A Deeper Blue (2 page)

and, for better or worse, those of his family. He said he lived for the “hum of the wheels,” and in hope of hitting “that one note” that would connect with “just one person,” and save that person’s life. He was deeply serious about this goal—which he believed without question was his life’s calling—to the extent that he “blew off everything” to pursue it, refusing to compromise. In an interview published October 17, 2002, in the
Houston Press,
his oldest son, J.T., succinctly summed up his view of the price they both paid for his father’s single-minded pursuit of that goal: “As a father he had a lot of unforgivable shortcomings that can’t be excused by his music.”

The lack of compromise that made family life impossible for Van Zandt made his music possible. For thirty years, he wrote beautiful, deeply inspired, brilliantly integrated lyrical and musical evocations of his inner life. He gave sometimes magical performances in his engaging, insouciant Texas folk-blues style for what must always be described as a cult audience, even though a couple of his songs reached the commercial heights. “If I Needed You” was a number three record for Emmylou Harris and Don Williams in 1981 and “Pancho and Lefty” was number one on the country charts for Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard in 1983.

But Townes never got the break that would take his career to the next level. In fact, he seemed to confound commercial success with a determination second only to his determination to make his music honest, meaningful, and lasting, like the music of his High, Low, and In Between

3

hero, Hank Williams, and his mentor, the Texas bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins. At that, it can be argued, Townes succeeded.

When he left this world at age fifty-two on New Year’s Day 1997—forty-four years to the day after Hank Williams’ death—

Townes Van Zandt left behind a solid and lasting body of work, as original and as deeply personal—yet as naturally a part of a great tradition and as all-encompassing and universal—as any created in twentieth-century American music, embodied in beautifully realized songs like “To Live’s to Fly,” “For the Sake of the Song,”

“Don’t You Take It Too Bad,” “Rex’s Blues,” “Lungs,” “Nothin’,”

“Flyin’ Shoes,” “Highway Kind,” “Snowin’ on Raton,” “Marie,”

and of course “Pancho and Lefty” and “If I Needed You,” among many others.

In the years since his death, Van Zandt has been repeatedly cited as a major songwriting influence and had his songs covered by a diverse host of respected artists, including Norah Jones, Alison Krauss, Lucinda Williams, Lyle Lovett, Steve Earle, Gillian Welch, John Prine, Nanci Griffith, Cowboy Junkies, Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock, and Guy Clark, among many others. Steve Earle is famously and repeatedly quoted as saying “Townes Van Zandt is the best damn songwriter in the world, and I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.”

So, one might ask, how is it that the “best damn songwriter in the world” was, like Van Gogh, so unheralded in his own lifetime? In fact, Van Zandt himself was a major contributor to—if not the architect of—his own lack of commercial success. “Why is Townes’ career in such a sorry state?” wrote his manager at the time, John Lomax; then he answered himself: “Inept, hap-hazard management, record company ignorance, and [Townes’]

own eccentric conduct.”1 By all accounts, that pithy assessment is accurate. At the height of Townes’ recording run, he titled his sixth album
The Late, Great Townes Van Zandt
, a dark spoof on the lifeless state of his livelihood that caused many to assume that he was, in fact, dead. In a sense, it was frustrating for him
4

A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
as an artist to know that his work was worthy but was so widely unrecognized. But in another sense, for the initiated, his obscurity—the magical “cult” status—clearly carried the connotation that his work was the kind of high quality, demanding work that might
never
make an impact with the masses. It was an elite obscurity, based on a demanding level of artistic quality that itself precluded commercial success.

