Thing of the past ...
Rob Carrigan is a third-generation Colorado Native. His grandfather's homestead was near the Hamilton turnoff between Craig and Meeker. He grew up in Dolores. Carrigan can be reached by emailing robcarrigan1@gmail.com.
Van Zandt in 'Heartworn Highways' (1975)
"He was a reckless drunk and a hopeless idealist, but he was also the best Texas songwriter of our time. Just ask Willie Nelson, Lyle Lovett, Nanci Griffith, and countless others who knew him well," wrote Michael Hall. in Texas Monthly, after Van Zandt's death on New Year's Day in 1997.
Rocky Mountain News File PhotoIn 1958, the family moved to Boulder, Colorado. Van Zandt remembered his time in Colorado fondly and often visited it as an adult. He later referred to Colorado in "My Proud Mountains,""Colorado Girl," and "Snowin' on Raton." Townes was a good student and active in team sports. In grade school, he was found to have a high IQ, and his parents began grooming him to become a lawyer or senator. Fearing that his family would move again, he willingly decided to attend the Shattuck School in Faribault, Minnesota. He received a score of 1170 when he took the SAT in January 1962. His family soon moved to Houston, Texas.
"Townes
Van Zandt, an influential songwriter whose dark and tragic country and
folk ballads mirrored his own life, died on Wednesday at his home in
Smyrna, Tex. He was 52," according the New York Times obit on January 3, 1997.
"The cause was apparently a heart attack, said Beverly Paul, a spokeswoman for Sugar Hill, the music label for which he recorded. Mr. Van Zandt broke his hip last week and had just returned home after undergoing surgery, she said.
"Mr. Van Zandt's powerfully written songs and spare, haunting delivery influenced many country, folk and rock performers, including Neil Young, Rosanne Cash, Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, the Cowboy Junkies and the grunge band Mudhoney. Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard topped the country charts in 1983 with a version of Mr. Van Zandt's song ''Pancho and Lefty.'' But Mr. Van Zandt never achieved mainstream success himself, in part because of his proclivity for living out his songs of drinking, gambling, rambling and depression.
''All that I've said/All that I've done/Means nothing to me,'' he sang on his most recent album, ''No Deeper Blue.'' ''I'd as soon be dead/All of this world be forgotten.''
"Mr. Van Zandt was born on March 7, 1944, in Fort Worth, into a wealthy oil family that had been prominent in Texas for four generations. Van Zandt County in West Texas was named for his forebears. He spent his childhood moving around the country with his family, and many of his teen-age years in a mental institution, diagnosed as a manic-depressive with schizophrenic tendencies.
"Influenced by the songs of Hank Williams, the guitar-playing of Lightnin' Hopkins and the lyrics of Bob Dylan, as well as by Elvis Presley's success, he moved to Houston in the early 1960's to try a career as a musician. Eventually he became so poor that he ate dog food and slept on concert stages. He tried to join the Air Force during the Vietnam War but was rejected because of his psychiatric history.
In 1968, Mr. Van Zandt moved to Nashville to record his first album, ''For the Sake of the Song,'' with the producer and songwriter Jack Clement, best known for his work with Johnny Cash. The album mixed humorous barroom songs with the tales of poverty, desperation and bleakness (''Waiting Round to Die,'' ''Tecumseh Valley'') that would make him, along with Guy Clark, a beacon to a generation of songwriters.
"He had since recorded nearly a dozen records and toured virtually nonstop, driven, his friends said, by inner demons that neither he nor they could account for. Sometimes his performances, like his last show in New York City, at the Bottom Line in 1995, movingly mixed minor-key tear-jerkers with a fatalistic sense of humor. Sometimes his shows were meandering, ending with him collapsing onstage.
At the time of his death, Mr. Van Zandt was working on a boxed set of his music. He had assembled a group of well-known musicians including Willie Nelson and Freddy Fender to record new versions of his songs.
Van Zandt was addicted to heroin and alcohol throughout his adult life. At times, he became drunk on stage and forgot the lyrics to his songs. At one point, his heroin habit was so intense that he offered Kevin Eggers the publishing rights to all of the songs on each of his first four albums for $20.At various points, his friends saw him shoot up not just heroin, but also cocaine, vodka, as well as a mixture of rum and Coke. On at least one occasion, he shot up heroin in the presence of his son J.T., who was only eight years old at the time, according to the Dallas Observer in 2002 in "The Way of the Gun – Living up to his famous father is a tall order for J.T. Van Zandt"
"He was a Texas troubadour and Colorado devotee whose introspective, often-pining compositions like “If I Needed You” and “Waiting Round to Die” serve as the archetype for today’s Americana (or alternative-country) music.
"Earle — today a bard of contemporary Americana himself — released a tribute album called “Townes.” On it, Earle covers Van Zandt’s 1969 “Colorado Girl.” Van Zandt briefly attended the University of Colorado at Boulder in the 1960s, and during the 1970s he spent summers in the state, writing such other songs about it as “Snowin’ on Raton,” “Our Mother the Mountain” and “My Proud Mountains.”
“Townes used to say there are two kinds of music — blues and zip-a- dee-doo-dah, and a lot of songs written about Colorado tend to be zip-a-dee-doo-dah,” Earle says. “But Townes’ stuff is not that.”
