Townes Van Zandt and his band thought they might be in for a night at the Washington County Jail in Brenham, Texas, until they realized the officers who pulled their two-car caravan over proudly donned the nicknames Pancho and Lefty. The fateful encounter wasn’t the only time Van Zandt would use his songwriting credits to cleverly evade trouble with the law.
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But considering the Texas-born musician was never quite sure where his iconic folk ballad “Pancho and Lefty” came from, this interaction was especially fortuitous, as it gave Van Zandt’s song a whole new meaning. Even so, he would later say that he hoped he never saw Pancho and Lefty again.
The Time Townes Van Zandt Met A Real-Life Pancho and Lefty
In a mid-1980s interview, Townes Van Zandt recalled driving to Houston with his wife and band while on tour. The two-car caravan was driving through the night to get to the next gig, with Van Zandt behind the wheel of one of the cars. Just outside of Brenham, Texas, about an hour and a half away from their destination, a police car pulled over Van Zandt’s car for speeding. The police officers asked Van Zandt if he had been drinking. He replied, “No, sir, not since last night.” The songwriter told the interviewer with a smirk, “They swallowed that, right. That’s cool.”
Next, the officers asked Van Zandt what he did for a living. “I said, ‘Well, I’m a songwriter,’” he said. “They both kind of looked around like, ‘Pitiful, pitiful,’ you know. Onto that, I added, ‘I wrote that song “Pancho and Lefty.” You ever heard this song, “Pancho and Lefty?” I wrote that.’ They look back around; they looked at each other and started grinning. It turns out that their squad car, you know, their partnership, right, it’s two guys. It was an Anglo and a Hispanic guy called Pancho and Lefty.”
Van Zandt remembered one of the officers looking at him and asking, “You promise?” He continued, “I’ve never had a policeman ask me if I promised or not. [I said], ‘Yeah, sure, I mean, for sure.’ And he says, ‘Well, at the station house, when we get called on the radio, they call for Pancho and Lefty.’ So, I got off the speeding ticket. I had to pay an expired inspection sticker and a failure to report a change of address.”
Who Were The Real Characters Behind This Iconic Folk Song?
Part of what made Townes Van Zandt’s interaction with those two police officers nicknamed Pancho and Lefty so special is that before that night, the songwriter never really knew where the song came from, exactly. Many believed the song to be about Pancho Villa. Villa was an iconic Mexican revolutionary who was assassinated in 1923 after a lengthy battle with the Constitutionalist Army, led by Venustiano Carranza and supported by the U.S. But as Van Zandt explained in the same interview, he never thought about Villa while working on his masterclass in narrative songwriting.
“I realize that I wrote it,” Van Zandt explained. “But it’s hard to take credit for the writing because it came from out of the blue. It was like it came through me, and it’s a real nice song. I kind of 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. That’s strange, huh? But in my song, Pancho gets hung. They only let him hang around out of kindness, I suppose. And the real Pancho was assassinated.”
Van Zandt mused that maybe “Pancho and Lefty” was always about those two police officers working the late-night shift in southeast Texas before adding, “I hope I never, ever see them again.”
Photo by Al Clayton/Getty Images
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