On Authenticity: Townes Van Zandt, Natasha Rostova, and the “Uncles”
There is a famous scene in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace in which Countess Natasha Rostova, recently betrothed and enjoying the last days of youth, goes with her brothers to the rustic home of a distant relative—or “Uncle,” as they call him—after a long and exhilarating day of hunting. Slender and graceful, Natasha cuts a fine figure as she expertly dismounts from her horse, arousing the curiosity of “Uncle’s” domestic serfs. “A regular Tatar!” they exclaim. The merry and stout housekeeper brings the guests a tray arrayed with liqueurs, wine, herb brandy, mead, mushrooms, buttermilk cakes, raw honey, apples, and nuts. Later, the housekeeper serves roasted chicken, ham, and preserves made with honey. Natasha savors the simple but succulent meal, and with “sparkling eyes” she listens to her older brother and “Uncle” talk of hunting.
As they finish dinner, they hear from just down the hall the resonant tones of a balalaika, a three-stringed Russian folk instrument with a triangular body, played by “Uncle’s” coachman, Mitka. Enraptured by Mitka’s masterful playing, Natasha reproaches her brother Nikolai for calling the music merely “nice” and proclaims that it is “absolutely enchanting.” “Just as ‘Uncle’s’ mushrooms, honey, and liqueurs had seemed to her the most delicious in the world, so this song at that moment seemed to her to be the very acme of musical delight.” As they all listen, “Uncle” remarks that Mitka did not get a certain part right, prompting Natasha to ask him if he also plays. “Uncle” smiles and then asks his housekeeper to bring his guitar. After blowing dust off his guitar, “Uncle” begins to play and sing a well-known folk song called “Came a Maiden Down the Street.” Natasha is so delighted with “his flawless, painstaking, vigorous” rendition that she demands he play it again.
As he plays, “Uncle” stands and strikes the pose of someone who is about to dance. Gesturing toward Natasha with the hand that just struck a chord, “Uncle” says, “Now then, little niece!” “Natasha flung off her shawl, ran forward to stand facing ‘Uncle,’ and with arms akimbo and a quick movement of her shoulders, struck an attitude.” Somehow, this young countess, educated by a French governess and largely unfamiliar with Russian folk traditions, captures the spirit of “those inimitable, unteachable Russian gestures that ‘Uncle’ had expected of her.” Her dance is “so absolutely perfect” that the housekeeper is moved to both tears and laughter. Everyone who witnesses her performance admires her grace and charm, the magical way in which she embodies the music.
When the song is over, Natasha sits down and listens to “Uncle” play a few other songs, the last of which is a favorite of his about hunting.
“Uncle” sang as peasants sing, with the full and naïve conviction that the whole meaning of a song lies in the words, that the tune comes of itself and exists only to give measure to the verse, apart from which it is nothing. Consequently, this unconsidered tune, like the song of a bird, had an extraordinary charm. Natasha was in ecstasies over “Uncle’s” singing. She decided to give up her harp lessons and play only the guitar. She asked “Uncle” for his guitar and at once picked out the chords of the song.
Except perhaps when she marries Pierre at the end of the novel, Natasha is never happier than at this moment, during these precious hours at “Uncle’s,” enjoying the peasant food and folk music. Unembellished by virtuosity and complexity, these sensual pleasures transport Natasha into “ecstasies.” The last song played by “Uncle” moves her so deeply because it speaks directly to the heart and captures the melodies and rhythms of nature—or, as she hears it, the spontaneous and artless song of birds. The tune and the words are in full agreement, the former giving expression to the latter. More sophisticated music performed in royal courts, concert halls, opera houses, and the parlor rooms of polite society can never touch her in the same way.[1]
One cannot help but smile when Natasha decides to give up the harp and play the guitar. If she lived in a time closer to ours, one can imagine that she would be inspired to reject a life of artifice and conformity, commit herself to a life of uncompromising artistic expression, and become a singer-songwriter. Of course, such a life is inconceivable for a Russian countess in the early nineteenth century. Not long after “Uncle” plays his last song, a droshky arrives to take Natasha and her brothers back to their father’s estate and to a world of resplendent wealth and aristocratic customs.
