Traveling on the road often leads to less-than-ideal lodging accommodations, which is where Townes Van Zandt was when he forced himself to write what would become one of his most iconic and oft-covered songs, “Pancho and Lefty.” Those same accommodations were what led Van Zandt and his friend across the path of a police officer, who pulled them over while they were traveling to a show.
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Unlike the characters in Van Zandt’s classic folk song, he and his buddy, Daniel, got off scot-free.
Townes Van Zandt Forced Himself To Write “Pancho and Lefty”
Ever the humble musician, Townes Van Zandt often told interviewers it was difficult for him to take credit for “Pancho and Lefty” because of how supernaturally the song came to him. Nevertheless, like any good folk artist, Van Zandt was an expert storyteller, and the lore around “Pancho and Lefty” made for quite a few good stories he shared with the press and his live audiences. He shared one such tale during a 1991 concert in Germany, which appeared on the live album, Rain On a Conga Drum.
Setting the scene, Van Zandt described the three-day string of shows he was playing in Dallas, Texas, at the time. The weekend run just happened to coincide with appearances by Billy Graham and Guru Maharaji, also in Dallas, which brought hundreds of thousands of young religious followers to the Texas capital city. (Van Zandt’s draw, he described, was “some seven winos from downtown.”) The influx of visitors to Dallas meant that Van Zandt and his friend, Daniel, had to travel quite a ways outside of the city to find affordable lodging accommodations.
“We finally found this place,” he described. “[It] had no TV, no Coke machine. It had a swimming pool that had a big crack in it, you know. Anyway, nothing to do, not a very fun place. The second day we were there, I sat down in a chair and said, ‘Well, I’m not gonna move from here until I write a song.’ I sat there for about three hours, three and a half hours, “Pancho and Lefty” kinda drifted through the window, and I wrote it down, or else I’d still be sitting there.”
How The Folk Icon Wiggled His Way Out Of a Traffic Ticket (The First Time)
The next day, Van Zandt and his friend were making the long trek back into the city, swerving around young Christians and gurus who were trying to hitchhike their way to see their religious idols. “A big Dallas cop sees us swerving down the road in this broken-down car,” Van Zandt recalled. The cop approached the window, saw the scruffy songwriter and his long-haired friend, and promptly asked the men for their IDs.
“The only ID Daniel had was a Georgia driver’s license that had been expired for, like, eleven years. The only ID that I had was a record album [that] had my name and my picture right there on it.” Sure that the cop was going to write them a traffic violation, Van Zandt’s friend had the bright idea of pretending to be one of the Billy Graham attendees. “Daniel, out of the blue, looks over to the policeman through the window and says, ‘Excuse me, sir, do you know Jesus?’ The cop looks at him, hands him back his driver’s license, and says, ‘You boys be careful!’ ‘You bet!’”
Van Zandt would have another brief encounter with the police (that ended with his wiggling out of a traffic violation) somewhere else in Texas, thanks to the uncanny coincidence that the two men who pulled Van Zandt over just so happened to use “Pancho and Lefty” as their partner nicknames. Call it divine intervention or Van Zandt’s blind luck, but Pancho and Lefty always seemed to put him in the right place at the right time.
Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
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