“At the end of every tour, Willie talks about retiring. [He says],\u2009’I think I might retire.’ But then we’ll have a conversation: ‘Well, what would you do if you retired?’ We both know the answer: Just lay down and die. It’s impossible to imagine him not being out there.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Here’s another thing Willie will never stop doing…\u00a0 opening his concerts with “Whiskey River”.<\/p>\n
He’s been doing it so long that nobody knows when he started.<\/p>\n
The best guess is around 1974, which means it’s kicked off about 6,500 of his shows.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"89-year-old Willie Nelson said he would rather die than retire.","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":20623,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"featured_img_display":"Yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[3337],"tags":[6917,3633],"class_list":["post-20891","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-country-music-news","tag-new-york-times","tag-willie-nelson"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-10 23:53:14","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"react_link":"https:\/\/chok.com\/blogs\/country-music-news\/2022\/08\/willie-nelson-would-rather-die-than-retire\/","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/briwebapp.net\/chokfm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20891","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/briwebapp.net\/chokfm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/briwebapp.net\/chokfm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briwebapp.net\/chokfm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briwebapp.net\/chokfm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20891"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/briwebapp.net\/chokfm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20891\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briwebapp.net\/chokfm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/briwebapp.net\/chokfm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briwebapp.net\/chokfm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briwebapp.net\/chokfm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}