 This video is sponsored by Skillshare. The first thousand of my subscribers to click the link in the description will get 30% off an annual premium membership so you can explore your creativity today. One of the great traditions in country music is the story song. While story songs are by no means confined to that genre, there's something about country songwriting that is uniquely suited to telling raw stories of tragic heroes and flawed humans. From the redheaded stranger to Joe Lean, from long black veil to a boy named Sue, country's history is rich with songs about life, love, and loss. But I think there are few story songs that hit quite like Towns Van Zant's Poncho and Lefty. As with many of the great country songs, Poncho and Lefty is a cowboy tale at its heart. But reading between the lines, we can find other interpretations, and we can see the truly unique genius of Towns Van Zant as he meditates on the nature of justice, friendship, art, and on his own tragic life. Let's take a closer look. Towns Van Zant was an outsider to the tight-knit world of country music. Hailing from Fort Worth, Texas, Van Zant grew up listening to country icons like Hank Williams, but his songwriting was also heavily influenced by the blues of Lightning Hopkins and the folk of Bob Dylan. And like the traveling singers who inspired him, Van Zant spent much of his life on the road. For the early part of his career, Van Zant's evenings consisted of playing shows in dive bars and sleeping off alcohol in cheap motels. It was these experiences that provided the inspiration for Poncho and Lefty. Van Zant wrote the song while on the road, staying in a Dallas hotel room. In fact, the first verse of the song seems less a piece of storytelling and more a letter from Van Zant to himself. Living on the road, my friend, was going to keep you free and clean. Now you wear your skin like iron, your breath says hard as kerosene. This is as much a portrait of Towns Van Zant as it is an image of a grizzled outlaw cowboy. Van Zant struggled with addiction and substance abuse for almost his entire life. His particular substances of choice were alcohol and heroin. In the opening stanza of the song, he contrasts the ideals of touring life with the brash reality. The character he's addressing has become hardened from a grueling life on the road. The second half of this verse also echoes Van Zant's life. You weren't your mama's only boy, but her favorite one at scenes. She began to cry when you said goodbye and sank into your dreams. Van Zant actually grew up well off and excelled in school as a young man. However, when he began to attend university, his demons emerged. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and his parents admitted him to a mental hospital where he was treated with insulin shock therapy. This complicated history is painted plain as day into the first verse of Poncho and Lefty. But before the listener can sit with it for too long, Van Zant introduces another side of the story. The lonely, harsh road life of the touring musician is an echo of the lives lived by traveling cowboys and vagabonds in generations past. We see that when Van Zant throws us into the story and introduces the first of our titular characters. Poncho was a bandit, boys. His horse was fast as polished steel. War is gone outside his pants for all the honest world to feel. Poncho seems every bit the archetypal outlaw with just a little glimpse and a few careful words. Van Zant conjures every image of the cowboy anti-hero that has become a permanent fixture in North American culture, and from Billy the Kid to Butch and Sundance, all the great outlaw stories end the same, with capture or death. Poncho met his match, you know, in the deserts down in Mexico. Nobody heard his dying words, that's the way it goes. Often people will point out the similarities between Van Zant's Poncho and the Mexican revolutionary Poncho Villa, but Van Zant said that wasn't his intention when writing the song. Poncho's death is told with grim irony in the chorus and a double meaning layered on top. In addition to talking about Poncho's ultimate fate of hanging, the narrator explores the boasting of the Federales. As they would have you believe, Poncho only gained his infamy because they were willing to let him go. Following the chorus we get a verse that discusses Poncho's presumed companion, and Lefty he can't sing the blues all night long like he used to. The dust that Poncho bit down south ended up in Lefty's mouth. We're once again underlining the parallels between outlaws and singers. Lefty himself occupied both worlds. But it seems that after Poncho's death, Lefty no longer followed either path. The dust that Poncho bit ending up in Lefty's mouth