Red Headed Stranger by Willie Nelson

Red Headed Stranger, Willie Nelson's eighteenth studio album, came out on Columbia in 1975, and it's the sound of a man who finally got the keys to the studio. His manager, Neil Reshen, had won him total creative control, and Nelson used it to build a concept album around "Tale of the Red Headed Stranger", a song he used to spin as a disc jockey in Fort Worth. The story follows a fugitive on the run after killing his wife and her lover, told in terse, poetic sketches.

He cut it cheaply at Autumn Sound Studios in Garland, Texas, with little more than his guitar, piano and drums. Columbia's executives thought they were listening to a demo, but nobody could make him add a thing. His take on Fred Rose's "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain" became his first number-one hit, the album went multi-platinum, and the title stuck to him as a nickname. It entered the National Recording Registry in 2010.

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