Townes Van Zandt's Fort Worth birthplace

Townes Van Zandt was born on March 7, 1944, in Fort Worth, Texas, into one of the more prominent families in the state. The Van Zandts were not merely comfortable — they were Texas aristocracy in the particular way that the Texas frontier produced aristocracy: through land, law, and the accumulation of civic standing over generations. Van Zandt County in East Texas is named for the family. His grandfather was a Fort Worth judge. His father was a successful businessman in the oil industry. The background was one of ease, stability, and expectation.

None of this shaped Townes Van Zandt in the ways that backgrounds of ease and expectation are supposed to shape a person. He had a breakdown in his late teens or early twenties — the accounts vary, and Van Zandt's own recollections were complicated by the insulin shock therapy he received as part of his treatment, which he believed erased most of his memory of his early life. He later said the treatment left him feeling that he had been born again without a past, and that this vacancy was what drove him to write songs: he was trying to fill the space where his early self had been. Whether or not this is literally true, it is the story he told about himself, and his songs carry its weight.

The Fort Worth connection is most physically present at the Dido Cemetery on the outskirts of the city, where half of his ashes were interred in the Van Zandt family plot — the prominent family reclaiming the prodigal son at the end, in a ghost-town graveyard on the old family land. He was buried with ancestors who had built the county, having spent his adult life choosing to own nothing and live nowhere for long. Fort Worth itself bears no specific marker for the man who was born here; the gravesite outside town is as close as the city comes.