.] And invited his jailers to his inaugural! So Mandela says to Bill Clinton, “Bill, you have to turn loose of this hate because all it is doing is destroying you.” And he said, “It’s like drinking poison and thinking it will hurt your enemy.” Isn’t that beautiful? And I have a buddy of mine, who’s a priest in Houston who I grew up with, he said something similar to me once, where he said, “I’m worried about your soul. That’s my job. And when you hate like that, it doesn’t—if you think about it practically, it has no effect on the other person, but it does corrode you.” And Willie’s ability—he takes a Mandela concept, right, a Kurt Vonnegut concept, a Jesus Christ concept, and packs it down in a way even I can understand it.
John Spong: Yep. Yep.
Paul Begala: So can I—can I tell you one personal thing he did for me? I wrote this book, and I know it’s not a political show, but I wrote this book last election about how I wasn’t for Trump, and I wanted to fire Trump, and, I kid you not, I sent the manuscript to three people to review: Bill Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Willie Nelson. Now, why Willie? ’Cause he and Annie are really politically sophisticated, as you know.
John Spong: Yeah.
Paul Begala: And they don’t proselytize, but they’re really smart. And I had a good bit in here about rural America, and how Democrats need to stop hating on those people, and judging them harshly, and looking askance at them. These people, they built the country; they feed the world. And trying to turn that, right? And I know Trump dominates the vote in rural America, but Democrats could do better if we would stop this—I’m trying to think of a nice way to put it—this judgmentalism.
John Spong: Yeah.
Paul Begala: So I was honored that he seemed to like it, and he gave me a little blurb for the book. But I know he’s not a partisan, but that’s how highly I view his judgment, and especially on these issues about working folk and rural America, where he has devoted what, forty years through Farm Aid? To helping farm families?
John Spong: Yeah. Yeah. And read the blurb. I don’t have the book in front of me, because I’m not in my office.
Paul Begala: Oh, he just said—he said, “If you want to know what’s going on, read this book.”
John Spong: There you go. Short and to the point.
Paul Begala: And, of course, he wrote my favorite political song, which is “Vote ’Em Out.”
John Spong: Yeah.
Paul Begala: It’s more fun. It’s not as deep as “Heartland,” but it’s kind of inarguably true: If you don’t like what they’re doing, vote ’em out.
John Spong: Well, it’s also part of the . . . one of the things that I love about spending more time—well, spending time with his music for a living, which is kind of what I do . . . which is a hell of a gig, right? But, like, the song “Still Is Still Moving to Me.” That seems pretty simple on its face. You don’t have to even think about it. It’s cute. “Okay, so what?” But, wait a minute—I just thought about it, and where Willie was in his life when he wrote it, and what he’s done since he released it . . . there’s some real depth to that song.
Paul Begala: There is. And that’s why it lasts. That’s why you and I will go back to something he wrote fifty years ago and listen to it and think, “Oh, there’s something new and different here.” You know, I doubt they’re going to do that with Jason Aldean. Sorry to name names, but you know. I doubt my children and grandchildren in fifty years are going to go back and say, “Wow, there was a real lot of power to that guy.”
John Spong: “He was so prescient.” Uh, yeah, well, huh . . .
Paul Begala: See? Negative campaigning, Spong. That’s my specialty. I’m a horrible person.
John Spong: Well, I even thought about it because I read a quote, your wife—and you’ve been with her for forty years? No, thirty-five.
Paul Begala: Yeah. We met forty-two years ago in the geography building at UT. When we were nineteen.
John Spong: She described you once as saying, “He really is all about destroying his opponents. He just wants to demolish his opponents.” But, I mean, there’s a Willie—there’s a happy-warrior way to describe you, which is also Willie, too. Because Willie is—he, for all of the zenness, not that I even understand that word, but for all the calm, cool, complacency, he’s very serious. He takes stuff like Farm Aid as—it’s a life-or-death matter, and he’s not doing it lightly. He takes it as seriously as it is. But, you know, his career, his releases, all of that stuff, there’s intention. And “out of my way”—there’s an out-of-my-way quality to just about everything he does. Y’all are similar that way.
Paul Begala: Right. What is it? “Write your own damn song, Mr. Record Executive”? You know—
John Spong: Yeah, exactly.
Paul Begala: —those are fighting words.
John Spong: Yeah.
Paul Begala: Yeah, there’s a real spine to Willie. But it’s not hateful. And yeah, I’m still trying to get there.
