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3. Where I Lead Me
- University of North Texas Press
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3 Where I Lead Me W ITHIN A FEW YEARS, THE guitar became for Townes Van Zandt the key to the form of expression that was to become his life’s work. Learning the instrument and playing and singing along with the radio and with records quickly became for him something more than just entertainment . Once he’d learned “Fraulein” for his father, he began diligently soaking up the music around him and seeking out more. “My musical influences were Elvis, Ricky Nelson, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, and the Everly Brothers … it started off with country, then Elvis and those guys …” Van Zandt said.1 Later, he started listening to jazz and blues, then to folk music. But his grounding was in the great, vital melting pot of country and western and early rock’n’roll that bubbled with such creative fervor in America in the 1950s and early ’60s. Townes had been absorbing it all with great interest and enthusiasm since he was a child and would ride with his father as he drove across the countryside visiting the oil fields, listening to Lefty Frizzell, Ernest Tubb, Hank Williams, and Roy Acuff on the car radio. According to Van Zandt, while Elvis had inspired him to take 20 Where I Lead Me 21 up the guitar, “In the long run, Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell probably inspired me more, they probably went in deeper to my consciousness.”2 Radio in the post-war years was flourishing, as were all kinds of recorded music, and a number of the artists who later inspired Townes were just beginning to make an impact: Hank Williams and Lightnin’ Hopkins both made their first commercial recordings in 1946; in 1950, Woody Guthrie’s Dustbowl Ballads was rereleased to a growing new audience of young folk music enthusiasts , the same year that Leadbelly’s old chestnut “Goodnight, Irene,” recorded by the Weavers, was the most popular song of the year; in 1952, Harry Smith’s monumental Anthology of American Folk Music was released on the Folkways label and began to seep into the underground consciousness; Hank Williams died at the age of twenty-nine in the back seat of his baby-blue Cadillac on New Year’s Day 1953, and his rise to lasting fame was launched in earnest; and Sam Phillips was just starting to record blues, country, and the beginnings of rock’n’roll music at his little studio in Memphis, and was putting the records out on his fledgling Sun label. This was the rich musical milieu into which Van Zandt was stepping and hoping to find his place. As the early rock’n’roll explosion was peaking, and as Townes was gradually growing more proficient on the guitar and more interested in making his own music, Pure Oil again transferred Harris Van Zandt, this time to Denver, Colorado, and the family moved to Boulder in 1958. The Van Zandts were already familiar with the area, having spent so many summers in the woods of Chautauqua. They all liked the Boulder area—which is about twenty miles northwest of Denver—and they settled in quickly. In September, Townes started at Boulder High School, and his sister Donna started as a freshman at the University of Colorado at Boulder. As a young teenager, Townes naturally began to display some of the qualities that he would carry with him throughout his life. Along with his high intelligence came an increasingly high degree of sensitivity. “Townes felt things more than the rest of us did. It was deeper, somehow,” his sister recalls. “You and I [54.158.248.39] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 11:11 GMT) 22 A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt would hear about a starving person and go about our lives, but it would just break his heart.”3 One time, as part of a business trip, Harris took Townes and Bill along on a hunting expedition with a client. As Bill recalls, Townes shot a deer, then, devastated, began to cry. Later, Townes’ brother “heard mom and dad trying to console him, tell him things were all right, because it was really upsetting to him.”4 A similar story, recalled by a friend, goes further back in Townes’ childhood. When Townes was five or six years old, his parents took him to a restaurant where there were live lobsters in a tank, and he was told he could pick out his own lobster. “So...