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" But I shot a man in Reno..."

Here is an interesting read that I copied and pasted from the interwebs about the songwriter of that song. He is not really even sure what it is about:

The song tells the story of a Mexican bandit named Pancho and a more enigmatic character, Lefty. The song tells of Pancho's death and implies that he was betrayed by his associate Lefty who was paid off by the Mexican federales.

Although the lyrics are not exactly reconcilable with the historic details of the life and death of the famous Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, Van Zandt does not rule out the idea. In an interview, he recalled, "I realize that I wrote it, but it's hard to take credit for the writing, because it came from out of the blue. It came through me and it's a real nice song, and I think, I've finally found out what it's about. I've always wondered what it's about. I kinda always knew it wasn't about Pancho Villa, and thensomebody told me that Pancho Villa had a buddy whose name in Spanish meant 'Lefty.' But in the song, my song, Pancho gets hung. 'They only let him hang around out of kindness I suppose' and the real Pancho Villa was assassinated."[4]

In the same interview, Van Zandt recalled, "We got stopped by these two policeman and...they said 'What do you do for a living?', and I said, 'Well, I'm a songwriter', and they both kind of looked around like 'pitiful, pitiful', and so on to that I added, 'I wrote that song Pancho and Lefty. You ever heard that song Pancho and Lefty? I wrote that', and they looked back around and they looked at each other and started grinning, and it turns out that their squad car, you know their partnership, it was two guys, it was an Anglo and a Hispanic, and it turns out, they're called Pancho and Lefty ... so I think maybe that's what it's about, those two guys ... I hope I never see them again."[4]
 
30 years later and this song is still bad***
For whatever reason I didn't like Skid Row back when they were big. Now I have their greatest hits CD in the car. Oh and that's another rant entirely but only two of the new Hyundai's models I have to drive from one lot to another everyday at the port have CD players. The high end Kia Sedona van and the high end Santa Fe have them but none of the other models do. My wife tells me it's the same with new Subarus. What the hell!? And last week I heard on the news that Best Buy is phasing out CDs. I don't want to buy digital music downloads. What's an old Cracker supposed to do?
 
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