Shuffle Synchronicities: Volume 1 - #112

"Pancho and Lefty" by Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard - 04/24/21

"Pancho and Lefty" by Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard

Willie & Merle’s 1983 version is perhaps the most well-known one.

While Emmylou Harris’ 1977 version popularized the song.

But the song was originally written by Townes Van Zandt in 1972.

He seems, to me at least, to be the most interesting of the musicians associated with the song.

Van Zandt said he was pulled over by two Texas state troopers one time. “They said, ‘What do you do for a living?’ I said, ‘Well, I’m a songwriter’, and they both kind of looked around like ‘pitiful, pitiful’, and so on to that I added, ‘I wrote that song ‘Pancho and Lefty.’ You ever heard that song ‘Pancho and Lefty’? I wrote that’, and they looked back around and they looked at each other and started grinning, and it turns out that their squad car, you know their partnership, it was two guys, it was an Anglo and a Hispanic, and it turns out, they were called Pancho and Lefty.”

Much of Van Zandt's life was spent touring various dive bars (often to crowds of fewer than fifty people), often living in cheap motel rooms and backwood cabins. For much of the 1970s, he lived in a simple shack without electricity or a telephone.

He suffered from a series of drug addictions and alcoholism and was given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder.

When he was young, the now-discredited insulin shock therapy erased much of his long-term memory. Afterward, his mother claimed her "biggest regret in life was that she had allowed that treatment to occur."

He then attempted to join the Air Force, but was rejected because of a doctor's diagnosis that labeled him "an acute manic-depressive who has made minimal adjustments to life."

Once he gave up finding a normal job, he started to write his own songs, which made him into a cult figure in songwriting communities in the late 60s and early 70s.

Van Zandt would turn down repeated invitations to write with Bob Dylan. Dylan was reportedly a "big fan" of Townes and claimed to have all of his records. Van Zandt admired Dylan's songs but reportedly didn't care for his celebrity.

Musician Steve Earle, who met Van Zandt in 1978 and considered him a mentor, once called 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." The quote was printed on a sticker featured on the packing of At My Window, much to Van Zandt's displeasure. In the years following, the quote was often cited by the press, much to Van Zandt and Earle's embarrassment. In 2009, Earle told The New York Times "Did I ever believe that Townes was better than Bob Dylan? No." But he concluded at the end of the same article that, "As a songwriter, you won't find anybody better."

So what’s so great about this song?!

Let’s get into it.

Living on the road, my friend
Was gonna keep you free and clean
And now you wear your skin like iron
Your breath as hard as kerosene
You weren't your momma's only boy
But her favorite one, it seems
She began to cry when you said goodbye
And sank into your dreams

There’s something that transcends time and place about this opening verse.

Living on the road isn't really the same as it used to be in the 1920s or even in the 1970s.

But then there are movies like Nomadland, which might win some Oscars tomorrow, and an even better 2018 movie by Hannah Fidell, or at least a more entertaining one to me, called The Long Dumb Road, which you can watch on Netflix.

It stars Jason Mantzoukas as kind of a manic Neil Cassady type who hitches a ride with the young Tony Revolori who like me, “sank into his dreams” and might have made his momma “cry” on his way out to LA to pursue his creative ambitions.

It has much more traditional drama than the docudrama of Nomadland. It’s very funny and quite sad, and in many ways, Mantzoukas’ character seems much more desperate and cursed like Van Zandt than Frances McDormand’s, who, to me, has a lot more options than she allows herself to have.

Pancho was a bandit boy
His horse was fast as polished steel
He wore his gun outside his pants
For all the honest world to feel
Pancho met his match, you know
On the deserts down in Mexico
Nobody heard his dying words
But that's the way it goes

Texashillcountry.com says that, “Many of the details in the lyrics mirror the life of Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, who was killed by unknown assassins in 1923. Villa’s dying words? ‘Don’t let it end like this, tell them I said something great.’”

But then notes that Van Zandt himself wasn’t so sure about who it was about:

“I realize that I wrote it, but it’s hard to take credit for the writing because it came from out of the blue. It came through me, and it’s a real nice song, and I think, I’ve finally found out what it’s about. I’ve always wondered what it’s about. I kinda always knew it wasn’t about Pancho Villa, and then somebody told me that Pancho Villa had a buddy whose name in Spanish meant ‘Lefty.’ But in the song, my song, Pancho gets hung. ‘They only let him hang around out of kindness I suppose,’ and the real Pancho Villa was assassinated.”

All the Federales say
They could've had him any day
They only let him slip away
Out of kindness, I suppose

The chorus is so beautiful. The “Federales say” has that nice alliteration of '“ales say.” The first three lines end in rhymes while the fourth line pleasantly and surprisingly breaks the pattern to suggest either the kindness of the police at times or more likely their bravado.

Lefty, he can't sing the blues
All night long like he used to
The dust that Pancho bit down South
Ended up in Lefty's mouth
The day they laid poor Pancho low
Lefty split for Ohio
Where he got the bread to go
There ain't nobody knows

There’s also something poignant about Lefty, who betrayed Poncho, being so low afterward that he can’t even sing the blues. In some ways, singing the blues or writing about your depression is part of the cure, so if you can’t do that, you are really down low.

All the Federales say
They could've had him any day
We only let him slip away
Out of kindness, I suppose

The poets tell how Pancho fell
And Lefty's living in cheap hotels
The desert's quiet, Cleveland's cold
And so the story ends, we're told
Pancho needs your prayers, it's true
But save a few for Lefty too
He only did what he had to do
And now he's growing old

The reference to cold Cleveland really gets me. What a silly and sad town to be stuck in after living the glamorous outlaw life on the border of Texas and Mexico.

All the Federales say
We could've had him any day
They only let him go so long
Out of kindness, I suppose

A few gray Federales say
They could've had him any day
They only let him go so long
Out of kindness, I suppose

And then of course the addition of the word “gray” in the outro verse, suggesting how long this legend keeps going on from the 1920s and now even into the 2020s.

Had anybody else heard of Townes Van Zandt; if so what’s your favorite song?

My favorite of his songs is “To Live Is To Fly”.

Okay, that’s the one hundred and twelfth Shuffle Synchronicities.