Red Headed Stranger: how Willie Nelson’s obsession spawned a classic country album

Willie Nelson first encountered the song Red Headed Stranger in the 1950s, working as a DJ at radio station KCNC in Fort Worth TX. It was a jaunty number, sung by Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith and His Cracker-Jacks, about a less-than-jaunty subject. The stranger of the title rides into town on “a raging black stallion” leading a second horse, a bay, that had belonged to his dead wife. He meets a woman who tries to steal the bay and shoots her. Willie not only played the song on his radio show but sang it himself. Eventually, he made an album to provide the backstory the song so desperately needed. Red Headed Stranger came out in 1975 and marked a new beginning for Nelson. 

On the album’s fiftieth birthday, country singer songwriters Tami Neilson and Henry Wagons join Andy to listen to, and talk about, why it's one of the greatest country albums ever made.