By MIKE GEE
The road forever goes on.

As the Outlaw reels off the rest of the year, a schedule that would leave most 30-year-olds examining their boot heels for holes yet alone a 63-year-old, 172cm, four-times married, scrawny country muso who's just stepped out of the shower a few hours before yet another show, this one in Louisville Kentucky, history seems to unravel in his voice - as cracked and weather-beaten as the well-worn leather skin that clings to his frame. There's nothing much to spare.

Willie Nelson is every centimetre the highwayman; the sad, spiritual poet endlessly travelling Americana, truckstop, pitstop, small town and large, a battered 33-year-old guitar wearing the signatures of his best friends, precisely that. When he wakes up the first name he sees is Roger Miller. Play it again, Sam.

And he doesn't want to stop. Probably can't. He gets around. "Yeah, really," the latter word intoned deep and low swallows a vast space. "I'm having a good time doing it. If I wasn't I wouldn't be out here." And today he's proud. There's some news he's been handed by the self-daubed "the Family", a restless coterie of musicians, stagehands, roadies, technicians, management and the titleless who trade constant adulation for a job and swing like a gate in a Texas twister around his presence. Mostly they fall into the Willie factor: long hair - his hangs waist and longer, boots and ankle tight jeans, headbands, leather jackets and all manner of accessories. Wyatt Earp meets Sonny Barger and the Hells and Angels.

"I was just looking at a new list somebody put together here of the 30 highest selling album sales of all time and I'm number 25 with 31 million. The Beatles are top with 70-something million and Brooks is second with 60 million. I'm right under Prince and right over Eric Clapton, so I'm in good shape. And they didn't count the bootlegs." The chuckle is a rattler. "For every one that's sold there's another one copied so there's 60 million people that have records out there."

They call him a national monument - and that's part of the reason why. The other is because he's on that highway, he's part of the land, seems to breathe the very essence of the dirt and downbeat, is as much part of the folk as he is of folklore. His press is littered with euphemism and allegory about his presence: Willie Nelson is closer to a spiritual leader, a guru than a mere truckin' man. Some swear they've seen him heal people; others would die for him. Emmylou Harris, herself a latterday Earth Mother, once summed it up, "He has this presence that radiates out of him, an aura. You can feel it even when he's not in the room. If you want to understand what I'm talking about, go to one of his concerts. People act like they're in church, as if he fills a spiritual void for them."

Alternatively, listen to his new album, "Spirit", the 100 and something Willie Nelson collection of "simple troubadour" songs; the record he modestly drawls "just might be the best yet". Poignant doesn't do it justice: "Spirit" rips at the heart and soul with such sad beauty, such a deluge of emotion, that's it's easy to understand why his great contemporaries seek him out or respond whenever he calls: Neil Young, Sinead O'Connor, Frank Sinatra, Hootie and the Blowfish, George Jones, Julio Iglesias, Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, Dolly Parton, Ray Price, Faron Young, Merle Haggard, the remaining Highwaymen - Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson, even U2.

"I went in the studio in Dublin recently with them and did a song that Bono had written for me. I'd had it for five years and we finally got together and recorded it," he says. "It's called "Slow Dancing" - it's a great song. I don't know when it's gonna come out. They just gave it to me and said I could put it out anywhere, anyway, I wanted to. I was kind of hoping they'd put it out on their album - they sell more than I do." Cue, more laughter. "Might as well go for the big audience. They're great. All of them are great guys."

Tributes - Nelson's not short of them. It's the songss they come for, are drawn by; perhaps by the sheer mystique of - and Emmylou is right - his presence. Just listen to Willie wander through a conversation; the pauses, spaces - it isn't that he's intense, he's just more than there.

At birth it would have been hard to figure that Willie Nelson had big-time stamped on his forehead. His hometown hamlet of Abbott in the Texas cotton-farming country north of now infamous Waco, doesn't even exist anymore. When it did it could have been lifted straight out of a b-grade western, the scene where the camera zooms in on the old town limits sign: population 300 carved into a flat, broken, lopsided, battered board.

