Dido and Townes Van Zandt

At the north end of Eagle Mountain Lake west of Ft. Worth lies a town that’s mostly forgotten, but not exactly dead. Founded about 1848, Dido (pronounced with a long “i”) was at one time a thriving community. The land for a church, school and cemetery was donated by Isaac Van Zandt, a co-writer of the Texas Constitution, one of the founders of Fort Worth, and the man for whom Van Zandt county Texas is named after. His son, Dr. Isaac L. Van Zandt, a well respected doctor built a home in Dido. Named after the mythological queen of Carthage, by the 1880′s it had several stores, a post office, a Methodist church, a school with 36 students and a large cemetery. The town was growing and the future was bright.

Cherubs and flowers in the Dido Cemetery.

In the 1890′s, a railroad being built through the area bypassed Dido and, like hundreds of other small towns who suffered the same misfortune, residents began moving to towns along the railway and Dido soon lost its post office, its school, and most of its citizens. The Methodist church managed to hang on and is now the oldest Methodist church in Tarrant county.

In the late 1970′s, Dido found itself in the news for a short time due to a rumor. The infamous Cullen Davis, at one time one of the richest men in the world, after being acquitted of the murder of his 12-year-old daughter Andrea, the murder of his ex-wife’s lover, Stan Farr, and the attempted murders of his ex-wife Priscilla and Gus “Bubba” Gavrel, Jr, announced he was turning over his life to Jesus and smashed over 1 million dollars worth of jade, ivory, and gold objects because he said they honored false gods. The persistent rumor was that Cullen, with the help of a Dallas evangelist, dumped the smashed remains into Indian Creek from the bridge in Dido. The water was high and the creek empties into Eagle Mountain Lake, but for a few years, treasure hunters combed the creek looking for valuable pieces of these false gods.

A small, dark little bar still serves the few people who live in the area, but Dido is now largely a very quiet, almost forgotten bedroom community between Ft. Worth and Alliance Airport. The Dido cemetery however, attracts visitors as it is the resting place of over 1,000 residents, many of them important pioneers who died during the late 1800′s. The oldest marked grave is the 1879 plot for Amanda Thurmond, the 1-year-old daughter of Dave Thurmond who, along with his wife, first settled the area. It is also the final resting place for 1/2 of the ashes of a noted Texas musician who is little known by the mainstream of America.

John was born on March 7, 1944 in Ft. Worth, the son of Harris Van Zandt and Dorothy Townes. Harris Van Zandt, a direct descendant of the Van Zandt’s who founded Ft. Worth, was wealthy and his wife was just as rich. The law school building at the University of Texas in Austin, Townes Hall, bears her family name. John had a life of privilege as a child, attended a prestigious private school in Minnesota and then the University of Colorado, but instead of going into the family oil business, he chose a life as a wandering singer and song writer.

The Van Zandt family headstone in
Dido cemetery.

John had a number of problems, both psychological and with drugs and alcohol. Once, while sitting on the railing of his 4th floor condo during a party, he announced to those with him that he wanted to know what falling felt like. He then slowly leaned back until he dropped. Amazingly, due evidently to some bushes and ground softened by recent rains, he survived, but his parents submitted him to a mental hospital. The doctors diagnosed him as a schizophrenic-reactionary manic depressive and gave him insulin shock treatments. The treatments erased all of his childhood memories and left him without any attachment to his past.

A creative genius with self-destructive habits, John was eventually cut off from his family’s wealth and for the rest of his life, he didn’t have money to speak of. Even when he did make some, he either gave it away to others who were down on their luck or spent it feeding his demons. Despite these challenges, John, who started going by his middle name, Townes, eventually earned the labels of “poet laureate of Texas,” “premier poet of the time,” “the James Joyce of Texas songwriting,” and “best writer in the country genre.”

At the age of 15, after seeing Elvis on the Edd Sullivan show, Townes purchased a cheap guitar and taught himself to play. He was influenced by diverse performers like Elvis, Sam “Lightning” Hopkins, Woodie Guthrie, Hank Williams, Muddy Waters, Van Cliburn, Mozart, Jefferson Airplane, and the early songs of Bob Dylan.

Here lies 1/2 of Townes Van Zandt.

The songs Townes wrote and the man himself profoundly influenced other more well-known performers like Lyle Lovett, Nanci Griffith, Emmy Lou Harris, Kris Kristofferson, Steve Earle, Don Harris, Willie Nelson, Guy Clark, Alison Krauss and Robert Plant. Townes much preferred to play in small venues like coffee shops and small clubs and perhaps partly because of this, he never achieved wide acclaim, but his songs were hits for many other performers. Perhaps his best known song was a number 1 hit for Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard, Poncho and Lefty - youtube link. Emmy Lou Harris and Don Williams sang his song, If I Needed You which it went to number 3 on the charts – youtube link. Townes took part in the 1981 outlaw country documentary ”Heartworn Highways” youtube link in which he sings the first song he wrote, Waiting Around To Die.

