(Repost from Patreon late last year…My slow and unsteady progress to meld these collections of my writings continues)
Here is another picture of Townes during his Tennessee country shack days, or perhaps daze would be more accurate, if a tired pun even by his standards.
Date is circa 1978, photo taken certainly by my dad. Townes had the run of two buildings on that spread -- a main house and a dilapidated barn with loft, which is where this photo was taken. It was intended as his writing retreat and seemed purpose built for the task, as you can see here, with the golden sun splashing down right there on his crude desk.
But if you look closer, you'll notice two things -- there is no paper on that desk, and Townes is holding not a pen but a Phillips-head screwdriver...It was a joke between him and my dad, but looking back, it's fairly well shrouded in darkness, which again, was characteristic of Townes, especially if the subject was himself.
By this time, his once-abundant font of musical creativity had slowed to a trickle. It was around this time that his studio recordings practically came to a halt. Flying Shoes was the main product of this interlude in his life, and the title track (a mortally wounded young Confederate soldier's death song as he lay dying on the battlefield) was inspired by the blood-soaked grounds on which this rural compound was sited. (It was near Franklin, TN; no battle in that war was more vicious minute by minute; with John Bell Hood's rebels cut down by the Federals in mighty and convulsive waves of carnage.)
But if you look back at his discography, Flying Shoes was his seventh studio record up to this point, and all of the songs for which he is most widely remembered and beloved -- "For the Sake of the Song," "To Live's to Fly," "Rex's Blues," "If I Needed You," and "Pancho and Lefty" -- were all in the Rear View Mirror, to recycle the title of a 1993 release of a 1978 series of live recordings.
After Flying Shoes, there would be only two more studio albums of material recorded contemporaneously, meaning sessions recorded then and there, with Townes alive and present in the studio. The first was the previously alluded-to At My Window from 1987, and the last was his unutterably grim 1994 swansong No Deeper Blue, which to me has sounded more and more like one death song after another.
Yes, it contains "Hey Willy Boy" and "Katie Belle Blue," two songs he cast as lullabies to his two youngest children, but to me they sound more like forever goodbyes than sleep-tight nighty-night material. Then there is "A Song For," which upon his debut of it at home, then-wife Jeaneane told him it was as pretty a song as he ever wrote. "Song my ass," he said. "It's a suicide note." In "The Hole," a screeching hag turns a young prince into a toad -- I see the hag as the depression that fed so copiously both on itself and his constant firing of it with his addictions. And of course, "Marie," the bleakest of all love songs in recorded history, in which a baby conceived by a homeless couple dies in utero, or "safe inside" his dead mother.
Yeah and that album came seven years after At My Window, which came almost ten years after Flying Shoes, and here we see Townes around that time, smiling sardonically at a sun-splashed desk bare of paper and holding not a pen but a screwdriver. And not the kind that hand was far more accustomed to holding at that time.
Yes, you really knew him and those smoky mountains, too. Oh the irony that before the blood soaked that sad earth, many of Texas' own heroes were but scaliwags on the run from the laws of Tennessee. Generations then and now who will not tell us, not now, not ever; who will not tell us who we are. Born, live, die and then repeat.