Townes Van Zandt is recognized as widely respected and admired as one of the greatest country and folk artists of his generation. His songs have been widely covered, including classics such as Pancho and Lefty from The Late Great Townes Van Zandt album (1972).

Townes Van Zandt spent the bulk of his life touring various dive bars, often living in cheap motel rooms, backwoods cabins, and on friends' couches. He is regarded as a better songwriter than as a performer, and he struggled with heroin addiction and alcoholism throughout his adult life.

This is Townes Van Zandt's more minimal version:

He's able to interpret the Rolling Stone's Dead Flowers so that it becomes his song. It was used in the final scene of the Coen Brothers' 1998 film, The Big Lebowski. and it plays over the film's closing credits.

He sings about heartbreak and sadness in some joint somewhere to folks who know about such things. The characteristics of the music are the poetry, the stark melodies, the restless wanderlust, the inherent melancholy and impenetrable darkness.