Natasha’s ecstasies at the home of “Uncle” are thrown into relief, no doubt intentionally by Tolstoy, when she returns to Moscow and attends the opera. With memories of the country still fresh in her mind, Natasha is shocked by what she witnesses. Upon arriving at the opera house, Natasha beholds the spectacle of finely dressed people who care less about the artistic performance than about seeing and judging and, in turn, being seen and being judged. This is a world not of substance but of appearances. When the lights dim and the opera begins, Natasha experiences more of the same.
After her life in the country, and in her present serious mood, all this seemed fantastic and amazing to Natasha. She could not follow the opera, could not even listen to the music: she saw only the painted cardboard and the oddly dressed men and women who moved, spoke, and sang so strangely in that brilliant light. She knew what it was all meant to represent, but it was so blatantly false and unnatural that she felt alternately ashamed for the actors and amused by them. She looked about her at the faces of the audience, seeking in them the same bewilderment and sense of the ridiculous that she herself felt, but they all seemed absorbed in what was happening on the stage and expressed what appeared to Natasha to be a feigned rapture.[2]
Instead of being moved, Natasha can only see that which is artificial and phony about the performers and the audience members. She is terrified of—and intoxicated by—the bejeweled women with dazzling dresses and pomaded heads, and, of course, the handsome figure and penetrating gaze of Anatol Kuragin. The evening ends quite differently than the one at “Uncle’s.” She feels not unalloyed joy and peace but a confused mix of flattered vanity, dread, and shame. In essence, her return to society constitutes a movement away from a simple and authentic life of pure feeling and toward a world of pride and pretense.
After enduring some heartache, Natasha eventually finds her way to a good and meaningful life, but she never fully recaptures what she had at “Uncle’s.” One can imagine that, as she grows older, Natasha might once again experience flashes of such intensity and purity of feeling, but it is her fate—as it is for most of us—to live with compromise and within the parameters of social convention. In many ways, her story is ours. As we mature into adulthood, those evenings like the one at “Uncle’s” are increasingly relegated to the beautiful realm of memory, evoked from time to time in moments of reverie, at best experienced vicariously during those quiet times when, say, we read a work of literature or put on a record. Yes, especially when we put on a record.
***
Throughout my life I have encountered my share of “Uncles” through the speakers of my stereo. But the “Uncle” who grabbed hold of me more forcefully than any other, and has refused to let go, is the late, great singer-songwriter, Townes Van Zandt (henceforth, just “Townes”). Both lyrically and musically, Townes seemed to embody the notion that a true artist reveals and expresses himself with complete candor. The perception that he was the genuine article—that he was always true to himself and his artistic vision, no matter the personal cost—explains, at least in part, the enduring appeal of his work, especially the recordings of his live performances. These recordings have prompted me to consider what it means for artistic expression to be authentic, why it matters to so many artists and art consumers, and whether it is even a coherent ideal in our jaded postmodern world. Vital philosophical questions are at stake: What does it mean to have an authentic self in a time of fracture and dislocation? Is it an attainable or desirable goal? If so, how is it achieved—and at what cost? If not, why does it remain a goal for which so many people continue to strive? Despite the prevalence of the postmodern view that the coherent self does not exist, that identity can best be understood as a performance enacted within a system of social discourse from which no one can escape, Townes’s arresting songs have restored my faith in the authentic self. They persuade me that the concept of authenticity still has meaning, and is perhaps more relevant than ever before, in the age of artificial intelligence.
My obsession with Townes began in 2010, thirteen years after the singer-songwriter’s death. My introduction was the studio version of “If I Needed You,” whose cheerful musical arrangement and clip-clop rhythm, evoking the image of a horse trotting in a sun-dappled meadow, does not accord with the heartbreaking lyrics. This is a song about the desperate desire to overcome the pain that comes from loneliness and separation. Despite the obvious incongruity between words and sound, the song captivated me. I had to hear more.
It did not take me long to discover Live at the Old Quarter, Houston, Texas, a double album recorded over three hot nights in July of 1973 but not released for another three-and-a-half years. Unlike the studio versions of most of his songs, these performances are distilled to the essential elements, voice and guitar. I recognized immediately that Townes was an artist meant to be heard live, unmediated, free of studio artifice and elaborate instrumentation and production.
His rendition of “If I Needed You” on Live at the Old Quarter is not marred by that disconnect between words and sound. Townes picks the notes of the melody on his guitar, complementing his lyrics and voice perfectly, and he sings without adornment, eschewing vibrato and opting for a lean and flat delivery. As one can say about most of the tracks on this album, it is the definitive version of this song.
Thunderstruck by the powerful immediacy of his live performances, by the magical combination of melody and lyrics that often left me breathless, sometimes emotionally shattered, I played this album continuously, as if on an endless loop, for months. I felt I was in the hands of a master who would not shrink from laying bare his soul. His art brought together exquisite craftsmanship and brutally honest revelations that drew from a deep well of despair.
One of the more memorable songs on the album is “Waiting Around to Die,” which he tells his audience is “the first serious song” he ever wrote. Singing in the key of C-sharp minor, Townes tells the story of a wretched man, an unrepentant convict, boozer, and gambler, who awaits death as he reflects on his life, a series of tragic events involving domestic violence, abandonment, betrayal, dissipation, crime, prison, loneliness, and addiction. It is a tour de force, an American epic told in just five stanzas, a little over two-and-a-half minutes. The song strikes such an emotional chord, captivating the audience at the Old Quarter into pristine silence, because it reconciles the tension between artistry and authenticity. Instead of creating a sublime wall of sound, an explicit reminder that this is indeed a work of art, Townes’s exquisite melody, haunting lyrics, and flawlessly executed performance establish a direct line of contact between musician and audience. Well-crafted art ceases to be art and, as if through a kind of musical alchemy, is transmuted into primordial experience.
Townes gave another unforgettable performance of the song in Heartworn Highways (1976), an acclaimed documentary about some of the pivotal figures in the outlaw country movement. In December of 1975, the filmmakers found Townes living with his girlfriend in a trailer in Clarksville, an historically black neighborhood in Austin, Texas, into which many white hippies and burnouts had moved. Townes agreed to perform a couple of songs in the house of his neighbor, “Uncle” Seymour Washington, a 79-year-old retired blacksmith. Many of the young white people in the neighborhood would gather at “Uncle” Seymour’s home and enjoy his famous barbecue.
When the camera was rolling, Townes turned on his rakish charm and hammed it up. He emerges as the most charismatic figure in the film, but he also steals the show musically. Joined by “Uncle” Seymour and Phyllis Ivy, Townes gives a mesmerizing performance of “Waiting Around to Die” at the kitchen table. Wearing a blue button-down shirt and a white cowboy hat, Townes plays brilliantly as Phyllis hums along and sways to the music and a dog barks in the distant background. At first the camera focuses on Townes singing, as he always did, with his eyes closed, and picking skillfully at the strings of his guitar, but by the second verse it pans over to Seymour and begins zooming in on his face, capturing his emotional reaction to the song as he listens intently to the lyrics. the end of the third verse, Seymour’s eyes are glistening with tears, which he wipes away with the back of his hand. Phyllis leans toward him, whispering words of comfort and taking hold of his hands. Crying silently, Seymour nods or shakes his head when a particular lyric speaks to him. At the end of the song his tear-streaked face says it all. Here is a man, old enough to be Townes’s grandfather, who is moved to the core by a song about a life full of pain and hardship, no doubt reflecting on the trials that he, a working-class black man, had to endure for nearly eight decades, most of it in the Jim Crow South.
