Photo: Townes Van Zandt by Paul Natkin
He was a folk musician well schooled in the songbook of murder ballads and hymns – his friend Steve Earle recalls getting good-humouredly heckled by Van Zandt when Earle admitted he didn’t know the traditional ballad The Wabash Cannonball. But early on he fell under the spell of fellow Texan Lightnin’ Hopkins, whose country blues and distinctively rhythmic finger-style picking influence is particularly evident on songs such as Rex’s Blues.
You can’t get much bluer than a Townes Van Zandt song. His first real song is also his bleakest ballad, Waitin’ Around to Die, sung with a high straining whinny and twang: “Lots of booze and lots of ramblin’ / It’s easier than waitin’ around to die,” the refrain of “waitin’ around to die” eerily evolving as the song progresses from imagined possibility to reality. Harris, on her first encounter at Gerde’s, was struck by the “high lonesome sound” in his voice. Like Lightnin’, Van Zandt delivered comic preludes before laying in wrenching melancholic verse; he dealt in contrasts. Around the same time he wrote Waitin’, he was in Dallas learning joke songs for beer-drinking crowds.
Kris Kristofferson described Van Zandt as a “songwriter’s songwriter” – both high praise and an acknowledgment that Van Zandt still had not had his due. Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson and Emmylou Harris all had hits with Van Zandt’s songs. Harris chose what she calls one of her favourite love songs, If I Needed You. Since then, covers of his best-loved songs such as To Live Is to Fly, Tecumseh Valley, Marie, and I’ll Be Here in the Morning, have come from all corners – John Prine, Lucinda Williams, Nanci Griffith, his dear friend Guy Clark, Jason Molina, Andrew Bird, and First Aid Kit
Rebecca Bengal / The Guardian
Don's Tunes
Much like John Prine I first came across Townes Van Zandt through the wonderful Nanci Griffith here them both do Tecumseh Valley
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