Townes Van Zandt Was “Peed-Off” That This Country Star Didn’t Cover His Song, but That Star Had a Good Reason

Texas-born singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt is among a rare class of musicians whose songs are more ubiquitous than they are. Though he’s a legend among folk and alt-country circles, Van Zandt never quite achieved the same level of fame as artists like Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard, who covered his songs. But there was one star who never covered Van Zandt’s music, much to Van Zandt’s chagrin.

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Speaking to Aretha Sills in the mid-1990s, Van Zandt revealed he always wished Ernest Tubb would have covered his song “Don’t Take It Too Bad”. The track appears toward the end of the A-side to Van Zandt’s eponymous album from 1969. Van Zandt always felt like Tubb’s honky tonk style would have been perfect for the melancholy country tune. So much so that Van Zandt almost took Tubb’s passing personally.

“He died without recording [the song],” Van Zandt joked. “I was actually peed-off at him for a couple of days. He wasn’t gonna record it. But he did. I mean, he was maybe gonna record it.” The singer-songwriter then added, “He wasn’t even thinking about it. I wanted him to, and then he died. It’s hard to be peed-off at the dead for long.”

Plenty of Other People Have Covered These Townes Van Zandt Classics

“Don’t Take It Too Bad” is one of this writer’s all-time favorite Townes Van Zandt tracks, so it’s not hard to understand the singer-songwriter’s desire to hear a legend like Ernest Tubb cover it. But Van Zandt certainly had no small shortage of artists who were covering his music, including tracks from that first album in the late 1960s. In Van Zandt’s lifetime, his friend and colleague Guy Clark recorded “Don’t Take It Too Bad” in 1979 and again in 1995. Even more cover renditions of Townes Van Zandt have come out since his passing in 1997, a few years after he made his comments about Tubb.

Some of the most notable Townes Van Zandt covers are of “Pancho and Lefty”. Emmylou Harris has included it in her repertoire for so long that she’s said it feels like one of hers. And in 1983, Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson released a duet version of the song, the music video for which actually featured Van Zandt. “It was real nice they invited me,” he would later say of his cameo appearance.

Conversely, one of Van Zandt’s most well-known songs is actually a cover. The singer-songwriter covered The Rolling Stones’ “Dead Flowers” for his 1994 album, Roadsongs. This version appeared in The Big Lebowski, introducing Van Zandt to an even wider audience after the movie’s 1998 release.

Photo by Frans Schellekens/Redferns