Guest post by Nathan Arizona
Townes Van Zandt’s life and career were too erratic to earn him much credit for his fantastic songs, except from other singers of folkish country tunes and a cult following that’s been going strong since his death in 1997.
But one of his songs, the 1972 outlaw ballad “Pancho and Lefty,” has gained a fairly wide audience and is considered by more than just cultists to be one of the best of its type ever written. Even “Pancho and Lefty” went mostly unheard until Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard scored a hit with it a decade later. Neither had heard of the song before recording it.
With his IQ north of 140, Van Zandt, the son of a wealthy Texas family, had once seemed destined for a career in law or politics. He left school at 22 to pursue a musical career, but beaten down by alcohol, drugs and bipolar disorder, he performed mostly in small clubs. For a while he lived in a cabin without electricity near the Nashville venues where he played.
Pancho and Lefty were border outlaws. Lefty left home young but soon lost his idealism about it. “Living on the road my friend/Was gonna keep you free and clean/And now you wear your skin like iron/And your breath as hard as kerosene.” Pancho’s “horse was fast as polished steel/He wore his gun outside his pants/For all the honest world feel.”
They apparently had a falling out that led to Pancho’s death and flight by Lefty to Ohio, where he was left with just his memories. The song is forgiving of Lefty. “Pancho needs your prayers it’s true/But save a few for Lefty too.” The police seem sympathetic. “All the Federales say/We could have had him any day/We only let him go so long/Out of kindness, I suppose.”
The law was kind to Van Zandt on a road-trip through Texas. The story goes that police stopped his car for expired tags and asked him what he did for a living. “”Well, I’m a songwriter,” he told them. They were unimpressed until he added, “I wrote that song ‘Pancho and Lefty.’ You ever heard that song ‘Pancho and Lefty?’ I wrote that.” Turned out the cops’ code names on the squawk box were Pancho and Lefty. They drove away.
Here’s an informal version of “Pancho and Lefty” by Van Zandt in an outtake from the documentary “Heartworn Highways,” followed by Willie and Merle’s souped-up version.
“Tecumseh Valley” is another often-covered Van Zandt song. This one’s by Nanci Griffith and Arlo Guthrie. Yeah, he did like the sad ones.
Van Zandt said this song was inspired by a story of Civil War soldiers too wounded to get off the battlefield as the fighting raged around them.
