The Wild Story Behind Willie Nelson’s Visit to The White House

There’s a famous photo of Willie Nelson and Emmylou Harris meeting President Jimmy Carter at The White House in 1977. Willie is on crutches, in a sleeveless t-shirt with the President of the United States.

It’s quite a picture. And a funny enough “rock star” photo as it is. But the backstory is even funnier.

We felt this little bit of Outlaw Country history deserved its own article!

It started out with Willie Nelson in The Bahamas where he, naturally, got arrested for possession of marijuana. He’d finished a big run of tour dates and took some time off to fish in the sea songwriter Hank Cochran.

Willie was jailed for a few hours, got out, celebrated with some booze, and next thing he knew, the country music star slipped down a stair and broke his foot.

Both the arrest and the broken foot complicated things, because he was scheduled to play at The White House seven days later.

Jimmy Carter Loved Music. He’s often known as the most musically-oriented president in modern history, an avid music fan who was famously friends with the rebels of popular music like Johnny Cash and The Allman Brothers Band.

Rock n’ Roll helped Carter appeal to young voters, and in the White House, First Lady Rosalynn Carter organized numerous musical events. The First Family preferred concerts over the endless high society cocktail parties.

Willie was a vocal supporter of Jimmy Carter during his 1976 Presidential campaign, and the two became fast friends. After he was elected, Carter paid Willie back by inviting him for a performance at The White House.

Despite the news of the drug bust, Carter not only didn’t cancel the performance, but welcomed Willie with open arms.

So on September 2nd, 1977 and Willie Nelson played a concert with Emmylou Harris at The White House. But perhaps the musical highlight of the night was First Lady Rosalynn Carter joining Willie for a duet of “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother.”

Among those in attendance that night was Chip Carter, Jimmy’s son. Chip was more free-spirited than his ambitious father, which had notably lead to interpersonal relationship conflicts, which the two solved through music; specifically, their love of Bob Dylan. So having Willie at the White House was an opportunity nobody in the family would miss.

After the performance, Willie’s White House hijinks continued, but it took more than ten years for even a sliver of the story to come out about what happened after… and decades for the rest of it.

“I guess the roof of the White House is the safest place to smoke dope… I let the weed cover me with a pleasing cloud… I reflected on what a long, strange trip it had been from smoking cedar bark and grapevine at the age of four or five… to sitting on the roof of the White House sharing a number in the warm humid night.”
– Willie Nelson in his 1988 Autobiography

In his 1988 autobiography Willie: An Autobiography, Nelson mentioned that he snuck up to The White House roof and smoked “a fat Austin torpedo” (a joint) with someone he described as a “White House Servant”.

Not counting the unbelievable act of testicular fortitude it took to smoke Marijuana, which was villainized and very much federally illegal at the time, on The White House roof — Willie smoked that presidential joint exactly seven days after his Bahamas drug bust.

It was a salacious enough detail in-and-of itself. But in his 2015 book, nearly forty years after the smoking of the fat Austin torpedo, Willie finally fessed up that it was Chip Carter, the President’s son, who provided the joint.

In the 2020 documentary Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President, President Carter himself confirmed the exchange, laughing about Willie trying to disguise Chip’s identity in his ’88 book.

for his part, Chip also lamented the famed White House joint in the same documentary. “I said, ‘Let’s go upstairs.’ We just kept going up until we got to the roof, where we leaned against the flagpole at the top of the place and lit one up.”

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