After many battles against his drug addiction, depression, and alcoholism, John Townes Van Zandt suffered a heart attack and passed away on January 1, 1997. He was cremated and his ashes divided with 1/2 going to his last ex-wife and their children and the other half buried in the Van Zandt family plot in Dido Cemetery.

Good-by to all my friends, it's time to go again
Just think about the poetry and the pickin' down the line
I'll miss the system here, the bottom's low and the treble's clear
But it don't pay to think too much on the things you leave behind

Oh I may be gone, But it won't be long
I'll be a bringing back the melodies
And the rhythms that I found

We all got holes to fill & them holes are all that's real
Some fall on you like a storm, sometimes you dig your own
The choice is yours to make, time is yours to take
Some dive into the sea, some toil upon the stone

To Live Is To Fly Both low and high
So shake the dust off of your broken wings
And the sleep out of you eyes
Shake the dust off of your wings
And the tears out of your eyes.

"Waiting Around To Die" by Townes Van Zandt

  

The Final Dance

I have an attraction to cemeteries. Now don't go jumping to conclusions. It's not because I have an unnatural fascination with death or dying or anything else macabre which most "normal" people would find strange or weird. Much to the contrary. I have a fascination with living, especially since I have already visited the other side and made it back (Not Dead & Maybe A Bit Wiser).

Evergreen Cemetery; Paris, TX.

Death is the one thing we all have in common. The final frontier isn't space or the deepest ocean; it's death. To boldly go where everyone has gone before. I've come to the conclusion that graveyards are not really for the dead, but for the living. It's where the ones still living come to commune with their loved ones who have passed. It's where the living come to mourn. It's where the living come to pay their respects to the dead. It's where the living show their love by erecting monuments. Rural graveyards are even places of social events for the living.

When I was young and spent a portion of my summers on my relative's very rural farm in East Texas, I remember "decoration day," a day when the community would come together at the local graveyard wearing gloves and work clothes, carrying hoes and picnic baskets. Weeds would be eliminated, grass scraped off the graves, trash picked up, headstones righted and repaired, fences mended and everyone talked and told amusing "remember when" stories about the lives of the dead. When it came lunch time, everyone brought out their food for a community pot-luck with plenty of fresh vegetables, potato salad, beans, pies and tea. After lunch, the men would sit in groups on the cool grass under shade trees, smoking their cigarettes while the women and girls cleaned and divided up the left-overs and the young boys would toss around a football in the dirt road. Eventually, almost by tradition and no matter how hot it already was, one of the men would say, "It's getting hot. We better finish up" and everyone would go back to hoeing and scraping and cleaning and repairing and telling more stories. By mid-afternoon, everyone would judge the place to be in fine shape and as people left, individuals would stop by a headstone or two or three, they would rest their hand on it and, with head down, say a few whispered words to their loved one who lay below. The connection to the community of the living would be reaffirmed and the connection to the dead would be maintained.

Grave of a child marked by a statue of an angel.

That annual ritual I experienced throughout my youth is most probably the root of my affinity for cemetery tramping. Every cemetery is a story itself and every cemetery tells a story about the place where it is located. And every person buried in that cemetery has a story to tell. At some point in their existence, everyone meant something to someone. There are over 46,000 known cemeteries in Texas alone and no one knows how many more have been lost to history through time, weather, neglect, the building of roads and shopping centers and sub-divisions and simply because the people who knew about one have all passed on themselves and been laid to rest somewhere else. Weeds and brush have reclaimed a lot of the land where our ancestors still lie.



Sleeping child in a sea shell.

And so, I often find myself during my travels being a tombstone tourist. I look for the art and the history and the stories. Sometimes I find huge, ostentatious statutes the rich have erected to themselves; sometimes I find simple headstones with words inscribed which bring tears to my eyes even though I don't know the people. I've seen humor and I've seen things that make no sense at all except to the people who know the story. I've seen crude, hand-made crosses of fence pickets with names and dates hand-painted by someone with little education, but they cared. I've seen many graves marked by a square block of cement, name and dates written with a nail before the cement dried. I've found cemeteries with fascinating stories to them even though no famous person is buried within and I've found famous people buried in little known, discreet, out-of-the-way corners. I've seen, much like the Vietnam Memorial Wall, numerous items like coins, bottles, pictures, candles, white rocks, shells and other personally meaningful objects left on graves and headstones to indicate someone stopped by, someone cared.

Sharing Christmas with the dearly departed.

I believe every cemetery is worth visiting and the people in them are worth remembering. They are our history. It will be us there one of these days.