Tipping their cowboy hats to the one and only Willie Nelson… well, Possum and the Hag too.
This week, Ernest and Jake Worthington released a cover of the red headed stranger’s classic “Yesterday’s Wine,” which is the title track of the 1971 Willie Nelson album Yesterday’s Wine. The song was written by Nelson, and it later became a number 1 duet for George Jones and Merle Haggard in 1982. The release of the song, and the album itself, was significant in that it was the first of four concept albums Willie made, and he wrote nine out of the ten the songs on the tracklist at the Happy Valley Dude Ranch in Bandera, Texas, where he was living after his house in Nashville burned down.
This album was much more stripped-back than his previous work, which put his vocals at the forefront and included very basic instrumentation and production, allowing his masterful songwriting to shine. Unfortunately, though, his label at the time RCA Records didn’t particularly like or understand the album, and certainly didn’t know how to promote something that was so different from everything else coming out of Nashville at the time (shocker).
Wille recalled in his 2015 book, It’s A Long Story: My Life, his label heads telling him:
“It’s your f*****g worst album to date.”
Another executive added that it was:
“Some far-out s*** that maybe the hippies high on dope can understand, but the average music lover is gonna think you’ve lost your cotton-pickin’ mind.”
But once again, Willie stuck to his guns, and they released the record anyways, though they felt they couldn’t properly promote a bare-bones, existentialist country album. Willie says he wanted to defend himself, but he was coming to realize that the whole Nashville thing maybe just wasn’t meant to be:
“I was tempted to say something, to show how the songs fit together in one cohesive story, but I stuck to my guns and stayed silent… Nashville and I had been trying damn hard but we hadn’t really seen eye to eye for most of the sixties. I felt like I had shown goodwill and patience. I’d given the Music City establishment a fair chance.
After ‘Yesterday’s Wine,’ I cut other albums for RCA, but the story was always the same. The sales were slow and the producers lukewarm about my output. My career had stalled.”
In his 1988 autobiography, Willie: An Autobiography, he later reflected on the record, which is considered one of the very first concept albums, saying he feels looking back that it’s one of his best:
“I think it’s one of my best albums but ‘Yesterday’s Wine’ was regarded by RCA as way too spooky and far out to waste promotion money on.”
Not long after the release of this record, RCA parted ways with Nelson, who went back home to Texas, signed with Atlantic Records, and quickly became one of the best-selling artists on the label. His first release with Atlantic was Shotgun Willie in May of 1973, and though was critically-acclaimed within the industry, did not sell very well at all. The next year, in 1974, he put another concept record in Phases and Stages that included the hit single “Bloody Mary Morning.”
The rest, as they say, is outlaw country history (or something like that), and Ernest and Jake’s version is part of the inaugural project for Ern’s new DeVille Records called Cadillac Sessions. He signed three new country artists in Chandler Walters (who plays steel guitar for Post), Cody Lohden and Rhys Rutherford. The project features Snoop Dogg on a track, and also Miranda Lambert on a gorgeous heartbreaker called “Another Thing To Love.”
Of course, it’s no easy task to do justice to the great Willie Nelson, but Jake has such an incredible voice, and Ernest is so good at leaning into the classic country sensibilities that shaped the genre, that I think they did a really solid job with it. Their rendition is probably more in the spirit of the Haggard and Jones duet, but this song in particular was so important to Willie’s legendary career, that I can certainly appreciate two younger, rising stars in the genre spotlighting the music that revolutionized country music… and to this day, is still the absolute best the genre has to offer
See what you think here:
They previously sang “Yesterday’s Wine” together at the Grand Ole Opry:
While you’re here, check out Willie’s original version:
And the George Jones and Merle Haggard duet version:
