By the time Willie Nelson recorded Country Willie: His Own Songs with producer Chet Atkins in 1965, he was one of the more interesting writers in country music. His songs could feel classic in subject—heartache, loneliness—but quietly novel in approach: Here was a guy who sang about talking to his empty house in “Hello Walls,” and who employed chord changes on “Crazy” that were familiar in pop and jazz, but seemed positively exotic in the world of circa-1960s country. Still, most people who knew his songs probably didn’t know there was a person named Willie Nelson traveling around America, trying to make a living singing them. His first few albums—… And Then I Wrote and Here’s Willie Nelson—are decent, but Country Willie offers the first hints of the performer Nelson would soon become, albeit with some excessive production: Much to Nelson’s (retroactive) chagrin, Atkins added the moony backup choirs and other “requisite sweeteners”—Nelson’s words—he thought might make Nelson a star. But compared to the glitz and uprightness that defined early-1960s Nashville, Country Willie is a subdued affair. The 12 songs here feature the kind of casual phrasing (“Darkness on the Face of the Earth”) and mellow, slanted approach (“Are You Sure”) that connect country music to the jazz and blues that inspired it. Nelson certainly wasn’t the first Nashville writer to make a name singing his own songs: Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell had done it, Roger Miller was doing it, and Dolly Parton was getting a foot in, too. But something about that dumb title—Country Willie: His Own Songs—turned out to be central to Nelson’s persona, and helped shape how listeners would come to think of the singer-songwriter in general: Always part of some simpler, more distant place, always a little bit on his own.