The song was “Pancho and Lefty,” the Townes Van Zandt ballad that Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard took to the top of the country chart in 1983. Merle’s verse on that record was sung before dawn by a man who had barely slept in five days. When he came back the next morning to do it properly, he was too late.
Five Days Without Sleep
In 1982, Merle Haggard came to Willie Nelson’s Pedernales studio outside Austin to make a duet album. The two men worked through the nights and, by their own accounts, were fasting on a cayenne pepper and lemon juice cleanse. “I think Willie went 10 days,” Merle told Rolling Stone in 2015. “I went seven.” Willie later called the cleanse “horrible.”
Merle said he had been up for five days and nights working on the record. The album was close to finished, but it still needed one more song.
A Song From an Old Record
The missing song came from Willie’s daughter, Lana. She brought out a copy of Emmylou Harris’s 1977 album Luxury Liner, which included Harris’s cover of “Pancho and Lefty.” Townes Van Zandt had first recorded the song in 1972. According to American Songwriter, neither Willie nor Merle had heard it before.
Willie wanted to record it right away. By then, Merle had already gone to bed on his tour bus.
The Knock on the Bus Door
Merle told the story several times over the years, and the details shift a little. In one telling, he had been asleep about ten minutes. In another, about an hour. He remembered the knock coming around five in the morning; Willie remembered it as around four. Every version agrees on what happened next.
Willie was standing outside with the lyrics written on a paper bag. “I found us a song,” he said. Merle looked at the words and could hardly believe how many there were.
“It had more words than any song I’ve ever seen in my life.” — Merle Haggard
Merle told Willie he had been up for five days and would do his part in the morning. Willie did not want to wait. The band had the song worked out, and he wanted Merle in the studio right then.
The Verse He Wanted to Take Back
So Merle Haggard walked into the studio, by his own description “about half-awake,” and sang the last verse. Then he went back to his bus and slept.
The next morning he returned, rested and ready to sing it again. He asked if he could put his voice back on “Pancho and Lefty.” The answer, as he remembered it: “Hell, it’s on the way to New York.”
“I had no idea what I’d done,” Merle said. He did not even know whether he had been in key.
Willie Nelson never worried about it. After Merle’s death in 2016, Willie wrote about that night in a tribute for Rolling Stone.
“He sang it half in his sleep, but Hag sings pretty good in his sleep.” — Willie Nelson
What That Take Became
“Pancho and Lefty” was released as a single on April 30, 1983. It reached No. 1 on Billboard’s country singles chart dated July 23, 1983, and held the top spot for one week. The album, also titled Pancho & Lefty, climbed to No. 1 on the country albums chart five separate times that year.
A music video followed, with Willie Nelson playing Pancho and Merle Haggard playing Lefty. In 2020, the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
The verse Merle Haggard asked to redo was never recorded again. The version on the record is the one he sang that morning, barely awake, before the sun came up over Texas.