Bobbie Nelson will document her time playing in her sibling Willie Nelson’s band for 47 years in the upcoming Me and Sister Bobbie: True Tales of the Family Band, a co-written memoir with her younger brother Willie. The book, a collaboration with music biographer David Ritz, will tell the story of Willie and Bobbie’s relationship in a manner that switches between the sibling’s voices in alternating chapters.
The Nelson family memoir arrives five years after Ritz and Nelson co-wrote the Texas singer’s second memoir, It’s a Long Story: My Life (his first memoir, Willie: An Autobiography, came out in 1988). Me and Sister Bobbie: True Tales of the Family Band tells the story of the Nelson family’s troubled childhood, which was full of parental abandonment. “Willie is very much like our mother,” Bobbie told Rolling Stone in 2014.
In the early Seventies, Bobbie joined Nelson’s Family Band as a keyboardist and backup vocalist. Today, she mostly plays piano in the group, and her rendition of the instrumental “Under the Double Eagle” remains a staple of Willie’s concerts. “We were playing the same music we’d played since forever,” Bobbie said in 2014 of the type of Outlaw Country that Willie and his band crystallized in the early Seventies in Austin. “It was just a difference audience.”
Me and Sister Bobbie will be in stores on September 15th.
