Lyndel Rhodes was 92 years old when she heard Willie Nelson sing a song she had written. It was called “Little House on the Hill,” and it was the first song of hers anyone had ever recorded. Her son, the producer Buddy Cannon, wanted to film the moment. The first time the track played, he couldn’t. She was too emotional. So he played it again, and that second listen is the video more than a million people went on to watch.
A song written on the road home
Lyndel never set out to be a songwriter. She wrote songs for her own pleasure, and she played harmonica, something she had done since she was 13. “Little House on the Hill” came to her on a car ride home after visiting Buddy near Nashville. It was about the place she was heading back to: a small house in Lexington, Tennessee, where she had lived for about 60 years.
When she showed Buddy the song a few years later, he understood right away what she was writing about. He grew up in that house. He told People that his mother watched him and his sisters grow up and graduate there.
“My stepfather passed away in that house. It holds a lot of memories.” — Buddy Cannon
That is why the song never left his mind. It was not a general song about home. It was about one specific house on one specific hill, written by the woman who had kept it for six decades.
“I love it. Let’s cut it.”
Buddy Cannon is not just any producer. By 2016 he had been making records with Willie Nelson for about ten years, and his résumé also ran through Kenny Chesney, Reba McEntire, George Strait and many more. In 2016, while he and Willie were working on new music, he decided to take a chance on his mother’s song.
He cut a simple guitar-and-vocal demo and emailed it to Willie. On Facebook, Buddy wrote that the reply came a few hours later. Talking to People, he remembered it as about fifteen minutes. Either way, Willie did not make him wait, and the answer was short: “I love it. Let’s cut it.”
Willie may have had a soft spot for the writer already. For years, Buddy had been sharing videos of his living-room jam sessions with his mother, Buddy on guitar and Lyndel on harmonica. One of them, a gospel tune he filmed on his phone in 2014, had passed ten million views online. Buddy told the Today show that Willie was a bigger fan of his mom than she was of him. At that point, Lyndel and Willie had never met in person.
The song was cut at Willie’s Pedernales Studio in Spicewood, Texas, and Willie’s vocal went onto the track a few weeks after that first email.
Two listens in the little house
Then Buddy made the trip to Lexington with the finished recording and played it for his mother in the very house the song was about. The first listen overwhelmed her. On the second, he turned the camera on.
The video is simple. Lyndel sits wrapped in a green blanket, her red shoes sticking out at the bottom, and her feet tap along with Willie’s voice. Buddy asks her questions from behind the camera.
“What are you listening to?”
“Little House on the Hill.”
“Whose song is that?”
“Mine.”
“You wrote it?”
“Yeah, trying to.”
“Well, who’s singing it?”
“Mr. Willie.”
“Willie who?”
“Mr. Willie Nelson.”
Before long, she is singing along. Buddy said afterward that she could not stop smiling and her feet would not stop wiggling. He also said something more telling: his mother was a very shy, bashful woman, and she had never imagined that anyone would sing a word she wrote.
Buddy posted the clip in October 2016. Within days it had more than a million views on Facebook, and Willie shared it on his own page, calling it a sweet moment and thanking Buddy for it. In a second short video, Lyndel summed it up her own way: “Who would’ve thought it.”
The first track on the album
Willie kept his word. On April 28, 2017, the day before his 84th birthday, Legacy Recordings released God’s Problem Child. Track one was “Little House on the Hill,” credited to one writer: Lyndel Rhodes.
The placement was not a small gesture. God’s Problem Child was a record about getting older, about mortality and the odd beauty of still being around, and it opened with a 92-year-old woman’s song about coming home. The album debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart and reached the Top 10 of the Billboard 200.
Home, to the end
Lyndel Rhodes died on June 29, 2020, at the age of 96. Her family’s obituary noted that in all those years, she had left Tennessee only twice. It remembered “Little House on the Hill” the way she meant it: as a song about her homeplace, the house she always came home to.
Most of us have a place like that, a house we can still see with our eyes closed. If you have one, we would love to hear about it.