The image of Seymour Washington’s face as Townes strikes the final chord is a powerful document of that alchemy, his uncanny gift for stirring another person’s soul. Townes would often say that his goal in life was to “write the perfect song that would save someone’s life”—to “write songs that really do make a difference.” Instead of wealth, fame, and adulation, Townes said that the real aim was to “hear the guitar ring one note correctly and your voice ring the same note correctly with the proper meaning correctly for that instant…if you hit that note, it goes around the world and maybe—this is not bragging but it’s hopeful, kind of prayerful—maybe somehow connect up with a baby in England or Ireland or Ethiopia and somehow make a shade of difference.” Throughout his life Townes received letters from fans who thanked him for rescuing them from depression or addiction.[3]
Unfortunately, the music that Townes recorded in the studio rarely conjured the magic of his live performances. Guy Clark, the legendary singer-songwriter who was one of Townes’s best friends, lamented that his studio albums were overproduced. “I always thought Townes was done a disservice in the way his records were produced over the years,” he said. “I don’t think anything even comes close to a live performance like Live at the Old Quarter. However those studio albums were being made, that really quality part of Townes never cut through. There was always too much other stuff going on for me.”[4] I would go so far as to say that there are only a handful of songs in Townes’s entire oeuvre where the studio version surpasses all of the live performances recorded for posterity. Almost invariably, the producers of his studio albums would bring in a team of session musicians and turn his austere songs into grand and lavish musical creations. While Townes stood at the intersection of the blues and folk traditions, his producers were often trying to make a country music star out of him, creating sounds and arrangements that came straight out of Nashville.
Part of the problem was timing. As music critic Walter Dawson explained in a review of Live at the Old Quarterin 1977, “[Townes] came along too late for the sixties folk boom and too early for the progressive country movement.”[5] His record producers thought that situating Townes in the country music genre would be the most effective way of selling units. But their strategy did not lead to commercial success and, even worse, diminished the power of his music. In short, his art was sacrificed at the altar of marketing considerations. What his producers failed to understand was that Townes was an artist who should never have anything stand in the way between him and his audience.
I think it is useful to understand Townes as a musician who, metaphorically speaking, embodies the Protestant spirit. Martin Luther, an early sixteenth-century religious thinker and a central figure in the Protestant Reformation, criticized the Roman Catholic Church for being corrupt and turning Christianity into the practice of empty rituals. He believed that Roman Catholicism had abandoned the Christian faith with its focus on good works and sacramental observance and with its insistence that the Church must serve as an institutional intermediary between God and His flock. Along with other Reformation leaders, Luther believed that faith alone is sufficient to show that we are graced by God. He claimed that people could affirm their faith by reading the Bible and praying on their own without the interference or assistance of clergy. And they did not need the mystical ornamentations of a cathedral or other baroque aesthetic experiences meant to deepen their devotion to God. Indeed, Protestants regarded these forms of aesthetic mediation as a kind of idolatry, enshrouding God in artistic representations that evoked not faith but mystery.
By analogy, we can think of the artist as an ersatz god and the recording studio as a cathedral where the producer functions as the archbishop and the session musicians as priests. The virtuosity, innovation, and complexity on display in their musical arrangements are supposed to enrich appreciation of the artist’s songs. But Townes was a musician whose art is meant to be unadorned, expressing without compromise or artifice feelings forged in the smithy of his soul. All you need is Townes and his guitar, and a direct line of contact will be established. Anything else just gets in the way and deprives his audience of the stark but beautiful message that he wants to convey.
In our disenchanted age, with the death of God and the fragility of other transcendental sources of meaning and authority, artists like Townes, who appear to bear the mark of authenticity, have a strong appeal. For it is not God but the authentic artist with whom the audience has any hope of finding communion. The authentic artist can use his craft to unmask himself and allow his audience to experience vicariously the great depths of joy and sorrow that dwell inside him. But for the authentic artist, it is mainly anguish and sorrow to which he feels a need to give voice. He is a Christ figure, a martyr who suffers—and bears witness to his suffering—for the sake of his audience. While he endures and expresses great pain, his audience experiences a kind of spiritual cleansing or grace.[6] This is because the authentic artist reminds us that we are not alone in what we are going through. We find solace in the fact that his forlorn voice cuts straight to the bone and speaks to universal truths about the human experience.
