I have been an aficionado of country music for many years, going back to when I was just a young boy growing up in the Midwest. Country music was a staple of my playlist before anyone even had a playlist. And at the top of my playlist has long been Willie Nelson. I was a huge fan of Willie back in the late 60s and early 70s when he wasn’t as recognized as he is today.

One of my favorite Willie Nelson songs, is titled “Bloody Mary Morning” and it is near the top in my “writer’s playlist”, or those songs that I play when I am writing, to help inspire me to greatness. Bloody Mary Morning (BMM) is, in my opinion, one of the most quintessential songs of the country genre, in that it contains several basic elements from which other songs are spawned.

In BMM, a young man from the ‘sticks’ is dumped by his big city sweetheart (in this case a girl from L.A.), and he is headed home (to Houston) to recover from the sudden breakup. On the plane ride home, he succumbs to drink (Bloody Mary cocktails) to ease the pain.

This is a country story that could be rewritten a multitude of times by switching genders, mode of transportation, and type of booze. We could swap a young lady from Alabama heading home from Nashville on a bus drinking wine. Or a guy on a train bound for New Orleans, staring out a window, sipping bourbon from a paper bag. You get the picture. BMM is perfect in its simplicity.

Some sources (and we always trust some sources don’t we), say that Willie wrote this song on an especially rough flight, on an airplane airsickness bag. I can’t confirm that, even though it is a good story. What I do know about the song is that when it was first released in 1970, it was titled “Bloody Merry Morning” and according to Willie, he wrote the song to inspire him to be a better parent. I am not sure how that worked, or how the song was supposed to accomplish that, but the song was reworked and released again in 1972 under the new cocktail driven title. The song became a minor hit for Willie, and it peaked at number 17 on the Billboard chart for 1974, or around the year I picked up on it.

Over the years, I have heard Willie play BMM numerous times, but none quite as movingly as last Friday evening in West Palm Beach, Florida, when 90-year-old Willie took to the stage once again.

Three songs in, Willie broke into BMM and performed the song well. Maybe not as well as he did on Austin City Limits in 1974, but hey, that was 49 years ago!

Willie is always calm and laid back, even when performing an intense song like BMM. And he makes recovering from heartbreak seem easy, and nearly painless, and in the space of an LA to Houston flight, he infers that things can turn around for a guy (with the help of a cocktail or two).

And how do we find serenity in calamity? I found this quote from Willie that might explain it:

I take it not only one day at a time, but a moment at a time, and keep it at that pace. If you can be happy right now, then you’ll always be happy because it’s always in the now.

So, it is all about living in the now! Is that the secret? Is this the fabled ‘here and now’ in which we are supposed to live. A friend of mine told me that his AA sponsor once told him to forget one day at a time and take it one hour at a time, and then one minute at a time if need be. That’s screwing it all the way down to the here and now.

It makes sense. If we can learn to be happy in the present moment, then maybe it is all just a matter of stringing the moments together.

Willie Nelson – iThink Amplitheater, West Palm Beach, Florida, October 8, 2023