Townes Van Zandt

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Townes Van Zandt, Robert Townes Van Zandt (March 7, 1944 – January 1, 1997), also known as Townes Van Zandt, was an American singer-songwriter.

He recorded several songs, including "Pancho and Lefty," "For the Sake of the Song," "Rex's Blues," and "To Live Is to Fly," which are often regarded as American folk music's best-selling songs.

His musical style has often been described as melancholy, with abundant, poetic lyrics.

Van Zandt was known for his guitar playing and fingerpicking skills early in his career. Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard covered his album "Pancho and Lefty" in 1983, six years after Emmylou Harris first introduced it, debuting at number one on the Billboard country music charts.

A large part of Van Zandt's life was spent in various dive bars, often in cheap motel rooms and backwood cabins.

He lived in a basic shack without electricity or a phone for the majority of the 1970s. His name has been quoted by dozens of musicians from various genres, and Counting Crows, Steve Earl Keen Jr., Nanci Griffith, Jason Isbell, Stanley Russell, Natalie Maines, and Frank Turner have all recorded or performed his songs, including Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, Norah Jones, Emmylou Harris, Counting Crows, Steve Earl Keen Jr. He suffered with a series of heroin use, alcoholism, and bipolar disorder, as well as a psychiatric diagnosis.

When he was young, the now-discredited insulin shock therapy erased a lot of his long-term memory.Van Zandt died on New Years Day 1997 from cardiac arrythmia as a result of years of heroin use.

In the 2000s, there was a revival of interest in Van Zandt.

During the decade, two books, a documentary film (Be Here to Love Me), and many magazine articles about the singer were published.

Personal life

Fran Peterson married Fran Peterson on August 26, 1965; a son, John Townes "J.T." Van Zandt II, a boy from Houston, was born on April 11, 1969. On January 16, 1970, the couple divorced. In 1974, he started dating Cindy Morgan, who married in 1978. For the most part of the early 1980s, townes and Cindy were estranged, and they were divorced in Travis County, Texas, on February 10, 1983. They had no children.

Jeanene Munsell was Van Zandt's third marriage. On December 9, 1980, they were at a memorial for John Lennon. "You're going to do the right thing and respect the child," Dorothy Van Zandt, a terminally ill woman, told him. On March 14, 1983, he divorced his estranged second wife and married Munsell. William Vincent, the couple's first child, was born ten days later. Katie Belle, the sister of another child, was born on February 14, 1992. On May 2, 1994, Van Zandt and Munsell divorced. However, the two stayed close until Townes' death, and Jeanene was an executrix of his estate.

Jeanene coerced the singer to fork over the publication rights of his back catalog and establishing royal connections to her and her children around the time of their divorce in April 1993. After making the switch, the townes' only source of income was money earned from concert appearances, and even then, Townes frequented his ex-wife and gave her the money in his wallet. Dorothy's only possessions were a 1989 GMC Truck with camper shell, a 1984 Honda Shadow motorcycle, and a 1983 Starwind 22-foot boat since their divorce in 1994. He also retained sole ownership of his family's interest in oil lease and mineral rights.

Claudia Winterer, a woman from Darmstadt, Germany, had been in an long-distance relationship with him at the time of his death. The two met in Hanau, Germany, in November 1995 at a concert of his father. Van Zandt told his colleagues that he planned on marrying Winterer but that the two couples never got engaged.

Throughout his adult life, Van Zandt was addicted to heroin and alcohol. He became inebriated on stage and skipped the lyrics to his songs at times. At one time, his heroin use was so strong that he gave Kevin Eggers the rights to all of his first four albums for $20. At various times, his friends saw him shooting up not only heroin but also cocaine, vodka, as well as a slew of rum and Coke. He fired up heroin in the presence of his son J.T., who was only eight years old at the time.

Harold Eggers, Kevin's brother, was hired as his tour manager and 24-hour caretaker in 1976, a relationship that lasted for the remainder of the singer's life due to Van Zandt's continuous drinking. Although the singer was older than he was, Eggers later reported that Van Zandt was his "first child." He was reliant on heroin almost every day in the 1970s and 1980s. According to medical reports from his recovery centers, he believes his drinking habits began around 1973, and that by 1982, he was downing at least a pint of vodka a day. "He admits to hearing voices, mainly musical voices," doctors' notes said, "Affect is muted, and the tone is sad." "Judgment and wisdom have been hampered." He was given Zoloft, an antidepressant, and lithium as a mood stabilizer at various times. About a year ago and 1990, the longest and final period of sobriety during his adult life was about a year.

Van Zandt continued writing and performing into the 1990s, but his output slowed noticeably. He had enjoyed some sobriety in the early 1990s, but he continued to use alcohol during his remaining years. When Jeanene Van Zandt told Jeanene Van Zandt that attempting to detox Townes again could possibly kill him. During the mid-1990s, he became increasingly frail, with friends pointing out that he had "withered."

Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth, who told Van Zandt that he was interested in recording and releasing an album for him on the band's Ecstatic Peace label, which was funded by Geffen in early 1996. Van Zandt promised, and sessions were supposed to start in Memphis in late December. Van Zandt collapsed down the concrete stairs outside his house on December 19 or 20, fracturing his hip. After lying outside for an hour, he dragged himself inside and called his ex-wife Jeanene, who had invited friends Royann and Jim Calvin to check on him. He told the couple that he suffered the illness while getting out of bed and refused medical attention. They took him back to their house, but he spent Christmas week on their couch, unable to get up even to use the toilet.

Van Zandt arrived in a wheelchair by road manager Harold Eggers, determined to finish the album he had arranged with Shelley and Two Dollar Guitar. Shelley called off the sessions due to the songwriter's unpredictable demeanor and inebriation. Van Zandt eventually agreed to hospitalization, but not before returning to Nashville. By the time he agreed to medical care, eight days had passed since the crash. Van Zandt's left femoral neck fracture in his hip was noted on December 31, and several corrective surgeries were performed. Jeanene told the surgeon that one of Townes' previous rehab doctors had warned her that detoxing might cause her death. The medical staff tried to warn her that detoxing a "late-term alcoholic" at home would be dangerous, and that it would have a great chance of recovering under hospital supervision. She didn't pay attention to the warnings and checked Townes out of the hospital. The physicians refused to prescribe any painkillers to him immediately after leaving the hospital, knowing that he would most likely drink immediately after leaving the hospital.

By the time Van Zandt was checked out of the hospital early the next morning, he had begun to show signs of delirium tremens. Jeanene rushed him to his car, where she gave him a flask of vodka to ease the withdrawal delirium. She later reported that after returning him home to Smyrna, Tennessee, and pouring alcohol, he became "lucid, in a great mood, calling his relatives on the phone." Jim Calvin ate a marijuana joint with him, and he was also given four Tylenol PM tablets.

While Jeanene was on the phone with Susanna Clark, their son Will died and "looked dead," and his mother, who attempted to administer CPR, "screamed his name between breaths." In the early morning hours of January 1, 1997, Townes Van Zandt died at the age of 52. His medical cause of death was "natural" cardiac arrhythmia.

Two services were held for Van Zandt, one in Texas for family and another in a large Nashville church attended by neighbors, acquaintances, and fans. Some of his remains were laid down underneath a headstone in the Van Zandt family's plot at the Dido Cemetery in Dido, Texas, near Fort Worth.

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