Townes Van Zandt
Townes Van Zandt (1944–1997) was a singer, songwriter and guitarist from Fort Worth, Texas, whose “Pancho and Lefty” was a number-one country hit for Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard in 1983 and whose “If I Needed You” went to number three for Emmylou Harris and Don Williams in 1981. Bluegrass musicians took up his songs from 1970 on, among them the Stonemans, New Grass Revival, the Seldom Scene, J.D. Crowe & the New South and Peter Rowan and Tony Rice.
John Townes Van Zandt was born in Fort Worth on 7 March 1944, the son of Harris Williams Van Zandt and Dorothy Townes Van Zandt, of a wealthy family descended from founders of the city. His father’s work as a corporate lawyer moved the family to Montana, Colorado and finally Houston, and Townes went to the Shattuck School in Minnesota and then the University of Colorado. Seeing Elvis Presley on The Ed Sullivan Show started him on the guitar, and the records of Lightnin’ Hopkins, Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie and the early Bob Dylan shaped his writing. Rather than law school or the family business, he chose the life of a traveling singer.
From 1965 he played regularly at the Jester Lounge in Houston, and later at the Sand Mountain Coffee House, where he met Hopkins, Guy Clark, Jerry Jeff Walker and Doc Watson; at first he sang mostly other people’s songs. In 1968 the songwriter Mickey Newbury met him in Houston and took him to Nashville, where he introduced him to “Cowboy” Jack Clement, who became his long-time producer.
The years 1968 to 1973 were his most productive. Six albums came out on the Poppy label: For the Sake of the Song (August 1968), recorded at Bradley’s Barn in Mount Juliet, Tennessee, and including “Tecumseh Valley”; Our Mother the Mountain (April 1969); Townes Van Zandt (1969); Delta Momma Blues and High, Low and In Between (both 1971); and The Late Great Townes Van Zandt (September 1972), with “Pancho and Lefty” and “If I Needed You.” “To Live Is to Fly” also dates from those years. When Guy Clark married in January 1972, Van Zandt was his best man.
His songs drew on his own life on the road, and he mostly played small rooms. In 1975 he was filmed for the documentary Heartworn Highways with Guy Clark, Steve Earle and others, singing “Waitin’ Around to Die” and “Pancho and Lefty” at his trailer in Austin. Tomato Records, the label of his manager Kevin Eggers, released Live at the Old Quarter, Houston, Texas (May 1977), a solo concert recorded in July 1973, and Flyin’ Shoes (May 1978), produced by Chips Moman in Nashville; he did not release another studio album until 1987.
Other singers carried his songs to a far larger audience. Emmylou Harris and Don Williams took “If I Needed You” to number three on the country chart in 1981, and Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard, recording at Nelson’s Pedernales studio in Spicewood, Texas, in November 1982, had a number one with “Pancho and Lefty” in 1983; Van Zandt made a brief appearance in its video. In bluegrass the Stonemans recorded “Tecumseh Valley” on Dawn of the Stoneman’s Age (RCA Victor, 1970), New Grass Revival cut “White Freightliner Blues” for When the Storm Is Over (Flying Fish, 1977) with John Cowan singing lead, and at the Seldom Scene’s fifteenth-anniversary concert at the Kennedy Center on 10 November 1986 Ricky Skaggs and Sharon White sang “If I Needed You.” J.D. Crowe & the New South recorded “White Freightliner Blues” on Come On Down to My World (Rounder, 1999), and Peter Rowan and Tony Rice included “To Live Is to Fly” on Quartet (Rounder, 2007). More than thirty bluegrass releases include “If I Needed You.”
He returned to the studio with At My Window (Sugar Hill, March 1987), produced by Clement and Jim Rooney at Clement’s Cowboy Arms studio in Nashville. In May and June 1990 he toured the United States and Canada as the opening act for the Cowboy Junkies, and in September 1995 he played a benefit at the Bluebird Café in Nashville with Guy Clark and Steve Earle that was released in 2001 as Together at the Bluebird Café. He was planning a new album for Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace label when he died at his home in Smyrna, Tennessee, on 1 January 1997, forty-four years to the day after Hank Williams. He was buried in Dido Cemetery in Tarrant County, Texas.
The documentary Be Here to Love Me was completed in 2004, and in 2007 the Americana Music Association gave him its President’s Award. Robert Plant and Alison Krauss recorded his “Nothin’” on Raising Sand (2007), and Steve Earle’s album of his songs, Townes (2009), won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album in 2010. He was inducted into the Austin Music Memorial in 2010, the Texas Heritage Songwriters’ Association Hall of Fame in 2012 and the Austin City Limits Hall of Fame in 2015, and unissued recordings have continued to appear, among them Sunshine Boy: The Unheard Studio Sessions & Demos, 1971–1972 (Omnivore, 2013) and Sky Blue (2019).
