Willie Nelson › Similar Artists

Waylon Jennings - 100% match to Willie Nelson

Wayland Arnold Jennings, 15 June 1937, Littlefield, Texas, USA, d. 13 February 2002, Arizona, USA. Jennings’ mother wanted to name him Tommy but his father, William Alvin, insisted that the family tradition of ‘W.A.’ should be maintained. His father played guitar in Texas dancehalls and Jennings’ childhood hero was Ernest Tubb, with whom he later recorded Read more

Merle Haggard - 80% match to Willie Nelson

6 April 1937, Bakersfield, California, USA. ‘Like a razor’s edge, Merle Haggard sings’ is how John Stewart described his voice in ‘Eighteen Wheels’, and that razor has been honed by his rough and rowdy ways. In the 30s Haggard’s parents migrated from the Dustbowl to ‘the land of milk and honey’, California. Life, however, was almost a Read more

Kris Kristofferson - 53% match to Willie Nelson

Kristoffer Kristofferson, 22 June 1936, Brownsville, Texas, USA. Kristofferson, a key figure in the ‘New Nashville’ country movement of the early 70s, began his singing career in Europe. Previously a Golden Gloves boxer and a Creative Literature student at Ponoma College in California, Kristofferson earned a Rhodes scholarship to study literature at Oxford Universi Read more

George Jones - 49% match to Willie Nelson

George Glenn Jones, 12 September 1931, Saratoga, Texas, USA. Jones is the greatest of honky tonk singers but he has also been a victim of its lifestyle. He learned guitar in his youth, and in 1947, was hired by the husband-and-wife duo Eddie And Pearl. This developed into his own radio programme and a fellow disc jockey, noting his close-set eyes and upturned nose, nicknamed Read more

The Highwaymen - 48% match to Willie Nelson

Dwight Yoakam - 41% match to Willie Nelson

23 October 1956, Pikeville, Kentucky, USA. Much of Yoakam’s hip honky tonk music paved the way for rock audiences accepting country music in the 90s. A singer-songwriter with an early love of the honky-tonk country music of Buck Owens and Lefty Frizzell, he has always shown a distinct antipathy towards the Nashville pop/country scene.Yoakam, the Read more

Hank Williams - 35% match to Willie Nelson

Hiram (misspelled on birth certificate as Hiriam) Williams, 17 September 1923, Georgiana, Alabama, USA, d. 1 January 1953, on the road between Montgomery, Alabama and Oak Hill, West Virginia, USA. Misspelling notwithstanding, Williams disliked the name and took to calling himself Hank. He was born with a spine defect that troubled him throughout his life, and which was furth Read more

Buck Owens - 34% match to Willie Nelson

Alvis Edgar Owens Jnr., 12 August 1929, Sherman, Texas, USA, d. 25 March 2006, USA, Bakersfield, California, USA. Buck Owens became one of the leading country music stars of the 60s and 70s, along with Merle Haggard, the leading exponent of the ‘west coast sound’. Owens gave himself the nickname Buck at the age of three, after a favourite horse. When he was 10, his Read more

Jerry Jeff Walker - 32% match to Willie Nelson

Ronald Clyde Crosby, 16 March 1942, Oneonta, New York, USA. Although Walker initially pursued a career as a folk singer in New York’s Greenwich Village, he first forged his reputation as a member of Circus Maximus. He left this promising group following their debut album, when a jazz-based initiative proved incompatible with his own ambitions. Having moved to Key West i Read more

David Allan Coe - 30% match to Willie Nelson

6 September 1939, Akron, Ohio, USA. From the age of nine, Coe was in and out of reform schools, correction centres and prisons. According to his publicity handout, he spent time on Death Row after killing a fellow inmate who demanded oral sex. When Rolling Stone magazine questioned this, Coe responded with a song, ‘I’d Like To Kick The Shit Out Of You’. Whatev Read more

Townes Van Zandt - 30% match to Willie Nelson

John Townes Van Zandt, 7 March 1944, Fort Worth, Texas, USA, d. 1 January 1997, Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, USA. A country and folk blues singer and guitarist, Van Zandt was a native Texan and great-grandson of one of the original settlers who founded Fort Worth in the mid-nineteenth century. The son of a prominent oil family, Van Zandt turned his back on financial security to pu Read more

John Prine - 29% match to Willie Nelson

10 October 1946, Maywood, Illinois, USA. His grandfather had played with Merle Travis, and Prine himself started playing guitar at the age of 14. He then spent time in college, worked as a postman for five years, and spent two years in the army. He began his musical career around 1970, singing in clubs in the Chicago area. Prine signed to Atlantic Records in 1971, releasing Read more

Tom T. Hall - 29% match to Willie Nelson

25 May 1936, Olive Hill, Kentucky, USA. Hall was one of eight children and his father was a bricklayer and part-time minister. Hall described the family home as ‘a frame house of pale-grey boards and a porch from which to view the dusty road and the promise of elsewhere beyond the hills - the birthplace of a dreamer’. Hall, who started to learn to play a school fri Read more

Emmylou Harris - 28% match to Willie Nelson

2 April 1947, Birmingham, Alabama, USA. Harris was raised in North Carolina, later attending the University Of North Carolina on a drama scholarship. Starting as a folk singer, Harris tried her luck in the late 60s in New York’s Greenwich Village folk clubs, making an album for the independent Jubilee label in 1970. Gliding Bird was largely unrepresentative of her subse Read more

Guy Clark - 28% match to Willie Nelson

6 November 1941, Rockport, Texas, USA. Clark has achieved considerably more fame as a songwriter than as a performer, although he is revered by his nucleus of fans internationally. Brought up in the hamlet of Monahans, Texas, Clark worked in television during the 60s, and later as a photographer - his work appeared on albums released by the Texan-based International Artists Read more