A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt by Robert Earl Hardy

The Book in 5 Points

1. A very nice and complete biography of Townes van Zandt. It succeeds in the primary function of a biography in that all of my questions about the subject have been answered. The book is well written and well structured
2. As I’ve gotten older my impression of TVZ has darkened considerably. I used to consider him (when I discovered him 30 years ago) as something akin to a tortured Old Testament prophet who was somehow clued into the unseen full picture of life. 20 years ago I discussed him with my guitar teacher of the time who described him as something like “a parasite who wrote some good songs”. I’m now much closer to that point of view than my original point of view. This book, and having reached the same age as TVZ when he died, largely cement that theory.
3. After reading the book I listened to his albums in order (the ones released during his lifetime) and my esteem dropped a bit more. Many, many of them were dramatically overproduced and hide all of the strengths of TVZ. Some of this songs remain powerful gems that resonate powerfully to this day. His recorded output is low for the length of his musical career.
4. I’d assumed that TVZ had a rough and tramautic childhood in some way to be write such dark and gloomy songs, but no! In fact his childhood seemed pretty awesome. Intact family, loving parents, close friends, upper middle class lifestyle, close extended family, no outside trauma at all – he checked all of the boxes for a happy life. But, I suppose a description of him as “a hedonist, first last and always” was true.
5. He had a huge ability to attract people who would enable his self destruction.

How I Discovered It

Part of my 2025 exploration of American folk music.

Who Should Read It?

Townes van Zandt fans – there is no general interest value to be had

Highlights

“I remember my dad telling stories about how the Depression had absolutely no effect on his family, except all of a sudden their neighbors were as poor as they were.”

Three months later, Townes asked his father if he could have a guitar for Christmas. As Townes later told the story, his father told him he could have a guitar if he learned to play “Fraulein,” a sentimental country hit of the time, as his first song.9 Townes readily agreed. He got the guitar for Christmas, and by New Year’s he had learned “Fraulein,” which he proudly played for his father and which he continued to play for the rest of his life.

Hank Williams and Lightnin’ Hopkins both made their first commercial recordings in 1946; in 1950, Woody Guthrie’s Dustbowl Ballads was rereleased to a growing new audience of young folk music enthusiasts, the same year that Leadbelly’s old chestnut “Goodnight, Irene,” recorded by the Weavers, was the most popular song of the year; in 1952, Harry Smith’s monumental Anthology of American Folk Music was released on the Folkways label and began to seep into the underground consciousness; Hank Williams died at the age of twenty-nine in the back seat of his baby-blue Cadillac on New Year’s Day 1953, and his rise to lasting fame was launched in earnest; and Sam Phillips was just starting to record blues, country, and the beginnings of rock’n’roll music at his little studio in Memphis, and was putting the records out on his fledgling Sun label.

On a “vocational interest” test in 1960, Townes’ highest rating was for “musician (performer),” followed by “real estate salesman.” Just below that was “artist,” and below that, “lawyer.

he didn’t pay any attention to the basic rule of a police state, which is, you obey the little rules, you shine your shoes, look nice, turn out well, hit all your appointments on time, and then you can break the big rules. Well, Townes was a scofflaw at every point. So consequently he was not too highly regarded by those in power.

Then he got into glue sniffing and so forth in his senior year. But always, Townes was a hedonist, first, last, and always…

Townes’ drinking and substance abuse, at first sporadic and experimental at Shattuck, soon became methodical and habitual, and the pattern of mood swings he had exhibited in his later teen years became steadily more pronounced.

