Texas starts Willie Nelson Endowment to help rural places and gives him the LBJ Liberty and Justice for All Award

Willie Nelson keeps bringing rural back into the conversation.
(Photo by Jay Janner, Associated Press)

Through song and advocacy, Willie Nelson knows about traveling long country miles to help farmers through Farm Aid. Even when an evening is in his honor, he takes the stage to rally for rural America, and showcase a new endowment to support it.

"A lot of people don’t realize where their food comes from, Willie Nelson said Friday night on the front porch of the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library," reports Robert T. Garrett of The Dallas Morning News. "Nelson asked the crowd, 'When they had breakfast this morning, did your food come from a farmer out here who raised his own? Is he feeding you? Are you getting it from some farm-to-market? These are things that you need to think about. . . . How you can help the local communities, help the local farmer – because he’s trying to make it.'”

Nelson was at the library to get the LBJ Liberty and Justice For All Award for his work advancing equal opportunity for all, and to celebrate the new Willie Nelson Endowment for Uplifting Rural Communities in the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, which "will fund research and student fellowships on sustainable agriculture and water, food insecurity, resilient energy and natural disaster recovery," Garrett reports. "Just as Farm Aid raised popular awareness of rural America’s crisis, the new Nelson endowment hopes to plant seeds about overlooked regions with rising public-policy intellectuals, explained Sheila Olmstead, a professor of public affairs at the LBJ School."

Nelson was born in the small town of Abbott, north of Waco. Garrett writes, "Over the past half-century, Nelson probably has done more than any other political or cultural figure to raise awareness that rural areas need help, Johnson’s two daughters, Lynda Johnson Robb and Luci Baines Johnson, said in interviews." Robb told Garrett, “He made a difference in the whole country’s recognizing how we need to support all parts of it and not just people who live in the cities." Her sister said, "Willie Nelson came and shook this country to its senses and said, ‘By gosh, we’ve got to care for the hand that feeds us.’ He reminded us how important they [farmers and ranchers] are."

Nelson launched Farm Aid with Neil Young and John Mellencamp in 1985, and is clearly proud of it. He told the crowd, "Farm Aid maybe had a lot to do with taking care of some of the farmers when they really needed help. . . . Somebody had to do it. We were there. We did it."