Townes Played Baseball

I’m pretty sure I first learned about Townes Van Zandt watching an episode of Austin City Limits that was a tribute to Townes. Nanci Griffith, Emmylou Harris, Guy Clark, Lyle Lovett, Willie Nelson, Steve Earle, all playing beautiful songs that I had never heard before.

When it originally aired in 1998, I was probably entering my sophomore year of college, only eighteen because with my August birthday I was always younger than others in my grade. I can’t remember if I watched it around then or later on a rerun, but regardless, whenever I watched it, Emmy Lou Harris and her performance of If I Needed You grabbed my heart and squeezed it tight and I was never the same person afterwards.

I definitely watched it either during or after my sophomore year, because it was after I’d had my heart broken after two weeks (another story for another time, but I will say it turned out perfectly well for everyone in the end) and in my sorrow I’d impulsively purchased a guitar so I could write the songs that I had to write to heal my heart.

So of course once I knew the song existed, I went and found the chords and lyrics online and started teaching myself how to play If I Needed You. I also found a copy of Live at the Old Quarter. I believe that song, that album, and the one guitar lesson I got to take with my jazz professor Doc Chamberlain was the best songwriting school I could ever have attended.

(I sometimes wonder if Townes Van Zandt v Bob Dylan is the singer songwriter version of Beatles v Stones or Blur v Oasis (for the record, I’m team Townes, Beatles, and Blur, make of that what you will). To my mind, Townes and Bob seemed to be opposite sides of the songwriting coin—Dylan mainly writing songs with characters and stories, both invented and stolen, and Townes writing songs so personal that you could hear his heartbeat throbbing in each and every one of them.)

Decades later after reading a book about Townes and his life I learned that Townes had lived in Barrington IL for about three years, and when I went looking for evidence I found a Tumblr post with a picture of him and his team:

For some reason, knowing that THE quintessential Texas songwriter had spent even such a brief amount of time living in the same state I’d lived in all my life felt…what? Encouraging? Magical? Like a sign of some kind?

I lived with this trivia for years, telling it to everyone I knew when it was relevant, even emailing a librarian friend of mine at the Barrington Area Library suggesting that they do something with this information (have a baseball game played entirely by local songwriters?) because I just really, really love when places have unique history and celebrate it (which reminds me, I really need to plan a trip to the Mike the Headless Chicken Festival). And always, always, in the back of my mind, I thought, There’s a great song in there, somewhere. But I never managed to write it.

Until this year, right around my birthday, actually. In 2022, Hey Nonny, a nice little listening room in Arlington Heights, IL, launched a songwriting contest, looking for songs that were about and celebrated the northwest suburbs. I thought then, That is the perfect place for this song. But did I write it then? Well, no. (I have a hard time getting my act together sometimes. I blame my executive dysfunction.) (Which is also another story for another time). But this year when the contest got posted again, I told myself I was finally going to write this song. I always take time off around my birthday so there was no excuse: I had the idea, I had a place for the song to go, I had the desire, and I had the time.

And I did it! I wrote the song. I reread his biography and noted more details about this time in Barrington and what he did there. I jotted out some potential lyrics.

Over two days I refined the lyrics, figured out the chords, and then recorded the demo and sent it off into the ether, to see if it would get chosen to form one square in a musical quilt of the northwest suburbs.

To my delight, it was. And I will get to perform it on Tuesday, September 5th, at Hey Nonny, as part of a lineup of other songwriters who found something in the life, land, and history of where they live that they just had to put into song.

I’m so glad this little song and I share a birthday. And I can’t wait for you to hear it.