Given how celebrated and prolific Willie Nelson has been throughout his career, it’s hard to imagine a time when the people who were actively championing his music and giving him a platform were confused by his artistic endeavours.

By the middle of the 1970s, Nelson had very much established himself as a hero of country music and had begun to even accrue an audience within the mainstream rather than just within country circles. Having been active for over 20 years, Nelson found himself more popular than ever when he entered his forties, but that didn’t mean that record labels were cock-a-hoop about his music or the way that he presented himself.

Because country music was becoming considerably more popular during this period, it also underwent a period of becoming more polished, with artists opting to go into the studio accompanied by orchestras and larger bands, which was the complete opposite of how Nelson had always done things. Not wishing to compromise on his own style, Nelson continued to work in a way that produced minimalistic country compositions rather than these lavish works, and it proved not to be to everyone’s taste.

As a result, he ended up submitting the song ‘Red Headed Stranger’ to Columbia, which they responded to with raised eyebrows. Having been written in 1954 by Arthur ‘Guitar Boogie’ Smith, it was certainly not going to have been in a modern country style, and because Nelson was a fan of the original version, he wished to do it justice by recording his own version in a similar style.

This standoff between label and artist led to them questioning why he couldn’t adapt to the times, and it meant that he was considered something of an outlier compared to the rest of the artists emerging from the Nashville country scene at the same time.

“They’d never heard anything, probably, that sparse turned in as a session,” Nelson later explained. “They thought it needed a little… you know, maybe it sounded pretty good as a demo, but I couldn’t be serious about it being a finished product.”

However, because of a clause in his contract with the label, he was allowed to overturn their demands and release the track as originally intended, putting it out on the album of the same name in 1975. With singles ‘Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain’ and ‘Remember Me’, he ended up scoring a number one hit on the country charts in America, and it ended up being one of his most acclaimed releases in his catalogue.

Nelson would go on to have further success in the 1970s with Starlight and was celebrated for the fact that he kept country music authentic and in its original form. If there’s any argument to be made that not all music has to be modernised, then the fact that Nelson was able to achieve his greatest successes by keeping things true to how they’d always been, and if people were willing to pay attention to him for this, then there was no reason for his label to question it.