Heartworn Highways

When Heartworn Highways finally received a theatrical release in 1981, it was already wrapped in an underground mythos. James Szalapski’s musical documentary, recorded in the brief span at the end of 1975 and beginning 1976, circulated by VHS like bootleg mixtape, which fit the film’s own mysterious and raw quality.

On its surface, Szalapski’s film is simply a document of a moment in country music, rolling passively through seemingly haphazard scenes with outsider artists emerging in the wake of the new outlaw sound. His camera follows David Allan Coe rumbling down the highway from Dallas to a gig at the Tennessee State Prison; Townes Van Zandt goofing around his Austin homestead; Guy Clark philosophizing as he repairs a guitar; and somewhat random studio sessions from Larry Jon Wilson and Barefoot Jerry. Charlie Daniels anchors the 90 minutes with a blowout show in a small high school gymnasium.

Many of those scenes have become legendary: Van Zandt playing “Waiting Around to Die” as his 79-year-old neighbor Seymour Washington tears up; the cigarette-and-liquor-swaddled Christmas picking party in Guy and Suzanna’s Clark’s house, with a guest list including Rodney Crowell, Steve Young, and baby-faced Steve Earle.

Other scenes feel just as out of place, like Peggy Brooks’ amateur turn at the mic in a small bar, or even Barefoot Jerry’s wild country funk jam of “Two Mile Pike.” That awkwardness is as much a result of filling the narrative void as it is the incongruity of the performances, though. Szalapski seems content to wander through these various scenes with little intent other than to capture these moments, not knowing or caring whether what he’s witnessing is extraordinary or mundane. Indeed, the conflation of the two is almost the artistic point.

The film itself plays as a lyric, scenes of rolling highways and seemingly commonplace moments rendered powerful, even poetic, through the music and the moment. The audience is never quite sure where we are, or who’s performing, or even why we should care. The vibe is simply one of recognition that something is happening here, and Szalapski doesn’t seek to interrogate it or explain it, just to share it.

Viewing the patchwork of performances and candid conversations at a 45-year remove as the film receives reissue via Kino Lorber, it’s tempting to consider it simply as a document of these elder country music statesmen in their salad days. Late legends like Clark, Van Zandt, and Daniels exude a hunger and unpolished, pre-success aura. Coe’s uncomfortableness onstage in front of inmates, telling his own prison stories while garishly dressed in rhinestones, strikes as almost charming against the hardened, ornery persona he would evolve into.

Yet in many ways, Heartworn Highways refuses that historicizing assessment, even resists it. The film would certainly not have become the canonical documentary it has without the subsequent success of its subjects, but their names are never the emphasis here. While the songwriters Szalapski follows are exceptional, there is the sense that he could have just as effectively been following any number of other young artists or communities. The documentary pushes into the moment, which if not timeless, is at least removed from time. The lack of context as the camera rolls is the point.

All that makes Heartworn Highways less about capturing these artists before their break, and really about traditions – upholding them, breaking them, and rebuilding them. It’s about found community and family, coalescing on the outskirts around a common chord. And that’s a story still being constantly formed at every moment, whether the camera is filming or not.

Available now as a virtual cinema release.