Pancho and Lefty
might be the most covered song.
Been on a recent Townes Van Zandt kick due to two factors: (1) seeing all the posts about his March 7th birthday last week and (2) reading Jonathan Bernstein's wonderful autobiography of his namesake, Justin Townes Earle, What Do You Do When You're Lonesome. His songs are excellent, but not necessarily the most uplifting batch of songs to listen to while enduring the never-ending winter in the Northeast.
Scrolling through his discography and listening to Dead Flowers and having to remember whether this was a Townes van Zandt song covered by the Rolling Stones or vice versa. It is a Mick and Keith joint but sounds just like a Townes Van Zandt composition when he does it. After that I got further sidetracked by hearing his version of Springsteen's Racing in the Streets for the first time. Again, another song he makes his own. Hearing his take on the Springsteen classic reminded me that Justin Townes Earle also did a cover version of Racing in the Streets as the B-side to the Christchurch Woman. (Alas, that version is not on Spotify; had to pull it up on Apple Music as I paid 99 cents for it years ago on iTunes).
After the above detours, I focused on the reason I went down this recent rabbit hole, to listen to Pancho and Lefty, only to realize there are an insane number of cover versions of this song available.
My first exposure to this song decades ago was undoubtedly the Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson classic version. More recently this came back to me with the live acoustic version Shane Smith and the Saints did on their 2021 live album, Live from the Desert.
In scrolling endlessly through all the available versions, I was (pleasantly) surprised that there are seemingly not any Pancho and Lefty covers that are far outside of the country and Americana genres. I was fully expecting an emo/pop punk cover version done at 2x speed that I would be both scared to listen to and very intrigued by how bad it would be. I guess screaming about federales is not something goth kids would be interested in hearing. There is also a Luke Bryan version; I can safely say I have never heard that version before and did not work up the courage to give it a listen this week for fear I might not be able to unhear it.
From the dozen of so versions I did give a listen to, I have come to the unscientific conclusion that it is such a well written song that it is almost impossible to do a bad version of it. Not all takes are classics, but I didn't find any that absolutely butchered the song. You know artists like Emmylou Harris, Jason Isbell, and Steve Earle are going to give it the respect it deserves, but there are dozens of smaller acts treating the song with the reverence it has earned over the decades. This does not even include the thousands of live versions done by artists on stages of varying sizes over the years. Finally, I love that Willie Nelson often gives it the duet treatment - the aforementioned Merle Haggard version, but also with George Strait, Emmylou Harris, and even Toby Keith (with Merle again).
Time to give it a few more listens and get ready for my family to ask who Townes Van Zandt is and why is he crushing our Spotify Wrapped at year-end.