This is how Van Zandt told the story of his most infamous youthful stunt to that writer: I lived on the fourth story of this apartment building, and at one point during one of these parties I went out and sat on the edge of the balcony and started leanin’ backwards. I decided I was gonna lean over and just see what it felt like all the way up to where you lost control and you were falling. I realized that to do it I’d have to fall. But I said, “Hell, I’m gonna do it anyway.” So I started leanin’ back really slow and really payin’ attention, and I fell. Fell over backwards and landed four stories down. Flat on my back. I remember the impact and exactly what it felt like and all the people screamin’. I had a bottle of wine and I stood up. Hadn’t spilled any wine. Felt no ill effects whatsoever. Meanwhile, all the people had jammed onto the elevator, an’ when the doors opened I was standin’ there and they knocked me over coming out—an’ it hurt more bein’ knocked over than fallin’ four stories.

Myrick recalls having a lot of parties at the apartment, most of them less crazed than the one that featured Townes going over the balcony. “He didn’t fall; he jumped,” Myrick says of the notorious occasion, “and it was the third floor. We were all blasted. I think it was just alcohol. And he was standing on the balcony, and he had his cowboy boots on, and he said ‘I wonder if I’d break my leg if I jumped.’ We just looked at him like he was nuts. And he did it. He sprained his ankle but he didn’t break anything. And the landing was not soft.”

Bob Myrick confirms that throughout this time, Townes continued to be immersed in his music. He was listening to Hoyt Axton and Dave Van Ronk records intensely, Myrick remembers, and a lot of Delta blues.

But they’d gotten wind that he was trying to drop out of school with the forged letter, and now we’re trying to pull Townes off the rug with glue stuck to his sideburns.… So perhaps that explains why they said, ‘You’re going to the hospital.’

The psychological report concluded with emphasis that Townes had an “obsessive-compulsive schizoid character with strong paranoid trends.” The official diagnosis was “Schizophrenic reaction, Schizo-affective type (Depression).”4 The treatment prescribed was cutting-edge at that time: a regimen of “shock therapies”—both insulin coma therapy and electroshock treatments—to be administered over the course of the next couple of months—nearly forty treatments between early April and early June 1964—during which time Townes was only to leave the confines of the hospital on occasional supervised weekend passes.

Insulin coma therapy, which had been introduced in the mid-1930s to treat schizophrenia, consists of injecting the patient with increasing amounts of insulin each morning in order to lower the blood sugar enough to bring about a coma. The procedure was performed in a special treatment room with specially trained nurses and attendants. “The comas were allowed to continue for about thirty minutes,” according to Dr. Jameson, “then [were] terminated by injecting fifty-percent glucose intravenously, followed by the administration of sugared orange juice and then breakfast. Acute episodes of schizophrenia did end quite satisfactorily with this treatment in most cases.”

“Obviously, the man wasn’t really schizophrenic, because he was able to do as much as he did,” Dr. Jameson says unequivocally. “Now we would call it ‘bipolar with psychotic features.’ Manic-depression—bipolar disorder—is basically a mood disorder, and it sometimes shows some psychotic features. If he was manic, and he probably was when he was psychotic, he couldn’t sleep, and just ordinary sleep deprivation can make a person psychotic.”

Manic-depressive illness is often complicated by the subject’s substance abuse, and Van Zandt clearly was abusing substances, primarily alcohol, prior to his diagnosis and treatment. In fact, it was recognized at the time and is even better understood today that a much greater percentage of individuals with bipolar disorder are diagnosed as alcoholics than in the general population, and Townes unquestionably was an alcoholic.6 It is important to note the relationship between the two distinct diseases. “The alcoholism could have started as his own misguided attempt to treat himself, because it would have made him feel better,” Dr. Jameson says. “Often we see patients for alcoholism and drug abuse where the underlying cause is that they’re manic-depressive. And they have to be treated for that before they can be treated for the other.”

And it seemed that the future was all that Townes was equipped to discuss. “He virtually had no memory of his childhood,” Fran says. She recalls that Townes’ mother, distraught by this unexpected after-effect of his treatment, would go through the family photo albums repeatedly with Townes, telling him stories to reinforce his memories and to help him rebuild them.