But while he had nearly insurmountable obstacles to overcome from a commercial standpoint, from the beginning Townes Van Zandt had a clear vision of his artistic territory, a strong grasp of his tools, and no fear of confronting an ever-present meta-physical darkness. As one writer of the time said, “Townes carries the terror and the sorrow of a sensitive man who has looked into the abyss and seen … the abyss.”2 This was Van Zandt’s territory, which he explored with a highly articulate poetic and philosophic vision, although it was territory into which a mass audience was simply unwilling to venture. Its sources lay clearly in traditional American blues, country, and folk music—with influences as diverse as Shakespeare and Robert Frost—but the depth of Van Zandt’s vision was unique. And his vision never faltered, it only deepened. In a way, he didn’t have a chance during his lifetime; the public sponge couldn’t possibly absorb the tears his songs shed. Ten years after his death, it’s starting to sink in. Like Hank Williams, Townes Van Zandt’s monument stands firm: a serious body of work by a great American artist.

Besides the work and a compelling story, Townes Van Zandt left behind an enigmatic memory, permeated with the enduring sense of mystery that Americans require of their icons. But Townes Van Zandt can’t be understood simply as the mysterious troubled troubadour of American folk mythology, no matter how much he might have played into the myth and no matter how much others might have tried to cast him in that role.

Townes Van Zandt was a complex man. It seems worth asking: Isn’t there something we can discover about him
as a man
that will help us understand his work?

High, Low, and In Between

5

This is the kind of question to which biographers naturally turn their craft. This book has taken shape as an attempt to tell the story of Townes’ life—beginning, middle, and end—to shed some light on his creative process and his work, and to set his life and work in context and in perspective.

More than forty of Townes’ family members, friends, colleagues, and contemporaries agreed to be interviewed for this book. Most participated with great interest and enthusiasm, often inviting me into their homes, showing me around town, engaging me in multifarious conversations, enduring meticulous follow-up calls, and introducing me to new sources and new friends. A few principals had reservations. I spent a day visiting and talking with Townes’ third ex-wife, Jeanene, at her home in Smyrna, Tennessee, and she was gracious and forthcoming but insisted on a level of control over my manuscript to which I could not agree. However, I was fortunate to be able to accept an offer from Ms. Ruth Sanders to share personal interviews with Jeanene and Will Van Zandt that she conducted for an unpublished project, so their parts in the story are told from those primary sources in addition to secondary sources. Kevin Eggers, of Poppy Records and Tomato Records, agreed to speak only off the record, so his role in the story is delineated through secondary sources. Only one central figure declined outright to participate: Townes’ friend and road manager Harold Eggers. His part in the story is also told through secondary sources.

One of his friends described Townes as a “whirlwind that passed through people’s lives.”3 A decade after his death, the dust from that whirlwind is only just beginning to settle. This book draws on the voices of the people who were closest to the center of the whirlwind that was Townes Van Zandt. My task has been to gather together the threads of these many individual voices, each with their unique variations and colorings, and weave them into a whole cloth.

A biography is necessarily filled with speculation, too, informed by and woven into the texture of fact and supporting
6

A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
detail that holds the structure firm. This biography weaves the softer threads of informed speculation—abounding in mystery—in with the durable threads of memory and documented fact. Upon backing up and applying the perspective of time and distance, we begin to see how these diverse threads tighten into the warp and weft of a complex man’s life.

So, here is the story of Townes Van Zandt, a man, “born to grow and grown to die.”

1

Many a River:

The Van Zandts

of Texas

O
FALLTHESOURCESFROMwhich Townes Van Zandt drew nourishment and influence, none was more nourish-ing or more influential than the Texas soil from which he sprang and in which his roots grew so deep.

When Mexico won independence from Spain in 1821, the Mexican government began to encourage settlement in what was then Mexico’s northernmost province, Coahuila y Tejas.

Within a short time, there was a steady flow of
norteamericano
settlers into the province, led officially by Stephen Austin and his famous colony. By 1830, there were 30,000 American settlers in Texas. Rapidly mounting tensions between the settlers and the Mexican government led to revolution, beginning in 1835

and followed rapidly by Texas’ Declaration of Independence on
7

8

A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
March 2, 1836, then ending the next month with the surrender of Mexican forces and the capture of General Santa Anna on the battlefield at San Jacinto, with Texas thereby established as an independent republic. Throughout the next decade, Anglo-American settlement of the region continued. From east of the Sabine, more and more men and their families lit out for the new territory, lured by the well-advertised prospect of cheap land and abundant work. Often with little or no notice, these pioneers left their old lives behind them, along with signs saying simply, “Gone to Texas.”