***
In a brilliant book he published over 50 years ago, Lionel Trilling shed light on the idea of authenticity by comparing it with sincerity. Trilling defined sincerity as “congruence between avowal and actual feeling,”[7] which in plain language means saying what we think. The sincere person is honest about his feelings. He abjures irony and always communicates in earnest with others. But Trilling recognized that, by the twentieth century, the prelapsarian simplicity of the sincere soul began to look like a laughable fiction, for it failed to account for the convolutions of the human psyche. We may insist that we are straight shooters who always speak our minds, but the truth is far more complicated. After all, we do not always know what we think or feel. When we do, there are often good reasons not to reveal it. So, in our more sophisticated age, authenticity has emerged as a virtue on which people, including artists and consumers, have increasingly placed a high premium.
Perhaps the first formulation of the concept comes from Polonius, who somehow rises above his usual prolix buffoonery when he speaks these immortal words to Hamlet: “This above all: to thine own self be true.” If sincerity involves being true to others, authenticity is about being true to yourself. And, as Trilling pointed out, the champions of authenticity regard it as having “a more strenuous moral experience than ‘sincerity’ does, a more exigent conception of the self and of what being true to it consists in, a wider reference to the universe and man’s place in it, and a less acceptant and genial view of the social circumstances of life.”[8] In other words, authenticity is about not telling the truth but livingthe truth, not saying what you think or believe but showing who you are, creating a strong and autonomous self that stands in defiant opposition to a society that insists on imitation and conformity. The sincere person means what he says. The authentic person means what he is.
But, even among those who see value in the idea of authenticity, there is a vigorous philosophical debate about what constitutes a self. What is this self to which the authentic person must be true? Do we even have stable, identifiable selves to which we can be true in the face of unrelenting social pressure and discourse? There are two schools of thought that understand the authentic self quite differently.
One school of thought can be called individualism, which sees the self existing independently of, and prior to, any external forces. People are authentic, according to individualism, when they remain unencumbered, free either to express the identity that lies at the core of their being or to fashion their identity ex nihilo by acting in the world. The former is Romantic individualism; the latter is existentialist individualism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson captured the Romantic idea of authenticity perfectly when he admonished his readers to heed the divine spark that lies within all of us. “Trust thyself,” he said. “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men—that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense…and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment.” Emerson believed that authentic people have faith in themselves and never surrender to social pressures. They reject “large societies and dead institutions” and “shun father and mother and wife and brother” when “genius calls.” They act intuitively, even whimsically, and follow their own hearts, confident that what they do will align with the “universal” truths declared at “the Last Judgment.”[9]
For the existentialists, there is no spirit dwelling inside people, connecting them to cosmic truths most often heard in the quiet of nature. According to Jean-Paul Sartre, authentic people recognize that “existence precedes essence,” that action comes before truth and meaning. We are thrown into a life empty of a priori truth or purpose and then fill it with meaning by acting in the world. Our choices define who we are and reveal what we believe. “[M]an first exists: he materializes in the world, encounters himself, and only afterwards defines himself,” he said. “He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature since there is no God to conceive of it…man is nothing other than what he makes of himself.” To be authentic, then, means embracing our freedom and, through our choices, fashioning ourselves. There are no heavenly or earthly fonts of wisdom on which we can rely when choosing, and we cannot use nature or society as a justification for what we do. The condition of every human being is “one of free choice, in which he has no recourse to excuses or outside aid.” Existentialists cut their own path, rely on no one else, and assume sole responsibility for the actions that define them.[10]
The other school is communitarianism, which sees each person as a social creature that can only come into being and form a self in the context of a community and its traditions. People can exercise autonomy and push back against society, but they always maintain ties to the community in which they were nurtured. The communitarian says that the idea of the unencumbered self is sheer fantasy, that people can never be completely free of their origins, for that is the starting point, the place where they were forged. People are authentic, according to this school of thought, when they show fealty to, and respect for, the cultural traditions and norms that are a part of their inheritance. Communal ties and obligations often matter more than freedom.
