Please visit the link on this page for a healthy sign of new life in the heart of real country music, Putting the Hurt Back in Country Music.

Have you noticed the return to quality in Country Music and the larger tent of Americana Music over the last ten years?  Could this be an awakening in the broad music-listening public for quality and “verisimilitude.”?  Here we bring you one of the important “root” songs of “outlaw” country.

The Nashville music machine began looking for ways to mainstream (see commercialize) country music to make it more palatable to a broader section of consumers during the early days of Waylon and Willie.  Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, along with the songwriting genius that Townes Van Zandt, had other ideas for the music they cherished.

 Townes Van Zandt wrote numerous songs, such as “Pancho and Lefty,” “For the Sake of the Song,” “Tecumseh Valley,” “Rex’s Blues,” and “To Live Is to Fly“, that are widely considered masterpieces of American songwriting. His musical style is often melancholy and features rich, poetic lyrics. Van Zandt was respected for his guitar-playing and fingerpicking ability during his early years.

In 1983, six years after Emmylou Harris had first popularized it, Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard covered his song “Pancho and Lefty,” reaching number one on the Billboard country music chart. Much of Van Zandt’s life was spent touring various dive bars, often in cheap motel rooms and backwood cabins. For much of the 1970s, he lived in a simple shack without electricity or a telephone.

I first heard this song on a BBC4 Drama series, Edge of Darkness, the original, starring Bob Peck, Joe Don Baker, and the beautiful Joanne Whalley. Edge of Darkness is a British television drama serial produced by BBC Television in association with Lionheart Television International and originally broadcast in six 50 to 55-minute episodes in late 1985.  A mixture of crime drama and political thriller, it revolves around the efforts of widowed policeman Ronald Craven (played by Bob Peck) to unravel the truth behind the murder of his daughter Emma (played by Joanne Whalley). Craven’s investigations soon lead him into a murky world of government and corporate cover-ups, and nuclear espionage, pitting him against dark forces that threaten the future of life on Earth.

Writer Troy Kennedy Martin was greatly influenced by the political climate of the time, dominated by the Thatcher government, and the aura of secrecy surrounding the nuclear industry – and by the implications of the Gaia hypothesis of environmentalist James Lovelock; these combined to his crafting a thriller that mingled real-world concerns with mythic and mystical elements. Kennedy Martin’s original ending was more fantastic than what was eventually used in the finished serial: he had proposed that Craven would turn into a tree, but members of the cast and crew vetoed this.

First broadcast on BBC2, Edge of Darkness was met with such widespread critical acclaim that within days, it had earned a repeat on BBC1. Winner of several prestigious awards, it remains highly regarded, often cited as one of British television drama’s best and most influential pieces.