Eclectic Company: Let Me Now Praise A Couple Of Songwriters Whose Works You Know But Whose Names You May Not

I was reading Jim Doyle’s column in the last issue of The Jam with appreciative nods and chuckles, when suddenly my dear friend misspoke himself. Jim was waxing poetic as only he can about his hero, Willie Nelson, and named some songs he said were written by Nelson, well known to be one hell of a lyricist. But among the titles he attributed to Nelson was one actually written by someone else. That song, “Pancho and Lefty,” is a wonderfully singable ballad about a pair of hapless outlaws (the shlemiel and shlimazel* of the Mexican cowboy set), and the untimely demise of one and the drift into sad obscurity of the other, written not by Nelson, who performed it famously with Merle Haggard in a 1983 video which helped the song reach number one on Billboard’s country music chart, but by one of the finest of Texas’ songwriters, the late great Townes Van Zandt.

I use the term “late great” with far less irony than it held as originally applied to Townes in the title of his 1972 album, when it was a snarky take on the then-living songwriter’s obscurity. A few years later, I briefly worked for Townes’ sinking record label — his former manager Kevin Eggers’ Tomato Records — in what proved to be a fruitless effort to beat back the creditors and get some cash to the artists, including Townes, who by all accounts was living in dire poverty in a tin-roofed Nashville-area shack. Eggers and company loved the work of the “late, great,” but couldn’t make it pay (the label was folding the entire time I worked there), and so ducked his increasingly frantic angry phone calls. And by the time I wrote liner notes for the EMI reissue of two of his early albums, The Late, Great Townes Van Zandt b/w High, Low and In Between, Townes was soon to pass over the line from the sickness and sorrow of his addictions and well-deep loneliness to what my traditional English folksinger and wickedly funny songwriter friend (who taught me “There Were Five Constipated Men In The Bible”) Heather Wood assures me is a wonderful party in the hereafter, where we all get to meet up with our old comrades.

Townes has been credited as influencing a who’s who of contemporary musicians (Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Jim James of My Morning Jacket, Vetiver, Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes, Simon Joyner, Caleb Followill of Kings of Leon, the Meat Puppets, Guy Clark, Rodney Crowell, Hoyt Axton, Tindersticks, Devendra Banhart, Gillian Welch, Nanci Griffith, the Dixie Chicks, and Garth Brooks), and his songs have been covered by some of the most interesting performers of our time, including Norah Jones (“Be Here To Love Me,” also the title of Margaret Brown’s well-made documentary about Townes), Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris (“If I Needed You”), Lyle Lovett, (“Flyin’ Shoes”), Robert Plant and Alison Krauss (“Nothin’”), The Cowboy Junkies (“To Live Is To Fly”) and Steve Earle, who released a whole album of Townes Van Zandt songs that won the Contemporary Folk Album GRAMMY last year (one of my rare votes for a category winner). But despite these admirers and supporters, Townes remains mostly unknown outside of a small circle of musical cognoscenti. Earle’s rasping performances on Townes can be found in the music section at www.amazon.com, Townes performs “If I Needed You” on last year’s Crazy Heart soundtrack (Julia Roberts sings the same song in the film Stepmom), and you can hear various artists, including Townes himself, perform “Pancho and Lefty” on youtube.

Another songwriter whose name is often omitted when praise is being heaped on his anthemic song, “City Of New Orleans,” is the late, great Steve Goodman. Arlo Guthrie is mistakenly credited with writing the definitive farewell-to-the-disappearing-past train song, because his cover is the best-known version of the number and it’s often heard on radio. But once again, it was Willie Nelson’s recording that charted at number one in Billboard’s Hot Country Singles, in 1984, the year that Steve died age 37 after years in remission from Leukemia. Along with several of Steve’s performances, including one with mandolinist Jethro Burns (of the famed comedy and music duo Homer and Jethro), and several by Guthrie — at the Boston Pops, with his band Shenandoah, and others — there’s a mighty version on youtube of “City Of New Orleans” featuring The Highwaymen, not the 1960s folk group, who killed with their often-imitated recordings of “Michael Row The Boat Ashore” and “Cottonfields,” but the 1980s country superstar quartet of Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson.

Kristofferson is the reason any of us have heard or heard of “City Of New Orleans,” because he’s the one who discovered Steve, performing at the Quiet Knight club in Chicago, and he’s the one who brought Steve (and Steve’s pal John Prine, in those days, a singing/songwriting mailman, who Steve insisted Kristofferson had to hear) out of local hero obscurity to the attention of pop songster Paul Anka, who signed Steve and Prine to management contracts, and sent them into the studio to record their prolific outputs, including their collaborative, perfect country song, “You Never Even Call Me By My Name,” which charted at number eight on the Billboard Country Singles list in the recording by pseudo-outlaw David Allen Coe.

I heard Steve for the first time at the Philadelphia Folk Festival, and soon after, in the minuscule living room of the festival’s programming wizard, Paula Ballan, where Steve often rested between rounds of chemo, writing and tinkering with new songs, and entertaining and being entertained by the constantly revolving cast of folksingers, bluegrassers, blues musicians, salseros and more, who dropped by between gigs on the festival and club circuits to smoke, jam and grin. Diminutive Steve, who could put over and ring the last drop of juice out of any type of song, bar none, was the finest live performer I’ve ever seen. Although I love listening to his recordings, which you can get from www.stevegoodman.com, and even more love to watch him on any footage I can get my hands on, those recordings only scratch the surface of his ginormous talent. For the improbably impossible performances of the million-versed trad ballad, “Knight William And The Maiden,” which still makes my belly ache from laughing/crying whenever I think about it, yes, even though it's 26 years later, you just had to be there and see it live. I still can't believe my luck.

* The Yiddish term shlemiel (pronounced shleh-meel) is usually translated as clumsy bungler, while his cousin, the shlimazel (pronounced shlih-ma-zell), is the Yiddish term applied to someone who has perpetual bad luck. In his wonderful compendium The Joys of Yiddish, author Leo Rosten quoted the old bubbemeiseh (literally, grandma’s tale), as “the shlemiel spills the soup on the shlimazel,” to describe what makes each such a loser.