Charles Taylor is currently the most important figure in the communitarian school. Authenticity, he says, does not demand “ignoring whatever transcends the self.” It does not require one to become a rugged individualist who rejects community, civic duty, citizenship, and solidarity. Nor does it embrace the relativistic view that each person must live “his own truth” and that all perspectives are equally valid. Taylor says that “authenticity should be taken seriously as a moral ideal,” which can only be realized if we start from the premise that the self is formed dialogically. “My own identity crucially depends on my dialogical relations with others,” he says. That is, we can only understand ourselves in relation to the people with whom we interact and connect in meaningful ways. And those self-defining interactions necessarily involve obligations and duties which further shape who we are. As Taylor puts it, “Authenticity is not the enemy of demands that emanate from beyond the self; it supposes such demands.” In short, the communitarian sees the authentic person as someone who does not stand alone. Rather than anomie or abandonment, she feels a shared sense of belonging with others.[11]
So, there are two ways of understanding authenticity: to be true to your autonomous self or to be true to your communal self. But we must not fall prey to the false dichotomy that insists on choosing one over the other. Through his art, Townes illustrates quite well the possibility of achieving a synthesis, both acting independently in the world and embracing community. His authenticity stems from an ongoing dialectic between the individualistic and communitarian conceptions of the self. The authentic person resists social pressures but also honors the people and traditions that shaped him. He recognizes that with freedom comes responsibility. Likewise, the authentic artist wants to be free of what others expect or demand while he is also drawn to artistic traditions that require operating within formal constraints. Out of that creative tension between freedom and constraint, between autonomy and relation, the authentic artist emerges.
At least in part, Townes and others like him seem authentic because they stay true to their artistic vision, with nary a thought to selling units, filling seats, or creating a marketable brand. In the parlance of the 1960s, we might say that the authentic artist refuses to “sell out.” He cares not a whit about what record executives or audiences want. He follows his heart and nothing else.
But in addition to being himself, the authentic artist is also concerned about expressing himself and making an impact on others. He is dedicated to using his craft, drawing on specific artistic traditions, to give voice not only to who he is but also to who we are. This requires an extraordinary commitment from an artist. To make that visceral connection, bearing your soul and reaching into the soul of your audience, means sacrificing everything else you might value and everyone you hold dear. To become a great musical artist and songwriter, said Townes, “you have to blow off everything else. You have to blow off your family. You have to blow off comfort. You have to blow off money. You have to blow off security. You have to blow off your ego. You have to blow off everything except your guitar. You have to sleep with it. Learn how to tune it. And no matter how hungry you get, stick with it. You’ll be amazed at how many people turn away.”[12]
Townes might have been amazed, but most of us would not be. His was a level of commitment that only a few can maintain. But sacrificing everything to his art, blowing it all off and focusing solely on his guitar and his songwriting, was what it took. It allowed him to develop not only his chops as a writer, singer, and guitarist but also his capacity for reaching deeply within himself. Combining both well-honed talent and true self-knowledge, an authentic artist like Townes can write and perform music that is both beautiful and devastating. His art bears witness to what it means to be a human being. When asked once why he wrote so many sad songs, Townes replied: “I don’t think they’re all that sad. I have a few that aren’t sad, they’re like…hopeless. About a totally hopeless situation. And the rest aren’t sad, they’re just the way it goes.”[13]
Because the authentic artist resists the prevailing winds of culture and society, saying not what we want to hear but what we need to hear, such expressions of the human condition are—as Trilling put it—a “strenuous moral experience.” The reason we need to hear what authentic artists have to say is that they expand our minds, challenging our assumptions, our values, our mental habits. Their art is disruptive and destabilizing. They stir our moral imagination, producing feelings, thoughts, and perspectives we have never had before. Their art speaks a larger truth not so much about themselves—for authenticity does not demand navel-gazing confessionals—but about the larger world they inhabit. From authentic art spring truths about the human experience more generally, and this just might make us more sensitive and empathetic people. Townes hoped his songs would “make a difference” and perhaps even “save someone’s life.” Those are the ambitions of the authentic artist.
