After Willie Nelson & Family finished a concert in East Troy, Wisconsin, last September, Mickey Raphael figured that was it. He didn’t think the band would tour again. After all, Willie was 92. He had been on the road forever. The band played 50 shows in 2025 alone.
Yet, Willie & Family are scheduled to play May 14 at Magnolia Field at Baylor Ballpark, the first concert ever at the baseball stadium.
“Willie is just having a resurgence of energy and wants to go out again,” Raphael said in an interview from his home studio in Nashville. “I guess he was feeling like he missed playing and missed the crowds.”
Raphael has been playing harmonica in Willie’s band since 1973, and only Willie could coax him into another tour.
“I don’t like to be away from home anymore,” he said. “I did it for 53 years, and there’s not one hotel I need to be in anymore. The music is great, but if I wasn’t doing it for Willie, I wouldn’t. That’s not true actually, because I’m going away this weekend and I just played last weekend with some other people. But I don’t like going out for extended tours.”
The “this weekend” gig for Raphael consisted of him playing with Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band for a gig at Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey; and then the following day at a tribute to Dionne Warwick and others at the Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey.
Raphael said fans can expect to hear all of Willie’s hits at the May 14 show, but that’s about all he knows right now.
“I have no idea because we don’t rehearse,” he said. “I get the set list an hour before the show.”
He did say that Willie’s son Micah Nelson and Waylon Payne, son of Willie’s longtime guitarist Jody Payne and country singer Sammi Smith, will be performing as well.
Raphael played tuba in the marching band at Hillcrest High School in Dallas, “goofed around a little bit with the guitar” and was inspired to pick up the harmonica after hearing fellow Dallasite Don Brooks, who played in Waylon Jennings’ band. Raphael said he’ll have an assortment of about 20 harmonicas with him on stage, all customized for him by Hohner, which has been making harmonicas since 1857.
Raphael said he always tries to make time for family visits in Dallas when he plays in Texas but hasn’t been to Waco much beside passing through while heading south on Interstate 35.
“I first started driving to Austin in ’73,” he said. “Is there still construction? I have heard that Waco has really blossomed. It’s really become a beautiful city.”
Willie and his band will play 13 shows between April 22 — in Birmingham, Alabama — and May 24, in North Charleston, South Carolina. His concert in Waco will be the only one not in an amphitheater.
“We don’t have an amphitheater in the Waco area, so we thought the baseball stadium would give us that kind of environment,” said Jason Cook, vice president for marketing and communications and chief marketing office for Baylor. He also handles concert booking for McLane Stadium, Foster Pavillion and, now, Magnolia Field at Baylor Ballpark.
With Willie not wanting to play indoor shows on this tour, the ballpark was the logical place for his show since load-in and set-up will have already started at McLane Stadium for the Post Malone and Jelly Roll concert scheduled for May 19. Baylor’s announcement of that show could not have been timed more perfectly.
During the Grammy Award broadcast on February 1, Malone led a band of all-star musicians in a five-minute tribute to Ozzy Osbourne, founder of the band Black Sabbath, who died July 22, 2025. Malone and the others — Slash and Duff McKagan from Guns N’ Roses; Chad Smith, drummer for the Red Hot Chili Peppers; and guitarist/producer Andrew Watt — performed the song “War Pigs,” which was on Black Sabbath’s 1970 album “Paranoid.”
Then near the end of the show, Jelly Roll won the Grammy — his third of the night — for Best Contemporary Country Album for his record “Beautifully Broken.” His enthusiastic 70-second acceptance speech might as well have been delivered from a church pulpit to a congregation shouting “Amen.”
“First of all, Jesus I am listening and I hear you, Lord,” Jelly Roll began. “Music has the power to change my life and God has the power to change my life. And I want to tell y’all right now that Jesus is for everybody.”
The buzz around Malone’s performance and Jelly Roll’s acceptance speech was still strong when, on February 2, the morning after the Grammy broadcast, Baylor announced that the pair would be headlining a concert on May 19 at McLane Stadium.
They are “set to return to the road with Post Malone and Jelly Roll Present: The BIG Stadium Tour Part 2,” Baylor’s news release said. (Malone’s website says the singer will be in Waco as part of his “Big Ass Stadium Tour.”)
“We were very blessed in terms of the timing,” Cook said. “And anyone who questioned why you’re bringing those people, I think Jelly Roll (at the Grammys) just really brought it home.”
The tour will make only one other stop in Texas, and that’s in El Paso on May 13, and will also play in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Fayetteville, Arkansas; and Oxford, Mississippi.
“We’re right there with these big SEC (Southeastern Conference) schools that are hosting big concerts,” Cook said.
When McLane Stadium opened in 2014, “there was this promise of these big events, great concerts,” Cook said. “There were a couple of attempts, but it was just never realized because I don’t think it was ever a priority for the [previous Baylor] administration.”
Eleven years after opening, Baylor hosted the first concert in McLane Stadium, a sold-out Boys from Oklahoma show on August 23, 2025.
For that show, “93 percent of ticket sales were outside of Waco,” Cook said. “We drew heavily from Dallas and the other metro areas, but we also drew from Oklahoma, given that Turnpike [Troubadours] and Cross Canadian Ragweed, they’re from Oklahoma, but we pulled from Arkansas, Alabama, all those.”
Cook said that for the Post Malone show, “we’re pulling heavily from Dallas, but because it’s on a Tuesday night, it will probably be a little more regional.”
Willie’s show is a sellout at the baseball stadium, which will be configured to seat around 6,000.
“The stage will be about where the center fielder would stand,” Cook said. “We’ll put close to 2,000 chairs on the field. We’re bringing in a floor covering to make sure that we protect the field. Even though the baseball team will be at the Big 12 tournament, there’s a chance that they will come back for a couple of days [of practice], hopefully for an NCAA regional. And the chairs will go right up to the pitcher’s mound.”
A Willie concert was scheduled to be the first event at Baylor’s Ferrell Center when it opened in 1988, but the show was canceled by Herbert Reynolds, Baylor’s president at the time, “because Willie’s politics had drawn what was deemed unwanted negative attention by some law enforcement groups,” Baylor posted in a Baylor Proud blog last month. From there, the story started that Willie had been “banned” from the university, a tale that still persists. Baylor’s current president, Linda Livingstone, wanted to put that rumor to rest.
“In one of my bi-weekly meetings with the president, she said, ‘Jason, how do we get these rumors about Willie Nelson to stop because I’m tired of people asking me about it,’” Cook said. “And I said, ‘Well, we need to have him back.’”
From there, Baylor’s concert agency in Nashville, Noise New Media, reached out to Willie’s agent, “and we’ve been talking since January,” Cook said.
“Willie Nelson represents the heart of Texas music and culture, and we are proud to honor him as a former student and embrace him as a member of the Baylor Family,” Livingstone said in that Baylor Proud post. “His accolades as a musician are virtually endless. And his selfless work as an advocate for those facing hardship, such as being a founding organizer of Farm Aid, is aligned with Baylor’s Christian mission of serving the surrounding world.”
