On this day in 1997, singer/songwriter Townes Van Zandt died in his Smyrna, Tennessee home at the age of 52. Van Zandt was among a group of elite Texas troubadours that included Guy Clark, Jerry Jeff ...

Townes Van Zandt lived the life of both an 18th-century byronic hero and a 19th-century cowboy. He was tragically brilliant, broken, and lost too soon. However, everything tragic about Van Zandt’s ...

Townes Van Zandt's name conjures tales of drug and alcohol abuse, gambling, rambling and mental illness. That mythic life sometimes overshadows his music, which was often as perfect as his life was ...

Early in Be Here to Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt, Margaret Brown‘s seminal 2004 documentary on the Texas songwriter, Van Zandt’s first wife, Fran Petters, recalls a doctor’s note he received ...

If you’re not familiar with Townes Van Zandt, let me catch you up. Often considered the best singer-songwriter to come out of Texas, Van Zandt’s material has been covered by the veritable royalty of ...

Welcome to the Texas Canon, a series that dives into the movies, TV shows, books, albums and more that represent us and reach far beyond the Lone Star State's borders. Today, we look at Townes Van ...

Maybe you know Townes Van Zandt as the drunken cult hero. Or maybe you know him as the broken folk singer that sealed his mouth shut huffing airplane glue, the country outlaw, the reckless junky, the ...

On Friday, Nov. 15, multimedia artist and musician Birdthrower–the artistic moniker of Robert O. Leaver–teamed up with Ben Harper for a collaborative cover of Townes Van Zandt’s classic “If I Needed ...

Evan Dando, the only permanent member of fuzz-pop institution the Lemonheads, was one of the great lovable wastrels of the '90s alt-rock boom. He's had a bumpy ride over the decades. The last time we ...

John Townes Van Zandt (March 7, 1944 – January 1, 1997) was an American singer-songwriter. He wrote numerous songs, such as "Pancho and Lefty", "For the Sake of the ...

Senior staff writer Alaina Babb argues that folk music is far from dead, continuing to shape political discourse and movements across generations ...