Townes wrote and performed many songs that tell the unvarnished truth about human existence, its joys and beauty, its mysteries and vagaries, its pain and misery. They compel us especially to imagine what it is like to experience the surfeit of madness, desperation, loneliness, longing, squalor, regret, and grief from which so many people suffer, and they heighten our compassion for those who live at the margins of society. At their most powerful moments his songs enable us to see and feel those mystic threads that connect us to our common humanity.[14]
Probably his best-known song, “Pancho and Lefty” speaks directly to the question of what constitutes an authentic life and urges listeners to enlarge their sympathies. The song recounts the story of two outlaws: Pancho, a legendary bandit who dies bravely in the deserts of Mexico, and Lefty, his friend who sells him out, absconds to Cleveland, and lives out his days alone and in obscurity. Even though the “poets tell how Pancho fell” while Lefty hid out “in a cheap hotel,” Townes is not endorsing the old cliché that it is better to burn out than to fade away. Nor is he suggesting that our sympathies should lie solely with Pancho. In fact, Townes urges us not to be too hasty in our judgment of Lefty. He sings: “Pancho needs your prayers it’s true / But save a few for Lefty too / He just did what he had to do / And now he’s growing old.” Both bandits are equally deserving of our compassion, Townes suggests, for if we are honest, we must acknowledge that there is a Lefty in all of us, even in those uncompromising stalwarts of righteousness who cannot countenance such an odious act of betrayal.
In the first verse, a sort of preamble to the main story about Pancho and Lefty, Townes sings in the second person of a mother’s favorite son who hopes “living on the road” will keep him “free and clean” but, with “skin like iron” and “breath…as hard as kerosene,” has surrendered to hard living and heavy drinking. He is both free and dependent, a rambler who sees the world and a mama’s boy who often sinks into a drunken stupor. “She began to cry when you said goodbye / And sank into your dreams,” he sings at the end of the first verse. And this man, perhaps a stand-in for Townes, dreams of two bandits—one a hero immortalized by poets, the other a sellout “the federales” let “slip away”—who clearly represent his divided self. He is both hero and blackguard, free spirit and fallen wretch; he is a conflicted man who has betrayed no one but himself.[15]
Of course, one can read the song as an allegory about the ongoing struggle within all of us. This is the dialectic, the tension, that resolves itself into a synthesis when the artist expresses, beautifully and heartbreakingly, our universal condition. We are all whole and fractured, free and bound, sacred and profane, noble and foul, good and evil. To be authentic is to recognize our wondrous complexity. It is to be true to who and what we are and to understand that others “contain multitudes” just as we do.
When he wrote, “I am large…I contain multitudes,” Walt Whitman was not only acknowledging but also celebrating his expansive and varied self. And this honest account of himself deepened his capacity to sympathize with his fellow human beings, for he could see himself in them and, in turn, them in himself. Indeed, he was one of those rare souls whose heart felt with acute sensitivity the sufferings of his fellow human beings. “Whoever degrades another degrades me…and whatever is done or said returns at last to me, / And whatever I do or say I also return,” he wrote.
Through me many long dumb voices,
Voices of the interminable generations of slaves,
Voices of prostitutes and of deformed persons,
Voices of the diseased and despairing, and of thieves and dwarfs,
Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,
And of the threads that connect the stars—and of wombs, and of the fatherstuff,
And of the rights of them the others are down upon,
Of the trivial and flat and foolish and despised,
Of fog in the air and beetles rolling balls of dung.[16]
With just as much sympathy, Townes also sang about prostitutes, drunks, beggars, knaves, fools, lovers, thieves, and many others in desperate circumstances. Like Whitman, he saw the similarities between himself and others, and his poetry reminds us that we all deserve understanding, forgiveness, and, yes, a few prayers.