Others have speculated that Townes pretended to have lost these long-term memories to inculcate guilt in his father and gain sympathy from his mother.

the marriage was made official that night because of a new military draft law taking effect the next day. In 1963, President Kennedy had changed Selective Service regulations so that married men were placed one step lower in the order of call-up than single men, spawning a rush of so-called “Kennedy husbands.” Now, Lyndon Johnson’s new Executive Order number 11241 stated that “men married on or after August 26, 1965, with no children, are … considered the same as single men in Class 1-A with regard to order of call.…” Townes got in as one of the very last “Kennedy husbands,” and remained eligible for draft call-up only in the fourth order of call, after “all delinquents, volunteers, and single and newly married men [age 19 to 26, oldest first] in Class I-A were selected for induction.” Had the marriage taken place the next day, he would have been considered the same status as single men in Class I-A and would have been near the top of the list of young men headed for Vietnam.

While Bob Dylan’s writing was inspiring folk musicians everywhere, Townes’ inspiration was more direct. “Townes was right there,” Clark stresses, “and while you couldn’t be Townes or write like Townes, you could come from the same place artistically.”

Townes determined that he wanted to join the Army. He went to a recruiter to sign up, Fran recalls, “and one of the things they ask is, ‘Have you ever been in a mental hospital?’ And of course he had been. So he had to get a clearance from the doctors, and they wouldn’t give it to him. That is when they wrote this letter, which said that he was an acute schizophrenic and was only marginally adapting to life.17 I will never forget that sentence, because Townes looked at that and said, ‘I’m crazy.’ I said, ‘No, you’re not. It’s just making you 4-F.’ It was one of those kind of mixed blessings. We didn’t have to worry about his going to war, but at the same time there was some desire to keep him out of trouble,

“Tower Song” is a well-crafted love song, if somewhat pious in its assumptions and outlook. It is much more in the commercial folk tradition than “Waitin’ Around to Die,” yet still reveals a depth of thought unusual for that tradition. It very clearly shows the influence of Bob Dylan’s writing circa Another Side of Bob Dylan, and comparing it with the more blues-oriented “Waitin’ Around to Die” illustrates a dichotomy in Townes’ early songwriting that remained quite solid for some years: it is easy to separate Townes’ Dylan-influenced songs from his blues-influenced songs. The clearest sign that Townes’ songwriting is maturing comes later, when those two lines of descent merge and become something uniquely his own.

According to Newbury, though, the reason was simple: the street-smart New Yorker, Eggers, conned the eager young artist—who happened to have a strong hedonistic streak— with talk of “how we’re going to go out there and set the world on fire.”

Townes told an interviewer years later that when the album came out, “The underground station in Houston would play cuts off it from time to time because my mother would just constantly phone in a request. She would try to disguise her voice. ‘Could you please play that Townes Van Zandt song?’ ‘Yes, Mrs. Van Zandt, we’ll play it as soon as we can get to it.’

We went home and went to bed, and about two o’clock in the morning I woke up and … I had gone into labor. I didn’t want to wake [Townes] up, so I kept thinking, this will go away, this will go away.”

For two or three months after the baby was born, things held together. “Then the pressures came back,” according to Fran. It was at this point that Townes started dealing with the new pressures by turning to new substances. For the first time, he started shooting heroin.

“I would come home and he would have drugs in the house with the baby right there.

The hitchhiker turned out to be Townes Van Zandt, and the album was Van Zandt’s brand new release, Our Mother the Mountain. Ely listened to it, then listened to it some more with his friend Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and they decided that they too wanted to write and perform songs like that.

Later he played shows in Austin with his friend Cado Parrish Studdard and some other on-again, off-again musicians, calling the impromptu group the Delta Mama Boys, in honor of a thenfavorite illicit high, Robitussin DM cough syrup, which they called Delta Mama.

There is a relentless quality to the progression of the verses; nature is invoked but there seems to be a power growing that is outpacing nature, an apocalyptic power, all couched, as Townes prefers, in a language of dreams.

