Words That Bleed
How feral lyrics, songs, and artists like Townes Van Zandt can ignite the barbarian within.
Last weekend while nursing my final glass of red wine, I stumbled upon Ken Burns’ eight-part series on the history of country music. Intrigued, I selected the episode 7 about the “Outlaws” of country music, back when a few long-haired rebels swerved country music towards a dirtier, more dangerous sound throughout the 1970s.
Of all the outlaw names you likely know—Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, David Allen Coe, etc.—the episode spends a good portion of time on an outlaw you might not know, a man from “all over,” a man named Townes Van Zandt.
Townes Van Zandt was a hard-luck drifter of a poet who played dusty bars across Texas throughout the 1960s and 70s. Adding to his dark romance, Townes was a tortured soul, often singing out his sadness between shots of bourbon and pills.
As Burns’ narrator introduces Van Zandt, I hear the first chords to one of my all-time favorite songs, “Pancho and Lefty.” Though many have recorded this song—including Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, and Emmy Lou Harris—no one sings it with a thicker chord of sadness than the man who wrote this masterpiece: Townes Van Zandt. (Watch the 79-year-old retired blacksmith begin to cry at 2:15 in the video.)
Van Zandt’s song tells the tale of two gun-slinging outlaws: Pancho, who died young in the desert of Mexico, and Lefty, who escaped only to languish in cheap motels north of the border, unable to sing the blues like he once could. It’s a story strewn with deep loves, dark memories, and clinging regrets.
Accompanied by nothing but the haunts of Van Zandt’s guitar, he begins with this:
Living on the road, my friend
Was gonna keep you free and clean
Now you wear your skin like iron
Your breath’s as hard as kerosene
I first heard this verse just after college and it was unlike anything I’d ever heard or read before. And up until that point in my life, I hadn’t intently read or listened to all that much.
When I heard him sing, “you wear your skin like iron, your breath’s as hard as kerosene” something stirred inside me. I could picture a sun-burned bandit, thirsty and worn, laboring across the desert sand with his beleaguered horse. Not only that, I felt some of what that desperate man felt.
“Cut these words, and they would bleed,” Emerson once wrote about Montaigne. Listening to Van Zandt’s lyrics, I felt the same way.
Linked, forged, and burned together in the dry heat, Van Zandt’s words gave me something I didn’t know words could give: Wonder.
Why do certain verses, stanzas, or sentences resonate so deeply and individually within each of us?
Hopefully, we will never know. The mysteries from our inner souls to the outer universe keep this experience we call life an enchanting and baffling one.
Yet I do know this. If there’s any proof that we’re more than biological debris, it’s our ability to feel art.
Certain words strung together in certain ways become our gnarled vines of darkness and beautiful bouquets of light. Like a witch’s brew, words are the magical ingredients stirring within our cauldrons. When mixed just right, these rhythmic beats and expressions smell and taste, whisper and shout, scratch and soothe, mend and break.
When I hear “you wear your skin like iron, your breath’s as hard as kerosene,” I feel my existence.
From this high plane of existence—floating above the pavement of daily life—I feel the barbarian inside whispering, “Go.” Take all that’s stirring inside you, he nudges, and get it on the page!
Whatever your medium—the pen, the paint, the strings, the weights, the waves, the mountains—please go there as often as you can.
John Muir once said, “The mountains are calling and I must go.”
How ever you hear your call of the wild, my barbarian friend, when you hear it, I hope you go.
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