Willie Nelson And Older Sibling To Publish ‘Me And Sister Bobbie’ Memoir

Willie Nelson and his sister and bandmate Bobbie will tell the story of their unbreakable bond and their lives together in the new book Me and Sister Bobbie: True Tales of the Family Band. Written with co-author and seasoned biographer David Ritz, it’s scheduled for publication by Doubleday on 15 September.

The Nelson siblings were abandoned by their parents as toddlers and then raised by their grandparents in a small town in Texas. The book tells of the enduring relationship that they continue to enoy to this day, with Bobbie now aged 89 and her younger brother, American music royalty Willie, 87. Bobbie has been a full-time member of Willie’s band, The Family, since the early 1970s.

The volume takes the form of a dual memoir of alternating chapters, in which the brother and sister describe powerful and emotional scenes from growing up together and playing music in public for the first time. It charts Willie’s pursuit of a songwriting career and Bobbie’s challenges in, as the publicity says, “a series of challenging relationships and a musical career that took off only when attitudes about women began to change in Texas.”

“Dizzying highs and traumatic lows”

Me and Sister Bobbie is her first book, and in it she shares details of her life as a mother and a musician, as she develops talents that her brother says outstrip his own. Willie explores the depth of the connection between the pair and how it helped him through his most troubled times. “Through dizzying highs and traumatic lows, spanning almost nine decades of life, Willie and Bobbie have always had each other’s back.”

Willie’s own memoir My Life: It’s A Long Story was published in 2015. He described it as “a story of restlessness and the purity of the moment and living right. Of my childhood in Abbott, Texas, to the Pacific Northwest, from Nashville to Hawaii and all the way back again.”

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Format: UK English