[Willie Nelson performing “Heartland”]
John Spong: Well, well—how’d you get to know him?
Paul Begala: Oh, I can’t really say that I know him. But I’ve sort of met him a few times. He, you know, he did—this is not how I got to know him, but my stepfather passed away in December of ’09. And it had been rough, and of course my mother was heartbroken. And I did—I took her to a Willie Nelson show, and I asked if I could go backstage. And I honestly, you know, I love Bill Clinton. Willie’s got the same kind of thing where—President Clinton can always sense the most vulnerable person in the room. And he’ll go over to them. And Willie’s that way. Willie comes across—we were backstage, I think we’re up in Virginia, at Wolf Trap. And he comes backstage and just wraps her in a hug—had never met her—and wraps her in a hug. And she burst into tears, said, “I love you, Willie.” And he said, “Well, I love you too, Peggy.”
And he, you know—all I said was, “Hey, I want to bring my mother to the show.” Of course, she was wearing her “Willie Nelson for President” T-shirt. And just how many tens of thousands of times did that guy do that? And, you know, like all of us, he’s got bad days. He’s got bad nights. He’s cranky. I bet—“The last thing I want to see is some heartbroken widow, right after I’ve just done a show in front of thousands of people who love me.” It was so moving.
John Spong: When you mention President Clinton, it’s interesting. I’ve been around him in 3D one time. Not in the same room, though. It was great. He was at a taco place in Austin, and a buddy of mine who was friends—
Paul Begala: At Guero’s?
John Spong: No, no. This was—because I know he loved to go there.
Paul Begala: He loves Guero’s.
John Spong: It was at El Chile, back when that was a thing, On the East Side, over by Hoover’s, right by campus. And a friend of mine who went to school with Chelsea [Clinton], and was tight with Chelsea, was at the dinner. And I guess I knew that that’s where they all were. And we had been at a bar two doors down, and we’re just walking by. And the restaurant is pretty full. It’s all glass. And so you can see in from the street, and it was a pretty packed restaurant. It was like there was one person in the room. You—I don’t know that I was even necessarily looking for him, but there was just your, your eyes were drawn to Bill Clinton. It’s that kind of magnetism. Um, where am I going with this?
Paul Begala: And Willie has that very much too.
John Spong: That’s what I mean, yeah.
Paul Begala: It’s not just celebrity. It’s not. It is—here’s the communications theory. Willie would say, “It’s energy follows thought.” He puts out good vibes. As a speechwriter, as a performer—“interactional synchrony.” Monkey see, monkey do. What we put out, we get back. Right? And performers know this intuitively. I actually teach communication theory, and that is what it is. So if you’re putting that out, and it’s authentic, people pick up on that very quickly. So—and by the way, that’s like how we learned to smile, right? Our mama leans down over that crib and smiles at us. We smile back, and then she’s all happy. Like, “Oh, I’m going to do more of that.” And, you know, Willie has spent his life putting out this kind of love, and he’s getting it back. President Clinton, the same thing. I mean, he always says this: “We do not have a person to waste.” He does not like to write people off. He always puts out this love and acceptance and positive vibe. And so that comes back to him. What do they say? “You get what you give?”
John Spong: Yeah. Yeah, but do you—in order for what you’re putting out, if it’s authentic, then it’s got to be coming from some kind of positivity, some kind of—I guess with Willie, maybe it’s self-knowledge? It’s being so well-defined, knowing . . . what’s it from?
Paul Begala: That’s a great question. And you gotta ask him. My own belief with President Clinton is that it started with Virginia Kelley, his mother, who I knew. Oh, my God. She was one of the great people of my life. She had that boy after his father had already died. So he’s born to a widowed mother. And she poured her heart and soul into him and then, later, Roger, President Clinton’s brother. And to me—of course, nobody ever knew Bill Blythe, his biological father. But I knew that mother, and we should all have a mother like Virginia Kelley. Brilliant. And she, after he was born, she goes off to get a nursing degree, so she could be a nurse so she can support this child, and leaves him with her mother and dad, the Cassidys in Hope, Arkansas.
And this is a very Willie thing. President Clinton used to say, “When I was a little boy, my grandfather ran the only integrated little corner grocery in Hope, Arkansas. Black folk and white folk. Some people couldn’t pay, and my grandpa would just make a note.” And he would say—Clinton would say, “I’d make a note too: This is how you treat people who don’t have enough.” And he would always say, “I was a little boy, but I learned to look up to the people others look down on.”
