Talk of the Townes

January is a time for reflecting on all that’s been good in the last 12 months. For me, over the past year, I’ve spent a good deal of time looking back at great old songs, as I’ve been contributing a weekly slot to Miss Paula Flynn’s ‘C Word’ show on RTE’s 2XM digital strand. The idea is to examine how some of the great old folk, blues and country songs have triggered something in modern music, keeping the lines open, pushing music forward from the past.

Doing the research has been a joy. I've been digging up early songs, tracking down old recordings and feeling some of the chain link that ties old to new, separating the facts from the legends and myths. I was surprised to learn, for instance, that the reason the lyrics of ‘There Is Power In a Union’ sound a little stilted is Joe Hill wasn’t a native English speaker, having only arrived in America as a 23 year old old migrant in 1902, 13 years before he was executed in a bizarre miscarriage of justice. The fact that these old songs survive at all, often as scratchy, shakily played, hesitantly sung recordings is another great joy. As Keith Richards points out in his autobiography, the reason why blues and jazz became two of the dominant musical forms of the twentieth century is because their happened to arrive at more of less the same time as the commercially available recording. You have to wonder about all the great songs that passed through the net before they got the chance to be recorded. Even if they had only ever existed as the demos gathered together on last year’s Please Don’t Tell Me How The Story Ends we would know how great Kris Kristofferson’s early songs were and how monumental an impact they would have on a generation of singers growing up round him and below him. Even in that generation when recording was becoming almost ubiquitous there were some near misses. My favourite find of 2010 was a song by one of the acknowledged songwriting greats, which came close to falling through the cracks.
One of the most respected writers of our time was Texas singer and songwriter Townes Van Zandt. Alongside Willie Nelson and Steve Earle he was quietly responsible for dragging the axis of country music way out west, from its traditional home in Nashville to some vague indeterminate point in Texas. Like Willie and Steve he danced with the Nashville devil for a time. But unlike Willie and Steve he never achieved mainstream commercial success. Something about the wavering uncertain nature of his voice made him an unlikely candidate for the charts but his songs nevertheless found a life of their own. Coming from a respected Texas family who had notions of grooming him for the senate, he fell early into a pattern of drinking and taking drugs and was subjected to insulin shock therapy as a young man in an attempt to cure his manic depression, with the result that his long term memory was shot to threads.
Throughout the '70s and '80 he recorded albums, mostly produced by Cowboy Jack Clements, who notoriously erased the masters of one of them, Seven Come Eleven, when Townes’s manager couldn’t or wouldn’t pay for the sessions. His recorded output was patchy in any case, as he was far more interested in writing songs than recording them and would allow Clements a huge degree of latitude in the recording process, often with disastrous results.
He had hugely influential fans with the likes of Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, Emmylou Harris and the Cowboy Junkies recording his songs. Furthermore, his own musical hero Bob Dylan was apparently keen to write with him. Alas, the royalties from the cover versions were siphoned off by his manager and only after his death on New Years Day 1997, 44 years to the day after the death on another musical hero of his, Hank Williams, did his family see any income.
In one bizarre footnote he left a batch of unpublished poems and unrecorded lyrics to an Israeli singer named David Broza with whom he shared a stage only once. It’s hard to fathom why. On the surface of it Broza was a very different kind of character whose own music was infinitely more studied and conventional than anything Van Zandt recorded. A multi-platinum selling recording artist in his native Israel Broza is chiefly known as a balladeer and has none of the rough edges that made Van Zandt what he was. The two met when then were both guests in a 1994 ‘Writers in the Round’ concert in Houston where they both won over the audience in there own distinctive way, Townes Van Zandt with his wavering eccentric delivery and David Broza with his blend of Middle Eastern Folk Rock and Mediterranean pop. When Van Zandt’s widow sent him the lyrics Broza struggled with the legacy but eventually released 12 of the songs as the album Night Dawn. The best of them is a wonderful song called Harm’s Swift Way, a beautiful account of his own flawed character, caring but unable to protect those around him, equal parts loving and destructive. It was pounced upon by Robert Plant who quickly recorded it with Buddy Miller, for his Band of Joy album. It is taken to another realm by Plant’s inimitable delivery, which seeks out every emotional nuance in the song. It is a tune that’s going to live among the greats. You should check it out for yourself.