Thirty years with Willie Nelson

A harmonica player with legs

By FRITZ MAYER

BETHEL WOODS — If you turn out to see Willie Nelson perform at Bethel Woods, along with Bob Dylan and John Mellencamp, another performer who will also be on the stage is Mickey Raphael. He’s a harmonica player who has been performing with Nelson for 30 years.

In a phone interview with The River Reporter, Raphael was asked if it was unusual for a harmonica player to last such a long time with the same band. He said “Yes, and that shows Willie’s dedication and loyalty.”

Raphael then recounted how he got started with the band. “I met Willie back in the ’70s and he was living in Texas; he had just moved from Nashville. He was playing a lot of bars and dance halls at the time, and he invited me to come and play. So, I would just show up at these clubs and sit in with him.

“He had asked me, when I first met him, to go to New York with him, which was several months in the future. But in the interim, I just decided to follow him around Texas and show up wherever they were playing. I wanted to get used to the music, because I really didn’t know too much about the music, not having a real country background, so I would just show up at these gigs. And at one of them, Willie asked Paul English, the drummer and leader of the band, ‘What are we paying Mickey?’ Paul said ‘Nothing, he just showed up.’ Willie said, ‘Well, double his salary.’

“I just kind of segued into this thing, and I now jokingly say I was never hired, I was just never asked to leave.”

Much more recently, in March, in fact, a new album called “Naked Willie” was released. Raphael produced it, or as he says, he “un-produced” it. By that he means he took some Nelson recordings from the late ’60s and altered them to better reflect Nelson’s preferences as a musician and performer.

He explained, “I thought about these great classic recordings, [and wondered] what if I were able to make them sound as if Willie were producing himself, which didn’t happen at that time; artists really had no say in the production back then.

“So, I got the tapes and I stripped off the strings and the background vocals, and took it down to the bare necessities, which were really Willie and the studio band, who were great legendary pickers and players. And I uncovered some great playing. It’s a different feel; the one compliment Willie said was the project was what it would have sounded like if he, Willie, had produced it.”