Townes Van Zandt – In the Beginning

No one would ever mistake Townes Van Zandt for Red Foley, not even before the ravages of drugs and booze rendered his vocals brittle and unsure; near the end, his voice was the sound of dissipation itself. And it’d be a stretch to say that Townes is crooning on this collection of newly unearthed demos from 1966. Yet the suppleness of his phrasing — the way he cradles the final word of a line in a descending series of notes, as well as the deep, round tones with which he imbues them — suggests that the early fuss about him had as much to do with the singer as the song.

The songs, of course, are here, including early versions of what would become “All Your Young Servants” and “Waitin’ Around To Die”. And not just the imagistic, alternately dark and tender ballads inspired by Bob Dylan and Hank Williams, but also the declamatory blues drones that Townes gleaned from Lightnin’ Hopkins and Bo Diddley. “I got a black widow spider for a Mama, Lord/I got a diamondback rattler for a Pa,” he warns in “Black Widow Blues”, a Rabelaisian boast after the fashion of “Who Do You Love”.

We tend to picture Townes in troubadour mode, which is how he performed his songs live and how he often committed them to tape. Yet a handful of these ten demos, all of them produced by Jack Clement, find him in the company of a rhythm section that’s as sympathetic as any that backed him on record. Producers at times saddled Townes with stiff, cluttered arrangements that got in the way of the songs; the playing here, however, is loose, unobtrusive, and in the pocket.

Indeed, this unattributed combo, which likely featured Charlie McCoy on harmonica, sounds a lot like those that worked mid-’60s sessions for the likes of Tim Hardin, Fred Neil and Tom Rush. All three of those men were folksingers who, like Townes, listened to jazz and/or blues and weren’t averse to doing something akin to crooning every now and then.