Dollar Bill Blues—Townes Van Zandt

#365Songs: February 29

There’s not much I can say about Townes Van Zandt that hasn’t already been said by anyone who knows anything about folk-blues singer-songwriters. His talent was immeasurable, his songs otherworldly, his legacy untouchable.

What I can tell you—and which you may have not heard before—is that this is the single best Townes Van Zandt album there is.

For a long time, it was impossible to find. Indie label, no distribution, the usual thing. Now that the world has finally caught up to this tragic genius we let slip through our fingers, it’s now widely available (including on Spotify, where you’ll find “Dollar Bill Blues” as song 61 on the #365Songs series).

What makes it so brilliant?

First and foremost, it’s Townes himself, of course. This was the perfect era to have captured him—old enough to have seasoned his voice with the age and rough edges his songs require, young enough (and sober enough) to give performances of devastating clarity and depth.

It’s also live. Like many artists who didn’t quite fit in, Townes was rarely ever produced properly. Early on, it was overwrought, string-heavy productions designed to Nashville him into commerciality (needless to say, it didn’t work), and later, it was just the conventional trappings of under-budgeted projects. Live was where you got to really hear what Townes could do. Unlike the deservedly lauded Live at the Old Quarter set, where Townes is strictly solo, here he has subtle and sympathetic accompaniment from second guitar and fiddle, with the fiddle in particular—played by Owen Cody—bringing out the beauty and mournfulness of Van Zandt’s songs. As was the case with Tim Buckley’s magisterial Dream Letter recordings, the subtlest treatments create the vastest experience, and Townes on this album sounds as majestic as a folksinger can be.

And then there’s the particular song selection. It’s pretty much perfection. 17 songs, and not a weak link among them. Many of these are quite simply as good as songwriting gets—easily on par with anything from whatever version of Mount Rushmore adorns your songwriting mountain: Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, John Fogerty, you name it. Townes outduels ’em all.

Picking one song from the set is kind of impossible, but I chose “Dollar Bill Blues” because it’s a stunning example of what Townes did so well; something that so many attempted and so few succeeded at—he took country, bluegrass, and folk’s major tonalities and used the mysterious sevenths and flatted thirds of the blues to link it with a Celtic-by-way-of-Appalachia minor modality to create a sound that was both comforting and terrifying.

And that’s just the musical side of things.

Lyrically, the interweave is just as mysterious and potent, as he blends approachably colloquial countryisms with an absolutely violent poetry:

Little darling, she’s a red-haired thing
Lord, she makes my legs to sing
Gonna buy her a diamond ring
Early in the morning

Well, Mother was a golden girl
I slit her throat just to get her pearls
Cast myself into a whirl
Before a bunch of swine

I can’t even read that on the page without getting goosebumps, let alone hear him deliver it live.

Listen, you’re not going to go wrong with any Townes Van Zandt album, and there are many others I can happily recommend, but if you want to get straight to the heart of the matter, dive into Rear View Mirror. But be careful. Listening to Townes will change you. It did me. The moment I first heard him, I felt like I’d been looking for him my whole life.

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