Music journalist Stephen K. Peeples wrote a review of Willie Nelson’s fourth 4th of July Picnic in 1976 on assignment for Crawdaddy magazine per then-editor Jim Trombetta, but blew the deadline. First and last time Peeples did that.
That never-published review became a chapter in his also–unpublished 1977 manuscript about the mid-’70s Texas music scene, titled Diamonds in the Rough, recently exhumed from the Peeples Archives. The piece debuts here on July 4, 2026, the 50th anniversary of Nelson’s Bi-Centennial Picnic and the USA’s 250th birthday.
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Throw 80,000-plus country rollers together for a music festival on a private ranch outside Gonzales, Texas (pop. 7,000), spiced up with record company and concert promoter/management infighting (with press caught in the middle), backstage politics, beer shortages, packs of cigarettes at $1.25 apiece, concession burns and Port-O-Can overflows.
Add gunpowder fumes from carelessly used unlawful fireworks, a rape or two, a drowning (a dude went swimming in a cattle water tank), more than a few heat/sun/beer/drug overdoses, clouds of seedy reefer smoke, buckets of rain, torrents of mud, and occasional sound problems.
Sautee the whole thing with more than 24 hours of music from a bunch of the best artists on the frontiers of country music/redneck and roll. Finally, bake it in South Texas’ brain-frying heat and stultifying humidity, while basting with rainwater from the sky.
You’ve got yourself your basic Buy-Centennial Willie Nelson Pic-Nic, coinciding with the USA’s 200th birthday.
Conservative elements in Texas tried to kill Nelson’s fourth annual Texas music festival last spring, just as they’ve tried to do since Nelson’s first July 4 Pic-Nic in 1973.
The guy shoveling water uphill in summer ’76 was a holy-rolling pro-fessional preacher named Rev. Jimmy Darnell. At the first mass-gathering permit hearing, Darnell agitated the vote-conscious Gonzales County Commissioners with unholy visions of decimation if 300,000 naked, drug-crazed hippies invaded the county’s rural peace and quiet. The commissioners hurriedly denied the organizer’s three-day permit application.
But that didn’t kill the beast. Nearly a month and much local politicking later, the organizers (Mike Benestante, Gino McCoslin, and Dar Jamal) rallied pro-Nelson locals in Gonzales while Nelson performed a benefit show in exchange for a single-day permit. Anything can be done in Texas, if you know the right people, the saying goes. In any case, the festival’s organizers had a mere three weeks to finish preparing the site, located on the 840-acre spread several miles from town owned by Sterling Kelley.
The music actually started the afternoon of the Third with sets from up-and-comers like Bobby Rambo and Bogus Joe, but didn’t “officially” get underway until about 10 a.m. on the Fourth. The festival’s most high-spirited licks came from Ray Wylie Hubbard, Rusty Wier, Doug Sahm, David Allan Coe (who was packing heat as usual), and Leon and Mary Russell.
Something usually overlooked is that Texas music bubbles from an unusually far-flung melting-pot culture, and stretches far beyond any meaningless “progressive country” tag. Taken as a whole, Texas performers explore all kinds of musical territory, from pure country to pure rock and roll, from pure blues to pure jazz and everything in between. Texas audiences, for the most part, like that kind of versatility as long as the musicians are accomplished.
So it’s understandable that the Pic-Nic audience had no trouble keeping up with smokin’ western swing/jazz/rockabilly by Asleep at the Wheel, soulful country blues/rockabilly/rock and roll (yes!) by the Possum, George Jones, all kinds of snap-rolling jazz aerobatics by The Point, and thoughtful honky-tonk ballad-and-roll by Bill Callery (in that order) on a single afternoon.
Also on the bill were Kris Kristofferson, Ernest Tubb, Roger Miller, and Jerry Jeff Walker. Regrettably, I didn’t catch them; I was also conducting interviews backstage and couldn’t be everywhere at once.
Nelson sat in with Sahm for a few numbers, using Atwood Allen’s Fender Telecaster instead of Trigger, the old gut-stringed Martin acoustic he usually plays.
Several hours later, Willie gospelized along at the end of Russell’s roaring, blewzy rock ’n’ soul wake-up set at daybreak on the Fifth.
Those turned out to be Nelson’s only appearances, and Russell’s turned out to be the last performance; as stage crews began to set up equipment for the joint (pun intended) Waylon Jennings/Willie Nelson set, a wall of black rainclouds thundered over the littered pastures.
The deluge didn’t stop for more than an hour. Jessi Colter and Spanky and Our Gang were also rained out. More than a few soaked and muddy members of the audience bitched that Waylon and Willie had not been scheduled to play earlier. “It was more like Leon Russell’s picnic!” one guy complained to his bedraggled girlfriend.
(Years later, Carter Robertson, singer in Waylon’s band, wrote about her Picnic experience.)
The once-verdant picnic site looked like ground zero after the blast—beer cans carpeted the mud that covered scores of abandoned blankets and shoes. “Jimmy Darnell and his CLODs (Citizens for Law, Order, and Decency) weren’t too far off,” mused one of the stage crew while surveying the apocalyptic scene.
When it was all over, the local Gonzales Inquirer noted that the county sheriff’s office and the Department of Public Safety had arrested only 137 people. Veteran concert photographer Scott Newton was quoted as saying it was “wild as anything I’ve ever seen… The heat was brutal, the crowd was brutal… I’ve never seen one worse.” I’d second that.
As in past years, Nelson allowed other people to organize and promote the Buy-Centennial Pic-Nic. There was the usual post-Pic-Nic confusion about who the hell got how much money. Like the cash from about 80 concessions sold for $1,000 each. And the money from ticket sales that was spread out all over the state and yet to be collected.
Some sources believed that the confusion was intentionally designed to keep the Internal Revenue Service confused. In any case, there are some nefarious types—both above and below the artists’ level—that are on the loose with a lot of cash that’s next to impossible to trace. And more than one artist wound up playing for free, whether they liked it or not.
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Stephen K. Peeples is a Grammy-nominated multi-media writer-producer and award-winning radio/record-industry veteran raised in Miami and Los Angeles by career newspaper journalists and music lovers. See the “About” page on his website. More original stories and exclusive interviews are posted there and on his YouTube channel.
Read more Willie Nelson-related stories on stephenkpeeples.com.
Article: Review: Willie Nelson’s 1976 Buy-Centennial 4th of July Picnic
Category: News and Reviews, Blasts From the Past
Author: Stephen K. Peeples
Article Source: stephenkpeeples.com