He could get up in a venue … with between a hundred and two hundred people, and he was without equal. If it got a little bigger than that, he’d tend to, in my opinion, kind of lose it.” And as the gigs did get bigger, White says, Townes grew more interested in working with supporting musicians.

Townes was really locked into that college circuit, and that’s where the big money was back then, better than the clubs.”

“Rake” addresses the duality, and the possibility of merging its two aspects, in a more fantastic context, personified here by the classic duality of the sun and the moon. The title character thrives in the night and curses the day, expressing the feeling of many sufferers of manic-depressive illness, except here the darkness is not depression, but life-infused mania, casting the rake into a vampire-like existence, while day “would beat me back down,” rendering him hardly able to stand. The rake’s selfawareness is sharp throughout. In the last verse, however, he gets a surprise when “my laughter turned ‘round, eyes blazing and said/ ‘My friend, we’re holding a wedding.’” Through some transmutation—like medication—the night and the day become bound together, and the sharp joys of the life of the night are turned into pain. “Now the dark air is like fire on my skin/And even the moonlight is blinding.” A more vivid rendering of the manic-depressive state is hard to come by in modern verse.

Van Zandt himself was exhausted after the sessions, and like always after a long stay in New York, he was glad to get back to Texas, where he returned to the bosom of his friends in Houston and took up again an unrestricted courtship of his heroin habit.

Townes realized he had left something at home that he now needed, Leslie Jo volunteered to go back and get it. As was her custom, and as was very common at the time, she set out hitchhiking. She was picked up by a man who took her onto a back road, stabbed her more than twenty times, then dumped her in a ditch. She was bleeding profusely, but still alive, and was able to crawl a considerable distance to a nearby house, where she started screaming for help as best she could. A woman came to the door, saw Leslie Jo dying before her eyes, and immediately went to call for an ambulance and the police. When she returned to the front door, Leslie Jo was dead.

he lived in an area called Pasadena, southeast of Houston, “down on the ship channel,” says Mickey White. “It’s a real industrial area; the petrochemical industry. ‘The air is greener in Pasadena.’

‘Two lonesome dudes on an ugly horse’ is about two guys looking to cop. The ugly horse, of course, is heroin.”

She recalls that J.T. often included an “imaginary father” in his games. “This imaginary father was incredible,” she says. “When J.T. would swing he would sit on the side of the swing and say he was saving room for his father to sit with him.”

Fran arrived at the hospital in the middle of the night, and they took her to Townes. “Immediately, I was scared really badly,” she recalls, “because they’d knocked his teeth out at the hospital. They told me he was DOA, and they knocked his teeth out trying to get the tubes out of him.

Bob Myrick visited Townes and was giving him a serious chewing out about the dangerous situation he was placing himself in. “Townes just looked at me with a real funny smirk and he said, ‘Well, it’s not my drug of choice.’

A seriousness of purpose had been coalescing among so-called “pop” artists and musicians that signaled the end of the innocence of the sixties. Significantly, many of these artists were reaching their thirtieth birthdays.

The subconscious must be writing songs all the time. I’ve heard a lot of songwriters express the same feeling, that that song came from elsewhere. It came through me.”

“I don’t really write my songs,” Dylan said, “I just write them down.”

Much like the folk music scene that had formed around the Lomaxes in Houston in the early sixties—a scene the young Guy Clark had absorbed studiously—a growing community of itinerant Texas musicians soon began to form in Nashville, with the Clarks as their nucleus.

As Earl Willis recollects, the purpose of Townes’ trips to the mountains was to dry out from his heroin habit as well as from alcohol. Willis says, “His way of kicking the habit was to go cold turkey, which he did a number of times. He’d go out in the mountains to clean up his act. He had a half interest in a horse out in Colorado, and he’d go and load that horse up with supplies and ride out into the mountains. He’d come back straight, then turn around and go back to Houston and start all over.”