is a beautiful metaphor to show how Poncho's death ended up sealing Lefty's fate as well. One of the most popular interpretations of this song is that Lefty betrayed Poncho and sold him out to the Federales. This is supported by the next stanza, where Lefty flees to Ohio, far north of the Mexican border. The day they laid poor Poncho low, Lefty split for Ohio. And where he got the bread to go, ain't nobody knows. If the story ended there, it would already be a beautiful tale of sacrifice and betrayal, worthy of all the praise that it gets. In the third verse, Van Zandt even says that for most, that's where the story would end. The poets tell how Poncho fell, Lefty's living in a cheap hotel, the desert's quiet and Cleveland's cold, so the story ends were told. The poets will glorify Poncho's tragic death and build him into a folk hero. But of course, they don't actually know how Poncho died. In the first verse, Van Zandt explicitly said, nobody heard his dying words. Still, the legend of Poncho will live on, an outlaw who lived fast and died young, burning out in a blaze of glory. That's the story of one of Van Zandt's heroes. Hank Williams died because of his alcohol and drug abuse at just 29 years old. There's something about these types of stories that attract us as people and as storytellers. But in the second half of the verse, Van Zandt reminds us that this isn't just the story of Poncho. Poncho needs your prayers, it's true, but save a few for Lefty too. He just did what he had to do, now he's grown old. Rather than paint Lefty as a villain for selling out his friend, Van Zandt empathizes with Lefty's plight. The harsh reality is that, when you're an outlaw, you're a pariah to society. While the poets and even the federales will tell myths of Poncho through glassy eyes after his death, few would have felt that way when he still walked the earth. As a narrator, Van Zandt doesn't place blame on Lefty. Instead, he lets Lefty live on, haunted by his own guilt. Indeed, this guilt is probably why Lefty doesn't sing the blues all night long like he used to. He's lost his creative spark, his raw-to-viv. There's a clear stated tragedy in Poncho's death, and he'll be remembered forever because of it. But Lefty's actions are just as tragic. He was forced by circumstance to betray his friend and ended up having to live with that guilt. If Poncho's fate has a musical analog, Lefty's does too. While most musicians don't tend to sell their friends out to the authorities, they'll often sell their art out to the industry. Throughout his life, Van Zandt bucked commerciality, and instead tried to live for his art rather than buy it. But I think, in this song, Van Zandt sees some of himself in Poncho, and some in Lefty. Van Zandt always thought that his hard lifestyle and the demons he fled were going to leave him dead at a young age. Poncho and Lefty was even released on an album with the morbid name The Late Great Towns Van Zandt. And in the end, his lifestyle caught up to him when his heart gave out at the age of 52. In the last chorus of Poncho and Lefty, Towns Van Zandt seems to be jumping forward in time. Only a few gray federales remain, but they still tell of their old glory days catching the band at Poncho. A few gray federales say they could have had him any day. They only let him go so wrong out of kindness, I suppose. The tale of Poncho has lived on, but the federales telling of it begs a question. If they truly could have caught Poncho any day, why didn't they? Why did they let Poncho continue his life of crime until he was condemned to death? And why did Lefty have to betray his friend and curse himself to an empty life, growing old alone with his guilt? Poncho and Lefty is one of the great story songs in music history, and it's so much more than that too. It's a reflection of the demons that Towns Van Zandt fought his entire life, and a piece of poetic philosophy that will live on long past his death. This video was made possible thanks to the fine folks at Skillshare. If you've watched my videos, you probably already know the deal with Skillshare. It's an online learning community with thousands of inspiring classes for creators of all kinds. And something I think is awesome is that their catalog is constantly expanding. Case in point, there's a new class by the inimitable Marcus Brownlee. For my money, Marcus Brownlee is one of the single best YouTubers in the game, and in this new class he teaches you how to plan, shoot, and edit a video, and then how to share that video and grow your channel. It's a really remarkable class by someone who is truly at the top of their craft. And he's not the only great YouTuber on Skillshare. 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