Like many good Colorado stories, "The Face on the Barroom Floor" paints a beautiful picture of a snap shot in time, and gets told over and over again, until no one is really sure who told it first. All that is remembered then, and remains — is to point out the very best, or a favorite version of such a story.
It is true in the case of Herndon Davis' painting on the floor of Tabor House Bar, near the Central City Opera House. Other versions of the story pop up around the state, and indeed, the whole country.
Davis had been commissioned by the Central City Opera Association to paint a series of paintings for the Central City Opera House; he was also requested to do some work at the Teller House. One afternoon at the bar he became embroiled in a heated argument with Ann Evans, the project director, about the manner in which his work should be executed. The upshot of the fight was that Davis was told to quit, or else he would be fired.
According to one version of the story, the painting was the suggestion of a busboy named Joe Libby; knowing that Davis would soon be fired, he suggested that the artist "give them something to remember him by."
"The Central City Opera House Association hired me to do a series of paintings and sketches of the famous mining town, which they were then rejuvenating as an opera center and tourist attraction. I stayed at the Teller House while working up there, and the whim struck me to paint a face on the floor of the old Teller House barroom. In its mining boom heyday it was just such a floor as the ragged artist used in d’Arcy's famous old poem. But the hotel manager and the bartender would have none of such tomfoolery. They refused me permission to paint the face. Still the idea haunted me, and in my last night in Central City, I persuaded the bellboy Jimmy Libby to give me a hand. After midnight, when the coast was clear, we slipped down there. Jimmy held a candle for me and I painted as fast as I could. Yet it was 3 AM when I finished."
Whatever the inspiration, Davis did not sign his work, and soon the bar's owners chose to capitalize on it. They advertised the painting as that from the poem "The Face on the Barroom Floor" by Hugh Antoine D'Arcy. The actual subject of the painting is Davis' wife, Edna Juanita (Cotter) Davis "Nita." She lived with Herndon at 1323 Kalamath St, in Denver, Co
"The Herndon Davis Collection in our Western History and
Genealogy Department is one of our most prized treasures. Anyone dealing
with major characters and/or notable buildings in Colorado should check
into Davis’s portraits and paintings of notable sites. In some cases
Davis provides the only extant image of certain people and places. In
hundreds of colorful paintings and drawings he adds impressively to our
portrait gallery. The Denver Public Library is pleased to be a
collaborator on this overdue book on one of our most popular and
prolific artists.”
—James X. Kroll, Manager, Western History and Genealogy Department, Denver Public Library
Herndon Davis, an artist and journalist, dedicated his life to depicting the major landmarks and personalities of Colorado in watercolor, oil, and pen and pencil. Best known for the Face on the Barroom Floor, the portrait of an alluring woman on the floor of the Teller House Hotel barroom in Central City, Colorado, Davis was a prolific artist whose murals, sketches, and portraits can be found all over the state, from the Sage Room of the Oxford Hotel on Seventeenth Street to the Denver Press Club poker room. Despite his numerous contributions, his work was never showcased or exhibited in the traditional manner.
In this biography and first-ever collection featuring most of his life’s work, authors Craig Leavitt and Thomas J. Noel provide a detailed look into Davis’s life and career and include a catalog of almost 200 photographs of his work from Colorado and around the country. They also put his work into the broader context of the time through comparison with such contemporary Colorado artists as Muriel Sibell Wolle, Allen Tupper True, Charles Waldo Love, and Juan Menchaca.
Published to coincide with the Denver Public Library’s 2016 exhibition—the only public display of Davis’s work to date—and bringing deserved attention to this overlooked figure, Herndon Davis: Painting Colorado History, 1901-1962 is an important contribution to Colorado’s cultural history.
Among my favorite Davis works of art however, is the Poker Room Mural at the Denver Press Club. When I worked next door, (we shared a rear parking lot between the two buildings at the time) at Colorado Press Association years ago, I tried to make it to the basement any time I was in the nearby building.
"The Denver Press Club at 1330 Glenarm Place still treasures Davis’s work on its basement poker room walls," writes Craig Leavitt and Thomas J. Noel in Herndon Davis: Painting Colorado History, 1901-1962.
"That large mural depicts the 1940s Press Room of the Rocky Mountain News, a place Davis frequented and where he worked. Among the immortals whose heads Davis painted on the outer edges of the mural are longtime favorite Rocky Mountain News columnist Lew Casey (editor of the book Denver Murders) and News photographer Harry Rhoads (the most famous and ribald of the press photographers, whose work is preserved in a biography and in the Western History and Genealogy Department of the Denver Public Library). On that same Denver Press Club mural, look for Gene Fowler, the Denver Post reporter who graduated to the big time and national fame in New York City. Among Fowler’s many books is one of the liveliest accounts in Denver literature, Timberline: A Story of Bonfils and Tammen. More than just a history of the founders of the Denver Post, this is a colorful, if not always factual, history of Colorado. It portrays in print the wild, funny, vividly colorful good old days that much of Herndon Davis’s work captures. Presumably, the Denver Press Club Davis murals are safe. That fortress claims to be the oldest continuous surviving press club in America and is a designated Denver landmark. And its inner sanctum’s most treasured relic is the Herndon Davis mural."