Where Willie Nelson first smoked marijuana: It’s a hidden Fort Worth tale | Opinion
(From a column published July 3, 2004.)
The facts are a bit hazy, for a lot of reasons.
But maybe someday there’ll be a marker on a forgotten historical site in Fort Worth.
More than 70 years ago, Willie Nelson’s future changed in one puff.
In 1954, in Fort Worth, Nelson tried marijuana for the first time.
His memory of the day has been a bit foggy, maybe because it was not his only time.
But he remembers partaking with a musician friend from the Stockyards.
No historical plaque marks the site of Nelson’s first nonmusical number.
But I found the address in old city directories. The musician friend lived on a cliff in the Scenic Bluff neighborhood near Oakhurst Scenic Drive northeast of downtown.
The corner lot in the 2400 block of Akers Avenue has been redeveloped. For years, it was vacant and overgrown with trees. In later years, it belonged to former Texas House Speaker Gib Lewis.
Lewis bought the land in 1998 without knowing its past, an executive with his nearby office-label company said.
“Just say that Gib has always taken pride in collecting items of great significance in Texas history,” George Noah said, tongue in cheek.
Lewis bought the land from the late Betty Mullen, owner of the then-nearby Smoke Pit Barbecue restaurant and a character in her own right.
According to tax records, Mullen bought it in 1984 from a family named Lockwood. The neighborhood dated to the 1930s, and it is not clear when that home was demolished.
In 2004, Nelson reminisced about the 1954 moment for reporters.
“I’d been playing with Acie Lockwood somewhere, probably here or on the Jacksboro Highway,” he said.
It was during the televised Army-U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy hearings in May or June, he wrote in his 1988 biography, “Willie.”
“I went over to his house, and we were playing dominoes. And sometime during the evening” — a Willie twinkle came to his eye, and he grinned — “I experienced it.”
Lockwood died in 1984.
“He’s not around to deny it,” Nelson said.
Nelson told a slightly different version of the story in “Willie,” co-written by late Fort Worth author and screenwriter Bud Shrake.
Chapter 8 begins: “Fred Lockwood” — Acie Lockwood’s brother — “was the first person who ever gave me a joint. ... Fred said, ‘Willie, let’s blow some tea.’ “
The two had been watching the McCarthy hearings on the tiny black-and-white TV in a Jacksboro Highway bar.
Nelson credits Fred Lockwood with coming up with the line that inspired a song — “I gotta get drunk, and I sure do dread it.”
Nelson was 21 then.
In the book, he wrote later that Fred Lockwood gave him “a skinny little joint with both ends twisted.”
He also remembered bumming them off Lockwood for months, including at the Lockwoods’ house.
Nelson didn’t like weed for about six months, he wrote. “Since then, I have made up for those wasted six months.”
It was an age when casual marijuana use was the least of Fort Worth’s problems, compared with the nightly barroom brawls, stabbings and the occasional execution-style killing by small-time Texas mobs.
Nelson retold his stories about Fort Worth in the 1950s, when he lived here off and on and his father was chief mechanic at Frank Kent Ford.
Nelson hosted a country music radio show, sold Encyclopedia Americana door-to-door and even taught Southern Baptist Sunday school at the Metropolitan Baptist Church, then on Northwest 27th Street.
“Fort Worth is one of my old haunts,” he said during the April visit.
He remembered singing behind a chicken-wire screen to protect him from thrown beer bottles at Gray’s Cafe and Bar at 120 W. Exchange Ave.
“As far as I know, that was the first beer joint with screen wire strung across the stage,” he said. “None of us even wondered about it.” The scene was re-created in the movie “The Blues Brothers.”
He and the Lockwoods also played at bars on Hemphill Street and Magnolia Avenue and at the Mountaineer Tavern downtown at 1013 Main St., before the downtown convention center took down dozens of seedy hotels and bars.
“Organized crime didn’t move into Fort Worth, because the local boys were too tough,” Nelson wrote in his book.
The downtown hotels were mostly brothels where “$5 would take you around the world.”
The Star-Telegram rarely covered country music back then. Finally, though, entertainment columnist Elston Brooks tracked Nelson down to write the story of a Fort Worth songwriter with a brand-new hit.
The song: “Hello, Walls.”
We’ve always been happy to have Willie come back and refresh his memory.
This story was originally published April 20, 2022 at 10:21 AM.
