Dec 01, 2005 By Chris Tinkham

In a scene during Margaret Brown’s ghostly, touching documentary Be Here to Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt, former Townes manager John Lomax III talks about a small classified ad in a 1976 issue of Rolling Stone that gave an address for the singer-songwriter’s fan club. Although Townes never enjoyed strong album sales, Lomax recalls how several hundred responses to the ad arrived within a month, many of them containing emotionally wrought accounts from fans who had been healed by Townes’ music—some were saved from suicide, others were comforted by his songs after the loss of a loved one. “I just thought, my Lord, the whole world needs to hear this,” Lomax says of Townes’ music. More