Townes Van Zandt

A Texas family

John Townes Van Zandt was born in Fort Worth in 1944 into an old Texas family; an ancestor had been a leader of the Republic of Texas, and his father was a corporate lawyer. He got his first guitar for Christmas 1956 in Montana, after his father asked him to learn Fraulein. At the University of Colorado he began writing songs. When his parents brought him home, he was given three months of insulin shock therapy in Galveston, which erased much of his long-term memory; his mother called it the biggest regret of her life.

In Houston in the mid-1960s he played the Jester Lounge for ten dollars a night, heard Lightnin' Hopkins, and met Guy Clark. His father urged him to stop playing covers and write his own songs. The first serious one, he said, was Waiting Around to Die.

Poppy

Mickey Newbury took him to Nashville, and Kevin Eggers signed him to Poppy in 1968. He made six albums in five years, starting with For the Sake of the Song, which Jack Clement admitted he may have overproduced. On Townes Van Zandt (1969), the album fans call the kitchen album after its cover, he recut four of its songs alone with his guitar. The Late Great Townes Van Zandt (1972), its title a joke on the overdose that nearly killed him that year, included Pancho and Lefty and If I Needed You.

The records barely sold, and an album recorded in Nashville in 1972 and 1973 was erased in a dispute between Eggers and Clement. Live at the Old Quarter, recorded over several nights in a Houston bar in July 1973 and released in 1977 on Eggers's Tomato label, won five stars from Rolling Stone; its liner notes call it the Rosetta Stone of Texas music. In James Szalapski's documentary Heartworn Highways, shot around the turn of 1976, he sings for his neighbor Uncle Seymour Washington, who is moved to tears. Steve Earle said he stole the film.

Other voices

Other singers made his songs famous. Emmylou Harris recorded Pancho and Lefty in 1976, and in 1981 she and Don Williams took If I Needed You to number three on the country chart; in 1983 Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard's Pancho and Lefty went to number one. Townes himself drank heavily and lived for long stretches on the road. Steve Earle called him the best songwriter in the world and said he would stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table in his cowboy boots to say so. Townes disliked the sticker that put the line on At My Window (1987), his first studio album in nine years.

The end and after

He toured Europe until the end of November 1996. In December he fell and broke his hip, arrived in a wheelchair at a Memphis studio where Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth was to record him, and the sessions were called off. He died at home in Smyrna, Tennessee, on New Year's Day 1997, aged fifty-two. His family won control of most of his recordings in 2006 after years of litigation over posthumous releases, and Fat Possum now looks after the catalogue.

Earle's 2009 tribute album Townes won a Grammy, and Earle named his son Justin Townes. Nanci Griffith called him the greatest folk songwriter Texas ever produced. Margaret Brown's documentary Be Here to Love Me (2004) and biographies by John Kruth and Robert Earl Hardy tell his story, and fans keep a timeline of nearly every show he played. His Dead Flowers closes The Big Lebowski, and his songs run through Breaking Bad and True Detective.