Songs For The 38th State: "Colorado Girl" by Townes Van Zandt

In Songs For The 38th State, The A.V. Club investigates a song that loves, hates, or otherwise immortalizes our great state of Colorado. This time around: "Colorado Girl" by Townes Van Zandt.

The song: "Colorado Girl" is on Van Zandt's 1969 album, Townes Van Zandt, made while the renowned country singer-songwriter was living and playing in Austin with fellow musical outlaws Guy Clark and Jerry Jeff Walker. Townes talks about wanting to return to Colorado to find a girl and lose his "lonesome Texas blues."

The history: If this "Colorado Girl" really exists, it's a good bet that Van Zandt met her either as a youngster when he moved to Boulder with his parents in 1958, or as a freshman attending the University Of Colorado in 1962—and by attending, we assume that really means drinking scary amounts of booze and climbing rocks in Boulder Canyon in the middle of the night. During his brief college time in Colorado, according to A Deeper Blue: The Life And Times Of Townes Van Zandt By Robert Earl Hardy, Townes worked as a ticket taker at Tulagi's On The Hill, even playing on its baseball team—which we're guessing just involved a lot of drunk base-running. At a party on the Hill at the Varsity Manor Apartments one evening in Boulder, Van Zandt jumped off the fourth story balcony to see what it felt like; according to his account of the story, he was fine, and "hadn't [even] spilled any wine" from the bottle in his hand during the fall. By the middle of his sophomore year, Townes was back in Texas, ready to do some missing and writing on the girls he met during his brief residency in our state.