I'll Be Here in the Morning: The Songwriting Legacy of Townes Van Zandt

Butch Hancock

Butch Hancock Pour the sun upon the ground, stand to throw a shadow Watch it grow into a night, and fill the spinning sky —TVZ, “Highway Kind,” from High, Low and In Between T ownes Van Zandt’s poetry illuminates the Cactus Café at least once a year, thanks to Butch Hancock. “Townes’s songs have a magic to them,” says Hancock, who has hosted Van Zandt’s birthday celebration at the venerable listening room every spring since the songwriter’s death in 1997. “Sometimes a song or two gets repeated once or twice during the night. We talked about ending this show one timewiththe‘Snowin’onRaton’contest.”WhenaskedhowTownesVan Butch Hancock, courtesy Butch Hancock. 194 I’ll Be Here In THe MornInG Zandt might have celebrated his sixty-fifth birthday in 2009, Hancock replied, “I have no clue what he’d be doing. I couldn’t figure out what he was doing in the first place.”1 Hancock, born July 12, 1945, in Lubbock, Texas, long has served as a grassroots bullhorn for Van Zandt. Early on, The Flatlanders, Hancock ’s band with fellow Lone Star singer-songwriters Joe Ely and Jimmie Dale Gilmore, performed Van Zandt’s “Waitin’ Around to Die” and “Tecumseh Valley” on their album Live at the One Knite, June 8th, 1972. Today all three singers—together as The Flatlanders and separately as solo artists—often perform his popular “White Freightliner Blues” and others in concert. The Flatlanders’ introduction to Van Zandt and his immediate impact on the band has become part of Texas music folklore.2 “I was living up in Lubbock then, just out driving around, and I see this long, tall, scarecrow-looking guy carrying a guitar, way out on the edge of town,” Ely says. “He said he’d just come back from San Francisco, recording a record, and he was heading to Houston. I took him on the other side of Lubbock, out where I used to catch rides, by Pinky’s liquor store. He said, ‘Thanks a lot,’ and reaches in his backpack. “I kind of looked in the backpack, and there’s not any clothes in there. It’s nothing but albums. He reaches in and gives me one. He’d carried these all the way across the desert back to Houston. I was a little surprised. I’d never met anyone who’d actually recorded an album. I take the record back to Jimmie Gilmore, and we put the record on and we were just mesmerized by it. Ends up, we played that album over and over for weeks just rethinking what we’re doing and what a song was all about.”3 “It was totally astounding,” Hancock says. “Townes found a channel to float through.”4 While Joe Ely and Jimmie Dale Gilmore followed The Flatlanders’ One More Road (1980) with more prominent solo careers, Hancock arguably proved himself the more accomplished and prolific songwriter. In fact, Hancock composed many of the songs that made Ely and Gilmore more widely known. Ely included versions of Hancock’s “She Never Spoke BuTCH HAnCoCk 195 Spanish to Me,” “If You Were a Bluebird,” “Boxcars,” and “West Texas Waltz” on The Best of Joe Ely (2000), and Gilmore has recorded “Nothing of the Kind,” “Just the Wave, Not the Water,” “My Mind’s Got a Mind of Its Own,” and others. Notably, the popular jam-band Phish frequently has performed Hancock’s “My Mind’s Got a Mind of Its Own.” The Flatlanders, who took a quarter-century hiatus before recording the song “South Wind of Summer” for The Horse Whisperer soundtrack (1998),earnedthemoniker“morealegendthanaband.”Bythetimethey regrouped in earnest with the albums Now Again (2002), Wheels of Fortune (2004), and Hills and Valleys (2009), Hancock had boosted his reputation as a songwriter with such albums asOwn & Own (1989), Own the Way Over Here (1993), and Eats Away the Night (1994) for Sugar Hill Records. He is also an accomplished photographer, river rafting guide, and painter.5 Hancock’s “epic” concerts at the Cactus Café in 1990, billed as “No Two Alike,” in which Hancock and twenty-seven guests (including Ely and Gilmore) sang 140 of his songs over five nights without repeat, featured a legendary Townes Van Zandt appearance. As Hancock approached the “Pancho and Lefty” reference in his song “Split & Slide II,” Van Zandt “almost magically appeared onstage, sang ‘And all the federales said / We don’t want them...