I just thought that Elvis had all the money in the world, all the Cadillacs and all the girls, and all he did was play the guitar and sing. He would later tell an interviewer that "watching Elvis Presley's October 28, 1956, performance on The Ed Sullivan Show was the starting point for me becoming a guitar player. In 1952, the family transplanted from Fort Worth to Midland, Texas, for six months before moving to Billings, Montana.Īt Christmas in 1956, Townes's father gave him a guitar, which he practiced while wandering the countryside.
Harris was a corporate lawyer, and his career required the family to move several times during the 1950s and 1960s.
Townes' parents were Harris Williams Van Zandt (1913-1966) and Dorothy Townes (1919-1983). Van Zandt County in east Texas was named after his family in 1848. During the decade, two books, a documentary film titled Be Here to Love Me, and a number of magazine articles about the singer were written.īorn in Fort Worth into a wealthy family, Townes Van Zandt was a third-great-grandson of Isaac Van Zandt (a prominent leader of the Republic of Texas) and a second great-nephew of Khleber Miller Van Zandt (a Confederate Major and one of the founders of Fort Worth). The 2000s saw a resurgence of interest in Van Zandt. Van Zandt died on New Years Day 1997 from cardiac arrythmia caused by health problems stemming from years of substance abuse. When he was young, the now discredited insulin shock therapy erased much of his long-term memory. He suffered from a series of drug addictions, alcoholism, and the psychiatric diagnosis bipolar disorder. For much of the 1970s, he lived in a simple shack without electricity or a phone.
Much of his life was spent touring various dive bars, often living in cheap motel rooms and backwoods cabins. In 1983, six years after Emmylou Harris had first popularized it, Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard covered his song "Pancho and Lefty", scoring a number one hit on the Billboard country music charts. He is widely regarded for his poetic, often heroically sad songs. Photo src: John Townes Van Zandt (MaJanuary 1, 1997), best known as Townes Van Zandt, was an American singer songwriter.
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