Maybe It’s Something About the Name Nelson

Are there two high-profile playing partners in all of pop music who have been at it longer than Willie Nelson and his sister, Bobbie?

“I doubt it very seriously,” Willie Nelson said last week from his tour bus as it rolled into San Francisco, on a trek that brings them, along with the rest of Nelson’s band, to the Bren Events Center in Irvine on Thursday for a benefit concert.

“They would have to be older than us”--Bobbie is 66; Willie turns 64 on April 30--”because nobody could have started [playing together] much younger,” Nelson said. “I’m sure somewhere there are family groups that have played together as long but [have] not recorded or traveled as much.”

Willie Nelson says he was 5 when he began playing his first guitar chords, and Bobbie was there from the start, accompanying him on the piano. That would have been in 1938 or 1939. Tutored by the grandparents who raised them, the two began performing in public almost immediately, both in church and in school in their hometown of Abbott, Texas.

The two most recent albums by Nelson have placed his partnership with his sister in an especially close and intimate focus.

“Spirit,” which includes some of his strongest original songs in years, is an all-acoustic release from 1996 featuring only Willie’s voice and guitar and Bobbie’s piano, along with rhythm guitar or fiddle accompaniment from two other longtime associates, Jody Payne and Johnny Gimble.

“How Great Thou Art,” an album of gospel songs the siblings recorded from memory, also emerged last year, featuring a similarly sparse, acoustic format.

With its heartfelt pleas and declarations of faith and its dedication to Bobbie’s son, Michael Fletcher, who died of AIDS, “How Great Thou Art” is an eloquent reminder that, besides learning together and triumphing together, the Nelson siblings have had to do some suffering and enduring together.

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Their parents divorced when they were very young. Grandparents William and Nancy Nelson were avid amateur musicians who, Bobbie recalls, took correspondence courses from a music school in Chicago, passing on what they learned to the children.

“All the time we were learning, they had us performing. We learned in front of the congregation in church, and we were playing for every [occasion] at school. As long as I can remember, we were performing,” said Bobbie, who has a proper, polite speaking manner. (Amy Nelson, one of Willie’s children, and part of the concert promotion team at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano, describes her aunt fondly as “totally a Southern belle.”)

The Nelsons, Bobbie recalled, also picked up repertoire from the radio, beginning Willie’s long tradition of stylistic omniverousness. (Willie Nelson says his live shows include two reggae classics originally done by Jimmy Cliff--a preview of the upcoming reggae album that is one of the widest-ranging of his stylistic departures from his base in country music. Bobbie made her recording debut apart from Willie in 1995 while playing on tracks by the Supersuckers and the Reverend Horton Heat, two wild young alternative-rock bands that appeared on the “Twisted Willie” tribute album.)

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Willie’s vocal talent--which would later establish him as one of the most distinctive singers in pop music--was apparent from the start, Bobbie says. She evidently didn’t inherit that gene.

“I used to harmonize with him when we were very young, but his voice is so good, and mine is not,” Bobbie said. “I wanted to [sing], but I didn’t have the nerve to do what it would have taken for me to really learn. I was so shy. I’d just as soon accompany him.”

When Bobbie married at 16, Willie got a gig: her husband, Bud Fletcher, put them both to work in his traveling band, Bud Fletcher & the Texans.

“He wasn’t a musician; he was just a B.S.-er, but he was a good one,” Willie recalled of his brother-in-law. “He’d book us into places we weren’t even qualified to play. He banged around on [a washtub bass] for a while, then he got an upright bass, and he’d kick it, hit it, spin it around”--anything but actually play it. “It was up to Bobbie [on piano] or me on guitar to come up with the bass licks.”

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Fletcher died in an accident in the 1950s, leaving Bobbie with three young sons to raise. She supported by playing in piano bars, supper clubs and churches, giving lessons and doing sales demonstrations for the Hammond Organ Co.

Willie, meanwhile, was establishing himself in Nashville as an ace songwriter whose songs became hits for others, but who couldn’t break through as a recording artist in his own right. Bobbie moved there in 1967 to be near her brother but continued to play on her own.

Their career as recording and nationally touring partners began in 1971, when Willie signed with Atlantic Records and was urged by label executive Jerry Wexler to record an album of gospel songs.

“When I got to New York to do the recording, I wanted [Bobbie] there,” Willie recalled. “If you’re going to record traditional gospel songs, she’s the best there is. It was second nature for us.”

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The album, “The Troublemaker,” didn’t surface until 1976. After the 1971 sessions, Willie invited Bobbie to stay in his band. With her sons grown, she was free and willing to travel. In 1975, Willie Nelson’s struggles to establish himself as a hit recording act ended with the release of “Red Headed Stranger,” with Bobbie’s piano helping to push the concept album about guilt and redemption in the Old West.

When Willie and Bobbie recorded “How Great Thou Art” in 1993, they had reason to feel grateful and grief-stricken. Willie had just recovered his Pedernales Recording Studio outside of Austin after it had been seized and dismantled to help settle a huge federal tax debt; the gospel songs were the first recorded on the studio’s new equipment.

At the same time, the Nelson siblings had come through a time of terrible loss during the early ‘90s. Six months after the death of Michael Fletcher--Bobbie’s second-oldest son, who had been a Los Angeles-based entertainment lawyer--her oldest son, Randy, was killed in a car wreck. Willie had been rocked by the 1991 suicide of his 33-year-old son, Billy.

Willie and Bobbie recorded the gospel album with her surviving son, Freddy Fletcher, a record producer who runs Pedernales.

“Naturally, when we did that one, a lot of things had happened, and there was a lot of emotion involved,” Willie said. “I’d been wrung out pretty good in every fashion. It has to have some effect on what you sing and what you think. All that had to come through.”

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Bobbie says she sees the album--which wasn’t released until she and her brother could find a home for it on Finer Arts Records, a small, Denver-based label--as an expression of gratitude amid grief.

“You think it can’t be worse, but it can,” she said. “We’re still here; for some reason we’re still here. We’re still playing this wonderful music.”

* Willie Nelson & Family play Thursday at the Bren Events Center, Bridge and Mesa roads, UC Irvine. 8 p.m. $40 ($100 tickets include a barbecue dinner). Benefits Classic Charities of Orange County. (714) 824-5000 (box office) or (714) 740-2000 (Ticketmaster).