Townes Van Zandt
Our Mother the Mountain
(Fat Possum, 1969)

The warm champagne glow of holiday reverie will soon be snuffed out by a sharp and brittle descent into the dead of winter where there’s nothing left to look forward to but the thaw still three months away. Huddled in cramped drafty flats stacked high and lonesome, with the hour growing late and the bottle getting low, sweet maudlin sentimentality slowly succumbs to the icy grasp of creeping bleakness around its neck. But the last gasp of fleeting memories is interrupted by the sound of boot heels in the hallway, and a sudden series of thumps at the front door. A bleary eye to the peephole spies a tall rangy fellow with a face like saddle leather framing a smile almost 88 keys wide. It’s Townes Van Zandt with a fresh jug of bourbon (minus a couple nips) and a pocketful of songs for precisely such an occasion.

The son of a Texas oil magnate, Townes Van Zandt grew accustomed to a lonely and itinerant lifestyle at an early age as the family roamed throughout the west in search of greater fortunes. Certainly the restlessness and solitude of his upbringing informed much of his music, as well as an adulthood spent splitting time between Texas, Tennessee, and Colorado, among other points. A singing career begun in Houston quickly lead him to Nashville where his songs were first committed to tape in a prolific outpouring between 1968 and 1972.

Our Mother the Mountain was the second LP recorded during this period and an instant classic of folk and country, though proper recognition proved elusive for decades. The first two tracks set the tone for the album: “Be Here to Love Me” is a grinning come-on couched in boozy surrealism opens, followed by “Kathleen”, a brooding lament for a distant love. It’s these two sides of Van Zandt’s personality that are most evident in this collection—the playful wordsmith and the desperate wanderer. Songs like “She Came and She Touched Me” recall the evocative dreaminess of Leonard Cohen and comfort the listener against the cold desolation of “St. John the Gambler” or the brutally driving “Snake Mountain Blues.”

Though the dusty expressiveness of Townes’s warble is prominent, Our Mother the Mountain does suffer occasionally from unnecessary woodwind and string flourishes. It’s possible that producers fancied the songwriter as another Lee Hazelwood, but whereas Hazelwood’s sometimes campy material benefited from broad strokes, Townes was always better suited with minimal adornment. This is music from the prairie and the mountain peak—the kind of wide-angle places the breadth of which could take a lifetime to explain, yet the subtle beauty of his songs bring it into focus—the perfect balm for a wintry, wind-beaten soul.

Many of the same qualities that made Townes such an amazing songwriter also likely contributed to his relative obscurity during his lifetime, a shy and gentle nature making industry shark-tanks like Nashville difficult to navigate. Luckily, the talent in Music City is a lot more observant than the management, and some important friends like Merle, Willie and Emmylou made sure that Van Zandt’s music reached a wider audience, though his name was still familiar to few. Townes lived out his days playing to small but devoted audiences across the country, the years of rambling and drinking gaining on him all the while. Like fellow country legend, Hank Williams, Townes Van Zandt died tragically on New Year’s Day, 1997.

So, when you wake up January 1st under a pile of bottles and strangers, eyeballs throbbing and a mouth full of cobwebs, somehow missing one sock but still wearing both shoes, think of Townes and remember: it could be worse, and at least someone was willing to sing about your pain.

Listen: “Our Mother the Mountain” [at rhapsody.com]

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