Townes and Seymour

If you’re going to sing and play the blues, you might as well be the best that you can be. Maybe that’s why Townes Van Zandt is revered as a Texas Bluesman. Here is a video clip of him playing “Pancho & Lefty” for an intimate group of friends. This song later became a number one country hit in 1983 when Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson adopted it as the title track of their duet album “Pancho & Lefty”.

Van Zandt is remembered as a gifted songwriter who left a legacy of songs that inspired, and continues to inspire, musicians of of much wider acclaim and repute than he; really a musician’s musician. Influential in the sub-genre referred to as “outlaw country”, his style really makes you feel just how big Texas really is (it’s the size of 5 average “other” western states).

“Doing your best is a process of trying to do your best,” he was once quoted in “Zen Guitar.”

Townes Van Zandt

This is Townes Van Zandt in “Heartworn Highway”, directed by James Szalapski. The song “Waitin’ Around To Die” from “For the Sake of the Song” album.”

“Sometimes I don’t know where this dirty road is taking me // Sometimes I can’t even see the reason why // I guess I keep on gamblin’, lots of booze and lots of ramblin’ // It’s easier than just a-waitin’ ’round to die.”

Fellow country outlaw musician Steve Earle called once called Townes Van Zandt: “the best songwriter in the whole world and I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.”