Willie was born into the worst year of the Great Depression. His father was a mechanic who travelled a lot, his mother left one day to find work and never returned, so Nelson was raised by his grandparents and handful of aunts. A simple twist of fate determined the future. His grandfather was a blacksmith who owned a $3 Sears Roebuck guitar, gave the youngster his first and last music lesson at age six and weaned him on the music of fellow Texans such as Bob Wills and Ernest Tubb, some of the big bands and a crooner - name of Sinatra. At 10, young Willie played his first dancehall in a band with his older sister, Bobbie, on piano and the local football coach on trumpet. It's been nightlife ever since.

While still in his teens, Nelson started playing dances and honky tonks with Bud Fletcher a local musician and hustler - who wasn't then? - who gave the fledgling singer and guitarist his first real stage experience opening for Wills and other redneck bravados. By the time he graduated from high school, Nelson had his own regular radio show.

During the day he sold Bibles and vacuum cleaners door-to-door, worked as a janitor, joined the Airforce, married and fathered, scuffled a lot. He moved to Fort Worth, saw his first marriage fall apart and his life do pretty much the same.

Come 1959, Willie Nelson, was a 26-year-old part-time disc jockey hangin' 'round the Jacksboro Highway. Located just outside the Fort Worth city limits and exempt by longstanding local custom from the sanctimonious Texas liquor laws, the Jacksboro strip was a mile-long corridor of cratered asphalt, clapboard, dingy and endless beer joints and chaos. In the sober desertion of daylight, it resembled an abandoned movie set gone to seed; a derelict's dream palace. By night, neon-lit and ablaze, it was the world's longest bar fight. Until the 1960s when it was deftly isolated by the Federal Interstate System, the Jacksboro Highway was the redneck answer to Sunset Boulevarde. Here the bedrock audience of country music gravitated, their raucous nights relieving the despair of alien days. All a good country musician had to do was help them find themselves. It was on the strip, particularly at the aptly-named Country Dump, Nelson got his licks. It wasn't Route 66; it was worse.

In 1959, Willie Nelson also wrote "Night Life", sold the copyright to three Houston businessman, bought himself a 10-year-old Buick convertible and hit the road for Music City, U.S.A. - Nashville where he landed a job with Ray Price's publishing company and a No 1 hit with Faron Young's version of "Hello Walls". Patsy Cline made his "Crazy" a monster and Price immortalised "Night Life" but his own recordings for Liberty, Monument and RCA obstinately fell on fallow fields throughout the 1960s. During the decade he recorded more than 20 albums and kept his cool, just.

"It bothered me nobody else thought I could sing back then, I guess I was into a lot of negative thinking," he says, real quiet. "I got in a lot of fights, divorced, all that stuff. My head was just pointed the wrong way. Then I started to do a lot of reading. I got into Kahil Gibran (author of "The Prophet"), got really into Edgar Cayce and his son, Hugh Cayce - books that had real positive attitude. I changed, you know. I was like a drunk that quit drinking. I kinda developed this real positive attitude toward my own life, got into my own life."

He stayed with it. The '70s brought the crossover of Willie Nelson. When his Nashville home burnt down just before Christmas 1970, Nelson took it as an omen and went home to Texas and found his future. Another simple twist of fate. Signing with Atlantic Records he recorded two albums, "Shotgun Willie" and "Phases and Stages" that gave him both critical acclaim and his best sales to date. When he shifted to Columbia and released "Red Headed Stranger" in 1975, a country concept album, stark and raw, it bore "Blue Eye's Crying In The Rain", an unexpected pop hit that spearheaded a traditional country revival. The following year, RCA packed previously-issued Nelson-material with songs by Jennings, Colter and Tompall Glaser on one disc "Wanted: The Outlaws". It became the first million-selling country album and sparked a musical revolution. And the rest as they say is history.

The "Fourth Of July" picnics, which have become the stuff of legend; his annual Farm Aid shows that have called attention to the horrific and largely ignored plight of the American farmer since 1985; an acting career that includes features such as "Thief", "The Electric Horseman", "Red Headed Stranger", "Honeysuckle Rose", "Barbarosa" and "Songwriter"; and the Highwaymen - man, it's "Stardust".

