“Pancho and Lefty” was written by Townes Van Zandt, who recorded it on 24 August 1972 at Jack Clement’s studio in Nashville for The Late Great Townes Van Zandt. It was originally titled “Poncho and Lefty.” Neither the song nor the album charted. Lonnie Knight, who played with Van Zandt for a week at the Rubaiyat in Dallas in 1973, took it back to Minneapolis and recorded it for his first album, Family in the Wind (1974), and Emmylou Harris recorded it on Luxury Liner (1977).
Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard were making a duet album at Nelson’s Pedernales Studio outside Austin in November 1982 and wanted one more strong song when Nelson’s daughter Lana, who knew Harris’s recording, suggested this one. Nelson said that neither he nor Haggard had heard it. Nelson cut it that night with his band, and Haggard, who had gone to bed on his bus, was woken to sing his part in one take. The record was the title song of the Epic album Pancho & Lefty, credited to Haggard and Nelson, and it reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart dated 23 July 1983. In the video, directed by Lana Nelson, Nelson plays Pancho and Haggard plays Lefty, with Van Zandt as one of the federales. The recording entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2020.
The song opens with a young man on the road, whose mother cried when he left. Pancho is a bandit with a fast horse who dies in the deserts of Mexico; the federales say they could have caught him any day and let him be out of kindness. Lefty goes to Ohio with money nobody can account for, and ends up old in a cheap hotel in Cleveland. The lyric hints without stating that Lefty gave Pancho up, and asks for a few prayers for Lefty as well as Pancho. In a 1984 interview on the PBS series Austin Pickers, Van Zandt said it was hard to take credit for the song because it came to him from nowhere, that he had always known it was not about Pancho Villa, and that Pancho is hanged in his song while the real Villa was assassinated.
