This is the only music board that I post on, so excuse me if I am posting about an artist noone cares about.

I will preface this by saying that I love country music. The good stuff, not the absolute shit you hear when you turn on country radio. Love all the stuff you all know well, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Merle, Waylon, Emmylou, Hank Sr,...all that and more. But Townes Van Zandt is the absolute best country songwriter that I have ever listened to. He wrote the famous "Pancho and Lefty" that was sung so well by Willie and Merle. Another hit was "If I Needed You", made popular by Emmylou and Don Williams. I had always loved these songs and knew who Townes Van Zandt was, but had never listened to anything else by him, until I watched the documentary about him "Be Here To Love Me", which I highly recommend.

So I post this to see if there are other fans out there and to highly recommend him to others who like this genre. I cannot stress enough how fantastic his music is.

quite possibly the best songwriter who ever lived. live at the old quarter is one of my favorite live albums. i have not seen the documentary but plan to. wish i had discovered him before his death as i would have had many opportunities to see him play here in Austin.

"Our Mother The Mountain" just kills me.

This is the only music board that I post on, so excuse me if I am posting about an artist noone cares about.

I will preface this by saying that I love country music. The good stuff, not the absolute shit you hear when you turn on country radio. Love all the stuff you all know well, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Merle, Waylon, Emmylou, Hank Sr,...all that and more. But Townes Van Zandt is the absolute best country songwriter that I have ever listened to. He wrote the famous "Pancho and Lefty" that was sung so well by Willie and Merle. Another hit was "If I Needed You", made popular by Emmylou and Don Williams. I had always loved these songs and knew who Townes Van Zandt was, but had never listened to anything else by him, until I watched the documentary about him "Be Here To Love Me", which I highly recommend.

So I post this to see if there are other fans out there and to highly recommend him to others who like this genre. I cannot stress enough how fantastic his music is.

So this is some deep stuff, huh?

More fatefully, Van Zandt wrote "If I Needed You," his second-biggest hit, while under the influence. Van Zandt was staying at Guy and Susanna Clark's house near Nashville, and all three of them had the flu. A bottle of codeine was produced, which they drank, and then all three of them went to bed. In an excerpt from Rain on a Conga Drum, his upcoming biography of Van Zandt, author John Kruth picks up the tale:

"Stumbling down the sidewalk of his subconscious, Van Zandt had a remarkable dream that night, 'in blazing Technicolor' as he later recalled it. He was a folksinger on stage, singing a strange and beautiful new song. The dream was so vivid that he sat right up in bed and wrote the lyrics down just as they had come to him only moments before. The melody rang in his head so clearly he knew he'd have no trouble remembering it the following morning. So he pulled the blankets over his head and fell back to sleep.

"The next morning Susanna and Guy sat around the kitchen table in a fog, sipping coffee. Eventually Townes sauntered in, disheveled, with his guitar. 'Hey, y'all, listen to this,' he said as the song just rolled off his tongue and fingers as if he'd been playing it for years. Of course they loved it. 'When did you write that?' they asked. 'Last night,' Townes replied. The bemused couple looked at him doubtfully and explained it wasn't possible as he'd gone to bed before them and in their tiny house they surely would've heard him working away in the middle of the night." (As an aside, Loop, one of Townes's two parakeets mentioned in the song, was named after the North Loop drugstore in Austin where Townes would score codeine.)