“Without my sister,” Mr. Nelson wrote in that book, “I’d never be where I am today.”
Bobbie Lee Nelson was born on Jan. 1, 1931, in Abbott, Texas, north of Waco, to Ira and Myrle Nelson. They had married when they were teenagers, and soon after Willie was born they divorced and went their separate ways, leaving the children in the care of their grandparents Alfred and Nancy Nelson.
“I believe my brother’s happy-go-lucky personality stayed happy-go-lucky because he wasn’t traumatized by the shock of our parents’ departure,” Ms. Nelson wrote in “Me and Sister Bobbie.” “He was too young to understand what was going on. But the trauma got to me.”
As a child, Ms. Nelson was mesmerized by the pianist she saw in church each week.
“I loved watching her fingers fly over the keys,” she wrote. “I watched her form the clusters of notes that I’d later learn were chords. I watched her, in short, make magic.”
When she started playing herself, she wrote, “the piano felt like a friend.”
Ms. Nelson and her brother played at local functions before landing in the Fletcher band. After her marriage to Mr. Fletcher ended — she would marry twice more — Ms. Nelson and her three sons ended up in Austin, where she played at piano bars and shopping center openings to make ends meet. When Mr. Nelson’s house in Nashville burned down, she urged him to join her in Austin. They had not played together publicly for years.
“If I did come down,” Mr. Nelson recalled saying in his autobiography, “what would you think about playing with my band, Sis?”
She replied: “I wouldn’t be thinking, Willie. I’d be crying with joy.”
In addition to her brother, Ms. Nelson’s survivors include a son, Freddy, and a granddaughter.
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