Pancho and Lefty and me?

December 1, 2018 11:01 AM

In the Townes Van Zandt song "Pancho and Lefty," the first verse is in second person, but all of the subsequent verses about Pancho and Lefty are in third person. Who is the first verse addressing?

I've heard this song a million times and could recite the lyrics, but until this morning I never noticed that the "you" comes and goes. I've read what I can find about how the Pancho and Lefty story came to Van Zandt, but the first verse is never addressed.

posted by mudpuppie to Media & Arts (8 answers total)

Just my personal interpretation, but I've always taken "you" to mean literally you, the listener. It makes me feel like a romantic vagabond outlaw, one of the characters in the story. Somewhat confusingly, I simultaneously interpret "you" as referring specifically to Pancho. This gives the song a bit of a dreamlike quality. When I listen to it I both am and am not Pancho. It's all very ambiguous; that's one of the things I like about the song.

This is just how I hear it of course, but I feel like when it comes to songs one's personal interpretation is as valid as anything else.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 11:15 AM on December 1, 2018 [4 favorites]

He specified in a few interviews that this was one of the songs that just came to him, so there may not be a linear or significant connection between the first verse and the rest of the song. It's been noted that the lyrics don't actually explicitly ever tie the stories of Pancho and Lefty together either, though most interpretations assume that Lefty betrayed Pancho.

I'd always interpreted it as two down on their luck people telling tales, one of whom may or may not be Lefty - the story of Pancho and Lefty being one of the dreams.
posted by Candleman at 11:29 AM on December 1, 2018

Because of the living on the road line, I always heard it as being about the life of a singer on tour (so basically Townes himself), and Pancho and Lefty was a song the singer sang, but thinking about it, that may not work. It seems like the singer may be talking to somebody who is living the life of an outlaw and sharing the tale of Pancho and Lefty as a kind of cautionary tale.
posted by willnot at 12:14 PM on December 1, 2018 [2 favorites]

Sorry if this comment is too chatfiltery, but FWIW I always thought of Lefty as being a Federale or a Ranger who ended up shooting Pancho and was then consumed by remorse afterward. "He only did what he had to do," after all. It's interesting, the different things people hear in these songs.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 12:18 PM on December 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

I had always assumed that the first verse is addressed to Lefty, and the remaining verses tell the story of how he got to be this way.
posted by yarntheory at 3:12 PM on December 1, 2018

I've always read the first verse as the singer/performer/person on the road talking to himself, and then shifting the rest of the song to a story about someone else in a similar situation of transience, precarity, and personal betrayal; confession by projection, I guess, because a man with skin like iron and breath like kerosene would never be as candid about his own fears.
posted by MonkeyToes at 3:12 PM on December 1, 2018 [3 favorites]

I always took it that in the first verse the singer was addressing his thoughts to the man with "skin like iron and breath as hard as kerosene," either Pancho (in his grave) or Lefty (who is growing old in a cheap hotel in Cleveland, broken by his past).

The rest of the song is telling the rest of us how the two men ended up that way, in both a confession of Lefty's guilt and a plea for us to forgive him.
posted by TrishaU at 5:34 PM on December 2, 2018

I've always thought 'you' is Lefty, who sold out Pancho to the Federales ('did what he had to do'/the dust ending up in Lefty's mouth) and now, an old man, tries to defend his actions.
posted by orrnyereg at 9:27 AM on December 3, 2018