Mercenary Song

This is a clip from the extras of Heartworn Highways, the film in which the Townes van Zandt song I posted earlier originally appeared. It is an excellent documentary which I heartily reccomend, many thanks to honky tonk musical font DJ Shamblin' Sexton for the lend.

In it, a tired and emotional, and surprisingly pretty Steve Earle sings a song about mercenaries in the early Twentieth Century. I've always found the historical war song genre strangley irresistable; examples I can think of include "Waltzing Matilda" by the Pogues, "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" by the Band, "Houses on the Hill" by Whiskeytown, and "Immigrant Song" by Led Zeppelin, why not? Please offer your own suggestions for a compilation.

(ps. I am on an iBook, and can't figure out how to do hyperlinks or italics - this may get sorted out eventually.)

Townes Van Zandt

When treated as a young man with electro-shock therapy, Townes Van Zandt lost from his memory the images of his childhood. This collapse of identity, eventually and patchily reconstructed from the stories of others, had to contribute to the bleakness of his songs. That and the depression that brought him into hospital in the first place. The alcoholism too, of course, and the fondness for the smell of glue. Be Here to Love Me (2004) tells the life of Van Zandt, which was sad and too short and apparently largely made up of hilarious anecdotes of self destruction. It was not all grim hopelessness though, he was a committed fan of Happy Days. He also spent his life doing what he loved, and was good at it.

"Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world - and I'll stand
on Bob Dylan's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that" - Steve Earle

It's deeply American music, as is the story. Van Zandt grew up in Texas (where his family has a county named after him) playing the folk music of the South - blues and country. In California, of course, he first met success and lived as a hippy, before drifting between Colorado, Texas and Nashville, and touring the country, apparently following his psychiatrist's advice to "just wander for a while and find himself" ("what is this doctor saying?" his first wife recalls wondering). Old sounding songs of woe and fear and love and death and addiction (and banditry); here's a taster.