Singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt (whose full name was John Townes Van Zandt) was an enigmatic, perhaps singularly talented individual.  He never had a hit song, and most people probably don’t even know his name.  Nevertheless, he was quite influential in the music business and his songs – the best known of which are “Pancho and Lefty” and “If I Needed You” – have been recorded by numerous artists, including Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris, Guy Clark, Joe Ely, Cowboy Junkies, Lyle Lovett and many others.  A documentary film about his life, entitled Be Here To Love Me was released in 2004, and he has been the subject of at least three full length biographies, perhaps the best being A Deeper Blue:  The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt (2008), by Robert Earl Hardy.  I can’t hope to give much insight into his life in this brief post, so let me simply tell you why this is a Colorado Song.

First, of course, the name of the song is “Colorado Girl,” which probably qualifies it for inclusion even though it comes from a quintessential Texas songwriter.

My maternal grandparents settled into Sulphur Springs, Texas, which is between Dallas and Texarkana, in the latter part of the 19th Century.  If you were to travel to the southwest for less than an hour from their house, you would be in Van Zandt County, which is nothing at all like Colorado.  The county was named for Townes’ great-great-grandfather, who had been the official diplomatic representative of the Republic of Texas to the United States, and who had died while he was running for governor.  His great-grandfather was one of the founders of Fort Worth.  His mother’s maiden name was Townes, and she was a direct descendant of John Charles Townes, for whom the main building of the University of Texas at Austin Law School was named.

With that pedigree, he might have spent his life in Texas and become quite influential in matters other than music.  However, his father was an attorney in the oil industry and his business required the family to move frequently.  In 1958, when Townes was 14 years old, they moved to Boulder, Colorado.  He attended school there for a short time, but because of his extremely high IQ he spent his last high school years at the exclusive Shattuck-St. Mary’s School in Fairbault, Minnesota, where the son of Senator and soon to be Vice President Hubert Humphrey was one of his classmates.  After graduating from Shattuck in 1962, he returned to Boulder to attend the University of Colorado. Continue reading →

The natural beauty and the interesting people of Colorado have inspired many wonderful songs through the years.  In this series of posts, we look at some of the best of these. The songs considered to date are:

A Mile High in Denver, by Jimmy Buffett
America the Beautiful
The Ballad of Alferd Packer, by Phil Ochs
Boulder Skies, by Pure Prairie League
Colorado, by Paper Bird
Colorado, by Rick Roberts
Colorado Bluebird Sky, by The String Cheese Incident
Colorado Girl, by Townes Van Zandt
Denver, by Willie Nelson
I-70 Westbound, by the Railbenders (new)
In My Colorado Home, by Sons of the San Joaquin
On the Natural, by Hoyt Axton
Rocky Mountain Breakdown, by Poco
Rocky Mountain High, by John Denver
Where the Columbines Grow

There are also a few Colorado songs that were discussed in posts before this series began, including:

Get Out of Denver, By Bob Seger
Colorado Christmas, by Steve Goodman

The fog on a London morning is not the same as the toxic haze of Beijing, and both are different from the the wide open vistas of Montana’s Big Sky Country.

Songs like Paul Simon’s “Under African Skies” and Hoagy Carmichael’s “Ole Buttermilk Sky” evoke images of particular and distinct locales.

The sky that is seen from any place on Earth is determined and shaped by what is below it.  Its breadth may be framed by mountains or extend across an ocean to the horizon.  The color of the sky and the clouds it holds result from the dust and humidity of the land, and the clouds often form around geographic features like lakes or mountains.

The sky above is familiar to those below who have seen its ways.  They can predict the weather based on the color of the sunrise or sunset, and they can use the stars to guide them home.

In a real sense, any place on this planet is defined by the sky which is above it.  Therefore, it would seem that a song like Pure Prairie League’s “Boulder Skies” should tell us something about the City of Boulder.  But it doesn’t.

“Boulder Skies” is a pleasant song performed by talented musicians, and it is definitely a Colorado song; though I can’t say precisely what it is about – other than a brown-eyed “Colorado Canyon Girl.”  But was she real, or just a pie in the sky dream? Continue reading →

I have just returned from a week in Florida where there seems to be a law that tourists are required to listen to Jimmy Buffett’s “drunken Caribbean rock ‘n’ roll.”  Down there, nobody even thinks about – and perhaps they don’t even know about – Jimmy’s long-time ties to Colorado, which began no later than 1970 when “A Mile High in Denver” was included on his very first album, Down to Earth (1970).¹

Jimmy Buffett was born on Christmas Day, 1946.  He grew up in Alabama and Mississippi, and earned a degree in History from the University of Southern Mississippi in 1969.  However, he really wanted a career in music and soon moved to Nashville where he worked for the regional staff of Billboard magazine and played in local clubs.  He is a talented writer and musician and was quickly discovered and signed to record for Barnaby Records, a label owned by singer Andy Williams.

Sometime before that first record came out, Jimmy vacationed in Colorado.  It being 1970, and Jimmy being Jimmy, the title’s reference to being a “mile high” has been seen as a sly reference to drugs.  It may very well be that, but the song is mostly about a vacation in Colorado.

That first album is stylistically much different than Jimmy’s later work.  Back in 1970, he seemed to be another folksy singer/songwriter offering social commentary with songs like “The Christian?” and “Ellis Dee (He Ain’t Free)” and clever tunes like “Captain America.”  However, that first album also had an excellent song about Jimmy’s grandfather, a old seafaring man, called “The Captain and the Kid” that gave a hint of his future work.

Jimmy did not remain in Colorado.  After he left Nashville, he spent a couple of years busking in New Orleans and Key West, during which time he developed the “Gulf and Western” style that has defined his career and made him rich and famous.

Still, he must have liked Colorado because when he became rich and famous he moved here and bought a house on Snowmass Road outside of Aspen. Continue reading →