***
When Townes performed on those three nights in July of 1973, knowing that his friend Earl Willis would be recording him, he was in peak form. At the age of 29, Townes was already an extraordinary poet, composer, singer, and guitarist—and it was all on display. But what makes Live at the Old Quarter such a vital album is that he harnesses that talent, exercising artistic restraint to ensure it never undermines what he wants to express. One never gets the sense that Townes is showing off. His virtuosity remains understated, even minimalistic. He never does more than is necessary, and one must listen attentively to appreciate his guitar-picking prowess and lyrical genius. Never performing for his own aggrandizement, Townes preserves the raw integrity of his songs, and that is why they endure to this day.
Using a portable four-track recorder and low-impedance microphones, Willis recorded 44 different songs—most of them more than once—over those three nights. Townes mostly performed his own compositions, songs rooted in the folk and blues traditions, ranging from soulful ballads to raucous foot-stompers. Willis selected 27 cuts for editing and eventual inclusion on what would become a double album. These recordings would remain in limbo for over three years in large part because Townes’s manager, Kevin Eggers, did not recognize that this was art of the highest order. Hoping Townes would make another studio album, he showed no interest in doing anything with the Old Quarter recordings until 1976. But the regulars who packed into the Old Quarter on those nights, bearing the heat and faulty air-conditioner, understood that they were in the presence of genius. Slouching slightly on his stool, picking at his guitar, and singing with his eyes closed, he held his audience in thrall. After a flawless rendering of “Pancho and Lefty,” he said, “Man, I’ve never heard it that quiet in here before.”[17] One can only wonder how many souls he saved.
Maybe—just maybe—one of Natasha’s descendants was among the saved who either saw Townes at the Old Quarter in 1973 or, at the very least, listened to the album that came out of those transcendent performances. For they capture the essence of that perfect evening of dance and music at “Uncle’s” joyous home, where Natasha channels the spirit of the Russian people. Natasha’s dance and Townes’s “Pancho and Lefty” become one, the apotheosis of authenticity.
[1] See Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (New York: Signet Classic, 1968), 614-621. For more on the significance of this scene in the broader context of Russian cultural history, see Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002).
[2] Tolstoy, 678.
[3] Van Zandt quoted in Harold F. Eggers, Jr., My Years with Townes Van Zandt (Milwaukee, WI: Backbeat Books, 2018), 177; Van Zandt quoted in John Kruth, To Live’s to Fly (New York: De Capo Press, 2007), 17; Van Zandt quoted in Bill Flanagan, “Ragged Company,” Musician, August 1995. See also Robert Earl Hardy, A Deeper Blue (Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press, 2008), 148.
[4] Guy Clark quoted in Brian T. Atkinson, I’ll Be Here in the Morning (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2012), 13.
[5] Dawson quoted in John Kruth, To Live’s to Fly, 168-169.
[6] See Paul K., “High, Low, and in Between.” New Times (Los Angeles), January 16-22, 1997.
[7] Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 2.
[8] Ibid., 11.
[9] Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” (1841), last modified April 29, 2022, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/16643/16643-h/16643-h.htm#SELF-RELIANCE.
[10] Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 20-22, 47.
[11] Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 22-23, 41, 48.
[12] Townes Van Zandt quoted in John Kruth, To Live’s to Fly, 63.
[13] Townes Van Zandt quoted in Margaret Brown (director), Be Here to Love Me (2004).
[14] It would pain Townes to see the homeless and the down-on-their-luck, and he would often hand them all the money in his wallet without thinking about it. His first wife remembers him even bringing a homeless man to their apartment. See Michael Hall, “The Great, Late Townes Van Zandt,” Texas Monthly, March 1, 1998.
[15] Townes Van Zandt, “Pancho and Lefty,” For the Sake of the Song (Houston, TX: Wings Press, 1977), 15.
[16] Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass: First and “Death-Bed” Editions (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2004), 90, 52-53. These verses are from the First Edition, originally published in 1855.
[17] Townes Van Zandt, “Pancho and Lefty,” Live at the Old Quarter (Fat Possum Records, 1977).