Okay, so cycling back to Willie, and especially Farm Aid and farm folks—so many people on my side of the political aisle look at country folk and say that. They say, “Oh you’re racist, redneck, stupid.” Gosh, that’s awful. And Willie doesn’t do that. He loves. And, but I have to say, Bill Clinton—I mean, again, people can have their political differences, but as a man, as a human being, he does look up to people everybody else looks down on. And that’s a rare and wonderful thing. It’s something I do think they have in common. It’s, I guess, why, politically, I’m a Bill Clinton guy, and musically, I’m a Willie Nelson guy.
John Spong: One of the ways I’ve come to understand Willie and his life is, it comes—it starts in hardship like that. We talk about this on the show every now and then—you know, his mom split when he was real little, and his dad was kind of in and out going forward. He’s raised by his grandparents, he and his sister, Bobbie, are. His dad—his granddad, who he called Daddy—gives him a guitar for Christmas when he’s, I think, six or five, and then dies a couple months later, you know? And so they—and it’s Depression-era Abbott, Texas, you know? It’s, they, everything is just kind of this constant reminder of the tenuous nature of life. Life itself is kind of scary, except for when Bobbie’s on the piano and Willie’s trying to learn to play guitar next to her, and they’re coming up on those gospel songs, and they’re coming up on the, you know, the pop radio, the old Tin Pan Alley stuff. When they’re working, they’re often out in the field with Mexican kids, and with Black kids. You know, music is what is really saving their lives and mattering to them, and they’re coming to appreciate those other kinds of music. You know, you grow up with that same kind of view of . . . equanimity. Is that the right word? With the same kind of people, equality, that same thought of equality—”I’m not going to look down”—and the bridge to get forward is music. The way forward is music. And that sounds like a way to describe Willie when he’s eight years old, and now that he’s 91.
Paul Begala: What I find so remarkable—and I’m 63—I’ve never had a bad day. So I haven’t known that kind of pain, like President Clinton had as a child, or Willie had. Some people—and I don’t have an answer; I just pose the question. Some people go through this kind of heartbreak, and, like Hemingway, they emerge stronger at the broken places. And it gives them empathy. Because I felt pain, and so I feel your pain. Willie’s very much that way. President Clinton, lots of people. By the way, Joe Biden is that way.
John Spong: Yeah.
Paul Begala: I don’t know anybody that’s had more pain than that poor man.
John Spong: Yeah.
Paul Begala: Other people go through terrible pain, pain that I cannot imagine, and they shut down. And I don’t judge them. I would probably be more like that, where they’re like, “You think you have pain? You don’t know nothing. I’ve felt much worse pain.” And it makes them hard-hearted. And it’s such an amazing triumph of the soul for a guy like Willie to go through that kind of pain and deprivation and come out open, and loving. Instead of closed and defensive. It’s really—it really is a blessing. It’s a sacred thing. It’s a holy thing. Um, I’m sorry to be—but I am a religious person, so I guess I have a right to say that. But they try to teach those of us who don’t have that ability at least to fake it till you make it.
John Spong: Right.
Paul Begala: Because energy really does follow thought.
[Willie Nelson performing “Heartland”]
John Spong: You are, I think, the fifty-seventh person we’ve talked to for one of these. I’ve not—I’m not sure—I’ve certainly not emailed ahead of one of these with anyone who was more excited to do it than you. How come?
Paul Begala: Oh, because he’s just such a special person to so many of us. But to me, it’s this huge role in my life, as somebody—it’s the soundtrack of my life, my entire life. Thank God he’s been performing for so long. And there is so much there, you know? And I like all kinds of music, but he embodies the best of American music and the best of, you know, the—as I said, the soul of morality is empathy. And the fact that, you know, a guy from Abbott, Texas, can rise to those heights and never forget who he is, where he came from, or how he got there, is really powerful to me. I love him.
John Spong: Ain’t nobody can’t learn something from that.
Paul Begala: Amen.
[Willie Nelson performing “Heartland”]
John Spong (voice-over): All right, Willie fans, that was Paul Begala talking about “Heartland.” A huge thanks to him for coming on the show. A big thanks to our sponsors, Still Austin craft whiskey and Tecovas boots. And a big thanks to you for tuning in. If you dig the show, please subscribe, maybe tell a couple friends, and visit our page wherever you get your podcasts and give us some stars or type in some comments. Every little bit of that helps the show more than you know.
I’m your host, John Spong. Thanks for listening.