“I Had No Idea What I’d Done”

The dynamic duo of Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard was unstoppable.

When the outlaw icons were together, nothing was off limits, which led to some pretty unbelievable stories and collaborations throughout the years. If you need some examples, you can direct your attention to some of best ones we’ve covered before:

-Running through 52 cases of beer with their teams backstage at a music festival in 1980

-Recording a love song together just because Haggard found it “perverted”

-Haggard barely remembering recording “Pancho & Lefty” with Willie

It’s actually that last one that were going to focus in on a little more with this story. If you read the version of the story that Eric Church has told before, it’s actually a little more descriptive than what Wille and Merle fessed up to in the video below – and mentions that Willie and Merle were “three sheets to the wind” for a majority of the recording process for their collaborative 1983 album Pancho & Lefty.

But coming straight from the horse’s mouth (and the horse is Merle Haggard, just to clear things up), Merle suggested that it was the lack of sleep that had him all mixed up when Willie came knocking on his bus wanting to record “Pancho & Lefty” incredibly early one morning:

“I had been up for about five days, and we’d been doing a cayenne pepper drink and we went on a fast. I had been up for five days and nights working on this album, and the fifth day I went to sleep in my bus. And about five in the morning, (I hear) a BAM! BAM! BAM! on the door and it was Willie.

I went out there and he said, ‘I think I found us a song.’ He had it written on a paper bag, and it was torn open and there were more words than I’ve ever seen in my life. He said, ‘The band has about got it. Let’s go in and cut it.’ So we did it and then I went back to bed.”

Love that.

Sometimes spontaneity is all a project needs to be taken to the next level. It was almost as if recording the song early in the morning, with Merle going back to sleep after the fact, made Haggard’s approach to the song more casual. When you listen to the recording, Merle’s part obviously came out phenomenally, though the country icon either didn’t remember singing it or wanted to try it again when he woke up, as he explained:

“I woke up the next morning and came into Willie’s (studio). Records were being made and I said, ‘Can I put my voice on ‘Pancho & Lefty?’ And they said, ‘Hell, it’s on the way to New York.’ I had no idea what I’d done. I didn’t know whether I was in key or if it made sense or anything.”

Everything about the story is pure art.

Willie went on to say that he had gotten the idea to cover the song from a recording he heard from Emmylou Harris’ 1976 album Luxury Liner. There are some versions of the story that say Nelson heard it in a motel and rushed to Haggard’s bus to get him to record it, but the way Willie explains it in this interview, he seems to have had the idea for the cover in the back of his mind for a while:

“I was in the studio I think in Austin and needed another song and heard it was written by an Austin Songwriter, Townes Van Zandt. Great song.”

Of course, it was originally written and recorded by Townes Van Zandt for his 1972 album The Late Great Townes Van Zandt, and then later by Emmylou Harris in 1976.

And thus, Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard released their version of “Pancho & Lefty,” which has arguably become the most popular rendition of the track to ever exist:

And not only was the song phenomenal, but the music video that Nelson and Haggard cooked up to go along with it was also deserving of praise.

They just don’t make music videos like this anymore, and that really is a shame. Though I guess one reason they don’t anymore is because of cinematic masterpieces that exist like this one. Why try to make a music video for any other song when you aren’t ever going to top this one?