Townes Van Zandt: A Far Cry From Dead

LIKE DOCK BOGGS, Townes Van Zandt was obsessed with death. Both men were shadowed by their own mortality, obsessing over it and collapsing under it time and again in song. Both men ran from death in their early years, but accepted its haunting abide later in life. On Boggs' last recordings (cut during the early '60s folk revival and reissued last year), the man whose piercing delivery once seemed to give voice to death itself had stopped running from it. Which made for a less compelling listen, but a more stable psyche.