Sugarhill [Country]
2003
Crazy: The Demo Sessions
About This Album
Prior to become a recording artist, Willie Nelson cut a number of demos for Pamper Music, a publishing company co-owned by Ray Price and Hal Smith. Though he had some success once he started pursuing his recording career in earnest in the '60s, he continued to cut publishing demos, partially because he was better known as a writer than a performer. Some of these demos have come out on assorted reissues over the years, but Sugar Hill's 2003 collection Crazy: The Demo Sessions is the first comprehensive collection of this work, and it's a very welcome addition to Nelson's often unwieldy discography. Nelson's earliest recordings for Liberty (and to a lesser extent, his recordings for RCA in the '60s) have been roundly criticized for awkward, string-laden country-pop arrangements -- a criticism that may have been overstated, but is certainly valid -- and this serves as a counterpoint to those polished recordings, since these publishing demos are spare and unadorned, all recorded in one take. The first eight songs are Nelson alone with a guitar and occasionally a harmony vocalist, and these songs sound like precursors to Red Headed Stranger in their intimate directness.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,10,11,12,14 and 15)

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