Pancho gets hung. 'They only let him hang around out of kindness I suppose' and the real Pancho Villa was assassinated." Like much of Van Zandt's output, the song went largely unnoticed at the time of its release in 1972. Neither it nor its parent album made any music charts. In 1977, Emmylou Harris covered the song on her critically acclaimed number one album Luxury Liner. Harris says she feels it is "her song", and it was this recording of the song that Willie Nelson first heard. Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard took the song to number one on the country charts in July 1983 on their duet album Pancho & Lefty. In the biopic Be Here To Love Me, Nelson states that when he asked Van Zandt what the song was about Van Zandt replied that he didn't know. Nelson also recalls how his album with Haggard was nearly completed but he felt they didn't have "that blockbuster, you know, that one big song for a good single and a video, and my daughter Lana suggested that we listen to "Pancho and Lefty". I had never heard it and Merle had never heard it." Lana Nelson returned with a copy of the song and Nelson cut it immediately with his band in the middle of the night but had to retrieve a sleeping Haggard, who had retired to his bus hours earlier, to record his vocal part. The vocals were recorded in one take that night. The next day, Haggard wanted to rerecord his part, but Nelson told him the song had already been sent to New York. Haggard later stated that the song was the only he had ever recorded before "he really knew it". Van Zandt appears in the video for the song, playing one of the Mexican federales. "It was real nice they invited me," Van Zandt told Aretha Sills in 1994. "They didn't have to invite me and I made I think $100 dollars a day. I was the captain of the federales. And plus I got to ride a horse. I always like that. It took four and a half days and that video was four and a half minutes long...The money goes by a strange life, or elsewhere. I mean it doesn't come to me. But money's not the question. I would like if I could write a song that would somehow turn