Willie Nelson - Red Headed Stranger (Remastered) (CD)

All Music Guide

Willie Nelson's Red Headed Stranger perhaps is the strangest blockbuster country produced, a concept album about a preacher on the run after murdering his departed wife and her new lover, told entirely with brief song-poems and utterly minimal backing. It's defiantly anti-commercial and it demands intense concentration -- all reasons why nobody thought it would be a hit, a story related in Chet Flippo's liner notes to the 2000 reissue. It was a phenomenal blockbuster, though, selling millions of copies and establishing Nelson as a superstar recording artist in its own right. For all its success, it still remains a prickly, difficult album, though -- difficult because it's old-fashioned, sounding like a tale told around a cowboy campfire. It's undoubtedly distinctive and sounds more so with each passing year.

- Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide