Townes Van Zandt - For The Sake Of The Song

Before the cult following, before the covers, before anyone called him the songwriter’s songwriter, there was this: a 1968 debut from a young Texan nobody outside a handful of Houston folk clubs had heard of. For the Sake of the Song introduced Townes Van Zandt to the world, and the writing was already fully formed. He would spend the rest of his life playing several of these songs.

The album was produced in Nashville by Jack Clement, the studio maverick whose credits run from Charley Pride and Chet Atkins to U2. Clement dressed the songs in the sound of the day, and that period production sits around a voice and a pen that needed very little help. “Tecumseh Valley” and “Waitin’ Around to Die” are here in their first recorded versions, alongside the title track, “(Quicksilver Daydreams of) Maria,” “Sad Cinderella” and the dry humor of “Talkin’ Karate Blues.” Fellow songwriter Mickey Newbury, an early champion, wrote the original liner notes.

Van Zandt thought enough of this material to return to it almost immediately, recutting four of these songs for his self-titled album a year later. That makes the debut a fascinating document: the first draft of a songbook that Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard and Emmylou Harris would all eventually draw from, and the starting point for one of the most revered catalogs in American music.

This reissue brings the debut back on a single LP, with all eleven songs across two sides and Newbury’s original liner notes intact. The place where the Townes Van Zandt story begins.