About The Song
Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson recorded the first of their two duet albums in the space of five days. Each day, they started in the late afternoon and worked in Nelson’s Pedernales Studio until 2:00 or 3:00 AM. The sessions are perhaps best known for Merle’s lack of interest in “Always On My Mind,” but the songs they did record proved fruitful in their own right.
During the sessions, Nelson’s daughter Lana brought a copy of Emmylou Harris’ “Luxury Liner” album to the studio around midnight. She played Townes Van Zandt’s “Pancho And Lefty” and Willie and Merle were instantly enamored with the song. They recorded it that night and their energetic version emerged as the centerpiece and title track for their own project.
There were some difficulties encountered with the recording of “Pancho And Lefty,” however. The guys were having trouble with the song’s instrumental bridge. Both Nelson and session player Grady Martin took a shot at it, but the part was so unusual that neither man could get the feel of it. Producer Chips Moman knew more about what he wanted than either of them, so Chips put in the bridge, stacking three guitar parts on top of each other! Oh, the magic of overdubbing!
On “Pancho And Lefty,” Willie and Merle actually sang together on only the final line and Haggard sang the last verse, which he learned at 4:00 AM from a track Nelson had already laid down. Merle picks up the story: “I was completely bushed and had fallen asleep for about an hour. I woke up, but couldn’t quite get my bearings. Willie had this song and it seemed like it was a half a mile long. It had more words than any song I’d ever seen in my life. I said, ‘Great. I’ll try to learn my part in the morning,’ and he said, ‘No, let’s do it now.’ I remember doing it and thinking, ‘Well, I’ll have to do this over when I wake up’ but I never did do it over.”
After delaying the album’s release for about a year, Epic selected “Reasons To Quit” as the first single and it went to #6. “Pancho And Lefty” followed in the early summer of 1983 and had soared all the way to #1 by July 23rd on Billboard’s country singles chart. The first shipment of the “Pancho And Lefty” album is now a collector’s item. Through a printing mistake, the “a” in “Pancho” came out as an “o.”
Video
Lyrics
Living on the road my friend
Was gonna keep you free and clean
And now you wear your skin like iron
And your breath as hard as kerosene
Weren’t your mama’s only boy
But her favorite one it seems
She began to cry when you said goodbye
And sank into your dreams
Pancho was a bandit boy
His horse was fast as polished steel
He wore his gun outside his pants
For all the honest world to feel
Pancho met his match you know
On the deserts down in Mexico
Nobody heard his dying words
Ah but that’s the way it goes
All the Federales say
They could have had him any day
They only let him slip away
Out of kindness, I suppose
Lefty, he can’t sing the blues
All night long like he used to
The dust that Pancho bit down south
Ended up in Lefty’s mouth
The day they laid poor Pancho low
Lefty split for Ohio
Where he got the bread to go
There ain’t nobody knows
All the Federales say
They could have had him any day
We only let him slip away
Out of kindness, I suppose
The poets tell how Pancho fell
And Lefty’s living in cheap hotels
The desert’s quiet, Cleveland’s cold
And so the story ends we’re told
Pancho needs your prayers it’s true
But save a few for Lefty too
He only did what he had to do
And now he’s growing old
All the Federales say
We could have had him any day
We only let him go so long
Out of kindness, I suppose
A few gray Federales say
We could have had him any day
We only let him go so long
Out of kindness, I suppose
