Boxcar Willie: My Life Story

By Boxcar Willie, a.k.a. Lecil T. Martin

I recently reread Boxcar Willie: My Life Story, published in 1995 by Boxcar Willie AKA Lecil Travis Martin. He talks directly to the reader while telling his story in a series of individual paragraphs separated by blank lines. “My wife tells me I am a little bit different from other people,” he writes, “so why not make my book different and not have chapters.”

He also doesn’t use dates; I had to refer to the bio on his website to learn when major events happened. From 1949 to 1976, the native Texan served on-and-off as an Air Force flight engineer, alternating with being a deejay and singing in bars, as well as various other jobs to feed his family and try to stay above the poverty level.

Waiting at a railroad crossing one day for a train to go by, he saw a hobo sitting in an open boxcar, and the man looked like an Air Force friend of his. He said, “My god, there’s Willie in a boxcar.” He pulled over to the side of the road and wrote a song called “Boxcar Wille.”

Several years later, he debuted his Boxcar Willie act at the Yellow Rose in Corpus Christi, Texas. (That is the nightclub where I saw performers such as David Allen Coe and Asleep at the Wheel). His first fame came from a performance on TV’s The Gong Show.

He was a major star in Great Britain before he became a star in the USA. He worked on Boxcar Willie: My Life Story for ten years and published it while he owned BoxCar Willie Theater in Branson, Missouri. A year later, he was diagnosed with leukemia. Lecil Travis Martin died in 1999 in at age 67.