Townes Van Zandt wrote 'Pancho and Lefty' in a chair he refused to leave. The year was 1972. He was stuck on the outskirts of Denton, Texas, exiled to a cheap motel with an empty swimming pool because Billy Graham and Guru Maharaj Ji were both staging massive competing events in Dallas that week and had filled every decent room in the area. There was nothing to do. So Van Zandt sat down and told himself he wasn't moving until a song came. Three and a half hours later, as he would tell it, the song drifted through the window and he wrote it down. He had no particular idea what it meant. That is where this story begins.
The song appeared on 'The Late Great Townes Van Zandt,' his sixth studio album, recorded at Jack Clement Studios in Nashville and produced by Clement, with executive producer Kevin Eggers overseeing the sessions. The album, released in 1972, featured Vassar Clements on fiddle, Kenny Malone on drums, Chuck Cochran on piano, Joe Allen on bass, Jim Colvard on guitar, Rocky Hill on slide guitar, and Jack Clement on mandolin alongside Van Zandt's own acoustic guitar. Eggers wanted to overdub drums onto 'Pancho and Lefty.' Van Zandt vetoed the idea. The song stayed spare, the voice and the guitar carrying the whole weight of it, and that restraint turned out to be the whole point. When the album came out, nothing happened. The song didn't chart. The album didn't chart. Eggers later said, 'Nothing happened with Pancho and Lefty for ten years.'
What Van Zandt couldn't explain, even to himself, was where the song had come from. The ballad follows Pancho, a Mexican bandit who wore his gun outside his pants and died in the desert, and Lefty, the companion who may have sold him to the federales and spent the rest of his days in a Cleveland hotel room, quietly falling apart. The song implies betrayal without stating it. It offers no verdict. When people asked Van Zandt about Pancho Villa, he acknowledged the surface resemblance and then stepped back from it. In a 1984 interview with the PBS series 'Austin Pickers,' he said, 'I realize that I wrote it, but it's hard to take credit for the writing, because it came from out of the blue.' He said he had always wondered what the song was about. He said it came through him. That is a strange thing for a writer to say, and Van Zandt meant it plainly, without mysticism. The song knew things he didn't.
The song's path to the world ran through Emmylou Harris. In 1977, she covered it on her album 'Luxury Liner,' and her version is the one that changed everything downstream. Five years later, Nelson and Merle Haggard were recording a duet album at the Pedernales Studio on Willie's property outside of Austin. They felt they still didn't have the song that would anchor the record. Lana Nelson, Willie's daughter, suggested they listen to 'Pancho and Lefty.' She brought a copy of the Harris album, and neither Nelson nor Haggard had ever heard it. Nelson cut it immediately with his band in the middle of the night, then walked out to Haggard's bus in the parking lot and knocked on the door. Haggard had been asleep. He remembered thinking the song seemed half a mile long, that it had more words than anything he'd ever seen, and that he'd surely have to redo his vocal in the morning. He never did. The performance on the record is the one he sang half-asleep, barely upright. The bridge gave Nelson and his guitarist Grady Martin trouble, so producer Chips Moman stepped in and stacked guitar parts himself to get the feel right. The song was released as the album's second single, after 'Reasons to Quit,' and reached number one on Billboard's Hot Country Songs chart on July 23, 1983. Lana Nelson directed the music video, the first video Willie had ever made.
The royalties from the Nelson-Haggard version became a lifeline for Van Zandt, who had spent years living in cheap motels and backwoods cabins, sometimes without electricity or a telephone, sometimes without much else. The song that came through the window of a motel near Denton eventually paid his rent. He was invited to appear in the music video, playing one of the Mexican federales who brings Pancho down. He took the role. He said it was real nice of them to invite him, that they didn't have to, and that he got to ride a horse. In June 2004, 'Rolling Stone' ranked 'Pancho and Lefty' 41st on its list of the 100 Greatest Country Songs of All Time. In 2021, Van Zandt's original version landed at number 498 on the magazine's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. The Nelson-Haggard recording entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2020. Van Zandt had died on January 1, 1997, and didn't see any of it.
After the Nelson-Haggard version made Van Zandt's name known in places it hadn't reached before, he and his band were driving to Houston when a police cruiser pulled them over in Burton, Texas, for speeding. He told the officers he was a songwriter. They were unimpressed. He told them he had written 'Pancho and Lefty.' Their radio call sign, it turned out, was Pancho and Lefty. They let him go. Van Zandt mused afterward that maybe that's what the song had always been about, those two officers working the late shift in southeast Texas, and then added that he hoped he never saw them again. The song had arrived without explanation and then spent years explaining itself to him, one encounter at a time. That is the kind of song it is.