Townes was pleased to be living a spartan existence in the barely furnished trailer—which they called Goat Hill—with some chickens to look after; the liquor store was around the corner, and the pharmacy sold syringes and codeine cough syrup.

Cindy recalls that the shooting of the film was interfering with their heroin shooting:

But these were like the Rhodes scholars of fan mail: eloquently written letters talking about Townes’ music in great detail; saying how he’d saved their life, by listening to one of his songs.”

Townes ended up getting in an armwrestling match for another pint that they had. And he won. Townes was a great arm wrestler…. He understood the leverage, and he was really good at it. He could go in with guys that were much bigger than him and beat them handily. In fact, it was the only thing he was good at gambling on, arm wrestling.”

They left the gathering and went to You Scream, I Scream, where Gradi figured Townes was likely to be found. She told Jeanene they had imported beer, ice cream, and folk music. “I can’t imagine a worse combination,” Jeanene says. “I was a punk rocker. I was hanging out at the Continental Club … I was a wild thing.

The kids are following behind, and whatever money he had left, he rolls down the window right as the cab is pulling out and says, ‘Here, take this home to your mama,’ and throws all the money out the window.”

By this time, there was a new development that Townes and Jeanene couldn’t ignore: Jeanene was pregnant, and she was determined to have the baby. At some point, Townes revealed to Jeanene that he was still a married man and that he didn’t know where his wife was.

Finally, in August, Townes checked himself into the Starlite Recovery Center Drug and Alcohol Rehabilitation Program—at Kerrville, of all places—where he underwent rehab until early October. Townes recalled later that this was his longest period of sobriety, the three months from August to October, 1982.14 But soon he was drinking again.

The song had come to Nelson through a fortuitous sequence of connections. Peggy Underwood was a good friend of Lana Nelson’s, Willie’s daughter, and Peggy suggested that it would be a great song for Willie to cover. Lana agreed, and played the song for her father during an evening recording session. Willie liked it so much he immediately learned it, then, late that night, woke Haggard up and had him come to the studio to record the song. The recording was done on the first take, and Haggard claimed it was the only song he’d ever recorded before he really knew it.

That same week, the doctors caring for Townes’ mother determined that her cancer was inoperable, and gave her roughly six months to live. Her eldest son married the nearly-nine-months-pregnant Jeanene Lanae Munsell a week later, on March 14, 1983, in a small outdoor ceremony,

Townes called Peggy Underwood, who took him to the Alcoholism and Drug Abuse Treatment Center at Brackenridge Hospital in Austin, where Townes voluntarily checked himself in on July 27. According to hospital records, Townes claimed that he had been in treatment eleven times previously.

Of Townes’ mental status, the Brackenridge doctor’s notes state that “He admits to hearing voices, mostly musical voices. He denies any suicidal ideations. Affect is blunted and mood is sad. Judgment and insight is impaired.” Townes initially expressed some confusion about where he was; his speech was “rambling,” and he walked with a “stumbling gait.” On his second morning in the hospital, he was “more alert,” and he told the doctor that “he will probably be staying for detox and does not want to stay for the program.” Townes requested and signed his own release that same day. He was discharged “AMA [against medical advice]/ Unimproved” on July 30, after only three days in the hospital.

Susanna Clark agrees. “Townes was funny,” she says. “Bob Dylan was a big fan of Townes. Every time Bob Dylan came to town, his people would call the house and say, ‘There’s a backstage pass ready for you at the Dylan concert.’”

Susanna also notes that Townes was inherently “not impressed” with Dylan’s stature, although he admired his writing. As she recalls, “Townes kind of made a joke. He said that when he ran into Bob Dylan on the street, Bob Dylan said, ‘Oh, I have all your records.’ And Townes said, ‘Apparently.’”

Bob observed that Townes joked about his new Nashville home, “saying that he had the perfect place to live; he was right by the airport and there were two liquor stores—he called them ‘LSs’—and a mental hospital all within walking distance.”