Not that having that album on the charts for more than a decade ranks much. "Spirit", the record where Nelson dispensed of big band backdrops got down to just fiddle, piano and rhythm guitar - and his voice and gut-string picking, that brings on the some rumbling analysis. The voice as a weapon.

"I think there's a danger of every time you add a musician, of losing the feel of a session. I know for sure that some of the great recordings were done with just a voice with no instrumentation; some of the cantors in the churches, they had no instruments. The churches I grew up in Abbott, Texas, particularly a Church of Christ, had no instruments. They just sang with the voices which is beautiful.

"Then you add a guitar and that's where I started getting interested in hearing and listening to music. I heard guys like Ernest Tubb and his guitar and Jimmy Rodgers and his guitar, Eddie Arnold and his guitar, Hank Williams ... and I just started putting things together in a supple way but then I'd listen to Bob Wills who has a big swing band. There is something lost each time you add a musician.

"To go against that I just did an album with 60 pieces out in LA called "Everything Has A Time" with Jimmy Bowen but those songs on there they called for that kind of treatment. We did songs like "All The Things You Are", songs I thought needed a plush lush sound, but for my songs - strictly my songs, I think they sound better the more simple they are. I like the voice. I think I'm in better health than ever so that's going to effect my lungs and singing. Yeah.

"I really do think this might be the best album. It's so simple and it was so easy to do and there's a lot of new songs in there that happened at the right time for the album and I put some old ones in that fit the spirit of the album. Some of them go back 17 years. I guess they finally found a place in life. It sort of came together like it's supposed to."

For the record, it came together in just two days. What isn't coming together is the plight of the American farmer for whom Farm Aid has already done so much. Drought-struck for more than a decade their fight is not only against nature but the nature of modern America.

And Willie sighs, "Comparative to a lot of the other places I've been to, we're in pretty good shape in America but compared to where we were we have slipped a lot. We're not taking care of our small farmers, our small business. We are allowing big corporations to come in and take over the land and that is a huge mistake. The fallow farmer is being foreclosed on. We used to have eight million small family farmers now we're down to less than two million. And we're losing 500 a week.

"The prices of farm products and producing has gone down so low the farmer has no way to pay his bills, pay his mortgage, and if he's had to borrow any money at all, well, he's screwed because he will be squeezed out. There's a big drive to take over the land and get rid of the small guy and let the big corporations do it all. It's a huge mistake because you're screwing up the land - a corporation wouldn't care less about an acre of land. Not at all."

So maybe the job of the country musician - if Nelson is just that - hasn't changed that much from those days on the Jacksboro strip. Spirit and helping people sort themselves out.

The audience he can call on though is so much bigger, many of whom will be rolling down to their local cinema paradiso to take in his latest feature "Gone Fishing". Nelson plays a fishing guru in the Florida Everglades who lands the job of looking after two boyhood pals (Joe Pesci and Danny Glover) who win a fishing trip there. "I guess I enjoy making films," he mugs, "especially if there's a guitar around. I got to do the music on this - a song called "Down In The Everglades". First place though, if it's not something I really want to do, I won't do it. But if it's got a horse in it or a guitar then I'm sucker for it."

His favourite film, incidentally, is the Fred Schepisi-directed "Barbarosa". It had horses and guitars.

Inevitably, the conversation ends up in verse and chorus, in the simple heart of Willie Nelson the songwriter, who can say honestly, "I like it best when I'm busy writing. I hate it when I sit around for months and don't write ... "; whose five decades of yearning, keening and solipsism come down to "music has given me the freedom to move around"; who finds joy in "going down the highway with the bus and the bike - it's a good place to write"; who can wish for the future "a raising of the spirit, a period of good positive thinking".

And it's the Willie Nelson who laughs loud, happy and long when asked whether it surprises him he keeps writing so many great songs, and replies: "Yeah, it does sometimes, I wonder especially when I go so long and don't write one then, all of a sudden, there it was and it was easy, then I wonder." There's one of those pauses, and he quietly ends, "We have a saying, "Fortunately, we're not in control, so ... "

And the road goes forever on.