Pancho and Lefty

He wrote it in a motel near Dallas with nothing to do, three verses and the refrain in one sitting and the last verse the next day, while his friend Daniel Antopolsky wrote in the parking lot. A young man leaves home for Mexico and becomes the bandit Pancho; his partner Lefty sells him to the federales and lives out his days in a cheap hotel in Cleveland. Townes said it came out of the blue and was hard to take credit for, and that he always knew it was not about Pancho Villa. Stereogum called it a demolition of frontier nostalgia.

He recorded it for The Late Great Townes Van Zandt in August 1972. Emmylou Harris covered it in 1976, and Willie Nelson heard her version; in 1983 he cut it one night and woke Merle Haggard on his tour bus to sing a verse. Their duet went to number one on the country chart, and in the video Townes plays one of the federales. Steve Earle said no song impresses songwriters more.

Live

It stayed in his sets for the rest of his life, and opens Live at the Old Quarter. The two uploads in the hypersongs web are both live and neither is the studio take: one is the solo performance filmed for Heartworn Highways at Uncle Seymour Washington's place, from the DVD extras, the other the trio version from Rear View Mirror.