Bob Moore remembers Townes stopping in to see him in the midst of the tour. “He just looked worn out,” Moore says. By the time Townes returned to Nashville in July, he was exhausted. And he was drinking again, after nearly a year of sobriety.

First, though, Glass says, Townes “insisted on scouting the street to purchase a walking stick, as his leg was troubling him.” Townes began having attacks of gout around this time, not unusual in heavy drinkers; he was photographed carrying a walking stick in subsequent years. Glass arranged to meet Townes later in the day. “When I came back, he had already drunk the entire contents of the room’s mini bar—every small bottle of whatever. I had neglected to remove it; I was told he was no longer drinking. He blamed the need to do this on the fact that I had turned up in dark sunglasses at the airport and it had freaked him out.’’

Townes also became more and more prone to weeping on stage.

“The truth is the truth,” Gingles says, “and on more than one occasion, in front of me, over at their house, I heard Jeanene tell him, ‘I can’t wait ‘til the day you’re dead, because then you’re gonna be worth more to me than you ever was alive.”

By all accounts, Jeanene demanded that Townes leave the family home in Smyrna and find a place of his own.

Once the doctors realized “that they had a late-stage alcoholic on their hands,” according to Susanna, “they had him in a room that had a glass wall so that the nurses could keep an eye on him at all times. And apparently they were giving him such strong drugs to make the withdrawal seizures not come that he had to be on a respirator.”

The doctor told me that if we ever tried to dry Townes out it would more than likely kill him.”

Townes overdubbed his vocals and did not play guitar at all—an absence that is felt on the final recording more acutely than Donnelly must have imagined during the sessions, even though it was his only option, given Townes’ unsteady condition and declining instrumental skills.

J.T. believes that Townes’ great writing was done before his addictions got the better of him, that “alcoholism didn’t take effect until the last ten years of his life,” adding: “I’ve never seen someone more able to in the worst circumstances, in the worst stage of personal abuse, be able to … convince someone that they were not only not able to help him, but that they had lied to themselves as well, and that their life was a sham and that they should also start drinking heavily.”

“Harold just showed up when it was time to go on the road,” Jim Calvin says. “He would fly into Nashville and stay at Townes’ house for a day or two, make sure the truck was running good, and they’d take off. Or they’d meet up at some airport if they were going to Europe. Harold would be constantly trying to take care of business and keep Townes away from his bottle and stuff, or keep him from getting in too deep before a show, and that kind of business. It was definitely a love–hate thing by the time I met them. They’d test each other, but you could tell they were friends. They would have quit each other in disgust long ago if there wasn’t a whole lot more to it, I think.”

Harold would hide his vodka, and then make him drink Ensure before he could have his vodka, so he’d just guzzle the Ensure so he could get his vodka.”

Jeanene was firm in her determination to keep Townes away from the family when he was drinking.

Some of those involved in the Easley sessions had heard that Townes was in a wheelchair, but seeing his condition when Eggers wheeled him into the studio was a shock for everyone. He was pale and unshaven, gaunt,

An engineer on the sessions remembers Townes and the group working for three days, starting each day around noon, working for two or three hours, then taking a break while Townes had a nap, and returning to continue around six or seven o’clock. Townes and Eggers were at odds the entire time. “I was the mother superior with the stick,” said Eggers.

Early the next day—New Year’s Eve—Steve Shelley phoned Jeanene, who still controlled Townes’ business affairs, and told her they were cancelling the sessions. Townes hadn’t been told of the decision when Jeanene called him at his hotel to tell him, and while they were talking Harold Eggers came in and confirmed what Jeanene had said. She then spoke to Eggers and told him to get Townes back to Nashville and to a doctor, even if he had to drag him kicking and screaming.

He was taken in for x-rays. When the doctor emerged he told Jeanene that Townes had an impacted left femoral neck fracture—a common variety of hip fracture—and that he would need surgery right away. Jeanene was stunned. How could he have a broken hip for nearly two weeks and not know it?

