Townes Van Zandt left us a true classic in the bittersweet “Pancho & Lefty,” which Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson later covered and turned into the anthem of the outlaw country movement.
"I realize that I wrote it, but it's hard to take credit for the writing, because it came from out of the blue," Townes told documentarians for PBS back in 1984. "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."
Townes went on to describe the night a few years later when he was pulled over for speeding outside Burton, Texas. He hadn’t been drinking, he said, which for Townes was a bit of a rarity.
"We got stopped by these two policeman and ... they said 'What do you do for a living?', and 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 guy, and it turns out, they're called Pancho and Lefty ... so I think maybe that's what it's about, those two guys ... I hope I never see them again."
They tore up his speeding ticket.
Anyway, here’s another hauntingly beautiful rendition of the song by the great Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings.
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