One of those pioneers was Isaac Van Zandt, son of Jacob and Mary (Isaacs) Van Zandt. The Van Zandt family originally sailed from Holland prior to the American Revolution, settling in New York then migrating to North Carolina. Jacob took his family to Franklin County, Tennessee, in 1800. Isaac was born there on July 10, 1813.1 When Isaac married Frances Cooke Lipscomb in December 1833, he and his father were proprietors of a store in Maxwell, Tennessee, near Salem. When Jacob died in 1834, the young couple moved to Coffeeville, in northern Mississippi, where Isaac opened his own store. A daughter, Louisa, was born later that year, and a son, Khleber Miller, was born on November 7, 1836.

Widespread hard times struck in 1837, and the Van Zandt business failed. The family was struggling and in debt, but Isaac was enterprising and intelligent. Having become somewhat accomplished at public speaking through his membership in a local debating society, Isaac decided to take up the study of law. In 1838 he took his examinations and was admitted to the Mississippi bar, and within the next year he had hung his own “Gone to Texas” sign and moved with his family to a small, one-room log cabin in Elysian Fields, in the Red River District (later part of Harrison County).

On January 5, 1840, another son, Isaac Lycurgus, was born.

Van Zandt had persuaded a wealthy local landowner to donate land whereon to establish a town and a college, and he became active in laying out the town that was to become Marshall, Texas, Many a River: The Van Zandts of Texas

9

which he named after the Chief Justice of the United States. Van Zandt was quickly becoming a civic leader when he was elected to represent Harrison and Panola counties in the House of Rep-resentatives of the Fifth and Sixth Congresses of the Republic of Texas, where he served from 1840 to 1842. He soon emerged as an influential voice in the House. In 1842, Isaac bought 200

acres in Marshall and moved his family there, including a new baby, Frances Cooke Van Zandt, born in May of that year.

Van Zandt was experienced and respected enough as a leg-islator and politician that in July 1842 Sam Houston, by then President of the independent Republic of Texas, appointed him Chargé d’Affairs to the government of the United States. Isaac took his family to Washington, D.C., and began to work for the annexation of Texas to the Union. The Van Zandts remained in Washington for two years, until that goal was achieved. During their time in the nation’s capital, in May 1844, a daughter, Ida, was born, the last of Isaac and Frances’ five surviving children.

The family returned to Texas in time for Isaac to attend the Convention of 1845, where the delegates considered and ap-proved the joint resolution of the U.S. Congress accepting annexation of Texas. Van Zandt and the other delegates then drafted the Texas Constitution, which was accepted by the United States on December 29. He was also instrumental in drafting such important legislation as the Homestead Law, which protected settlers’ homes from seizure by creditors and in which he had been interested since early in his career. Isaac’s political star was still rising and he was in the midst of a campaign for the governor-ship in 1847 when he contracted yellow fever in Galveston and died in Houston on October 11. He was buried in Marshall, and the next year Van Zandt County was christened in his honor.2

The Van Zandts’ contributions to Texas history, however, were not over. Isaac’s oldest son, Khleber Miller, or K.M., was an early graduate of the college his father helped found, Marshall University, and he settled in that town after also attending Franklin College, in Franklin County, Tennessee, where Isaac had been born. In Marshall, K.M. worked in a dry goods store and helped
10

A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
to found the Christian church there before taking a job securing deeds of right-of-way for the Vicksburg, Shreveport, and Texas Railway Company in Louisiana. He went back to Marshall, following in his father’s footsteps and becoming a member of the bar in 1858, and he practiced law there until the outbreak of the Civil War.

In Van Zandt County in 1860 there was only a small population of slaves—just over 300 out of the total population of nearly 6,500—but the citizens there voted decisively for secession in 1861, and as they did all over Texas, men began to volunteer in large numbers for service in the Army of the Confederate States.3