But when she arrived with Will and Katie Belle later in the morning, Townes was suffering delirium tremens, sweating, convulsing, and hallucinating. Jeanene spoke to a doctor, who insisted that Townes be put into alcohol detoxification and rehabilitation, saying it was the only way to save him, but she believed that Townes was too weak for that now. Even though, just the day before, Townes had himself expressed the desire to enter detox, Jeanene had come to believe that detox would kill him. Plus, she said, she had promised Townes that she would take him home. She was insistent. The doctor was equally insistent in his response, advising her against removing a late-stage alcoholic from medical care so soon after a major operation, especially in his extremely fragile, unstable condition.

Telling the hospital staff that she was his wife, Jeanene signed Townes out of the hospital “AMA (Against Medical Advice).”10 They got Townes to the car, where Jeanene lifted the flask and helped Townes take a drink, “which went against everything I had been through with him all those years trying to keep him away from the bottle,” Jeanene later wrote. “It was too late for that and I had to put that dream behind me and just accept what was and love him as he was.”

When Jeanene soon realized that the only medication they had prescribed for Townes at the hospital was antibiotics—no pain medication—she called the doctor. Knowing that Townes had left the hospital against medical advice and that he would drink, the doctor would not prescribe pain medication, which would be dangerous mixed with alcohol;

And this one doctor comes in this room, and boy he was just real upset. He was mad. He said to Jeanene, ‘What the hell were you doing? What were you thinking when you took him out of this hospital?’ And this other doctor just grabbed him and jerked him out of the room. And he says, ‘Unfortunately, Mr. Van Zandt did not survive.’”

Back at home, Katie Belle explained to Royann that “Daddy had a fight with his heart.”

As she recalls, “The doctor came in, and I said, ‘What happened?’ And he said, ‘He never should have left the hospital. It’s as simple as that.’ Think about it. He had all those drugs from the hospital still in him, then she’d given him vodka, then the nurse says to get him Tylenol P.M., and Jeanene told me that he took four of them. And damn, you know, he just laid back. Jeanene said that he had his hand on his chest and was just very peaceful. There wasn’t a peep out of him. He just laid back.”

The autopsy report states that “The patient died of a cardiac arrhythmia. The manner of death is natural.” In fact, “cardiac arrhythmia,” which is a disturbance or irregularity in the heartbeat, cannot reliably be diagnosed post-mortem—it is an effect, not a cause. The term is often used by medical examiners as a catch-all phrase when no cause of death is immediately evident. There was no “heart attack,” as such; the autopsy cites a “normal” heart, with no indication of significant coronary disease.

John Townes Van Zandt signed and executed his Last Will and Testament in October of 1988. No new will was prepared between then and the time of Townes and Jeanene’s divorce in 1994, but a codicil with three alterations was added. The first alteration was to a paragraph wherein J.T. and Will would share the inheritance of any of Townes’ assets in succession of Jeanene—the new version removed J.T. and left only Will in line for inheritance. The second alteration gave more details about the intended distribution of Townes’ song copyrights, specifying an intent that the Songwriters Guild of America administer the copyrights. The final amendment reads, in full: “It is my intention that Lara Fisher receive nothing under this my Last Will and Testament.”

On the other side of the coin, the bickering, ill will, and lawsuits surrounding Van Zandt after his death mark the final and most unfortunate similarity between Townes and his hero, Hank Williams.

It became a standing joke around Austin that the letters “BFI” (which stands for Browning-Ferris Industries), which adorned the front of every trash dumpster in town, actually stood for “Blaze Foley Inside.”

This could have been a seizure from alcohol withdrawal, indicating that Townes could not “sip” enough to get his blood alcohol level high enough.

By all accounts, Lara Fisher was Townes’ fourth child—his second oldest— unacknowledged except through the exclusionary gesture in the final version of his Last Will and Testament.