I’m a sucker for songwriters—from Judy Collins’ eclectic selections to Dylan to Lenny Cohen to Sondheim—they’ve taught me always to ask, “Who wrote this?” When I heard the Willy Nelson / Merle Haggard version of “Pancho and Lefty,” I searched out the songwriter. I had no idea it was from Townes Van Zandt, a guy I’d gone to high school with. A Wiki article details his drug problems quite specifically: “He suffered from a series of drug addictions, alcoholism, and was given a psychiatric diagnosis of bipoloar disorder. When he was young, the now-discredited insulin shock therapy erased much of his long-term memory.”
John Townes Van Zandt (like me, he has a first name of John that he abandoned) was from a family with deep roots in Texas—a county north of Dallas was named Van Zandt County after his progenitors. But his father, a lawyer, lived around Chicago for a while for his work, when Townes was in high school. We got to know each other there. Whenever I visited his home, in the same subdivision as mine (kind of a sociological middle between Barrington Hills, with five-acre zoning and Eastern money, and the townies), he was picking tunes on his guitar. I remember him fiddling with the word ‘Fed-er-a-les,’ so I suspect he’d been writing this song, his most famous, even back then. In an interview, he takes no credit for writing the song—it just came to him.
“Townes believed that the sky was full of songs just waiting to be pulled in. He said that ‘Pancho and Lefty’ came through the window of a seedy hotel room and that ‘If I Needed You’ came to him in his sleep, in a flu-driven fever dream. ‘I was just tapped on the shoulder from above and told to write these songs, as opposed to wanting to be a success in the music business,’ he told writer Don McLeese. ‘What I do is between me and the Lord, to examine and possibly alter the state of grace in which I live, and thereby the state of grace of anybody who listens.’”
We’re close to Thanksgiving, and somehow the song is right for today. It’s ambiguously about Pancho Villa, but it’s even more about Lefty, who might have turned his hero Pancho in. I’m convinced the never-will-die popularity of this song is due to its forgiveness.
The poets tell how Pancho fell;
Lefty’s living in a cheap hotel
The desert’s quiet; Cleveland’s cold
So the story ends, we’re told
Pancho needs your prayers, it’s true
But save a few for Lefty, too
He just did what he had to do
Now he’s growing old
That last stanza is a perfect one for Thanksgiving, for Lefty and Townes and all of us.
