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delivered the news that the family would be moving yet again, this time to Barrington, Illinois, outside of Chicago. This was not a move that anyone in the family wanted to make; nevertheless, in the middle of the 1958−59 school year, Townes started at yet another new school. Donna remained at college in Boulder, now a sophomore, relieved to be staying put.
    Dorothy, Donna, Townes, and Bill again vacationed in Boulder that summer, joined later by Harris, who was beginning to feel the mounting pressures of his position at the oil company and seemed to really need the vacation.
    There is a story that one day Townes came home from school to find his father very upset, weeping, because he had had to lay off thousands of company employees that day.9 “My dad 24
    A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt had that kind of a job, particularly in Illinois,” Bill remembers.
    “When there was dirty work to be done, my dad had to go and negotiate and do things like that. That’s the kind of thing that gave dad ulcers. He really loved people, but he had jobs where he had to confront people and do some things that weren’t pleasant.”10 This pressure and frustration was to have a predict-ably negative effect on Harris Van Zandt’s health. It also brought a dark element into the life of the family that did not escape the darkly inclined teenaged Townes.
    Even with all the upheaval, and even with his growing reputation as something of a rebel, Townes continued to do well in school, had a decent social life, and continued to read widely.
    He also continued to seek out records to feed his growing interest in music, and he continued to practice the guitar. By the late fifties, the guitar was becoming a very popular instrument with young people all over the country. By 1958, more guitars were being sold in the United States than ever before; the Kingston Trio sold four million copies of their recording of the old folk standard “Tom Dooley”; and the new folk boom—the
    “folk scare,” as some remember it—reached its first early peak. A young University of Minnesota student whose family name was Zimmerman began performing at a coffeehouse in Minneapolis that year, billing himself for the first time as Bob Dylan. The time was ripe, and as a musician, Townes was in a crucial formative phase, internalizing the music, seeking guidance wherever he could find it, and practicing incessantly. That year one of his friends dared Townes to take the stage at an upcoming school talent show and show them all what he could do. With a swag-ger and a swallow, Townes accepted the dare.
    Dorothy Van Zandt drove her son from the Van Zandt house on Biltmore Drive to the school that evening and waited outside in the car while he went inside with his guitar. When his turn came, Townes played three songs, a natural if somewhat eclectic mix of Elvis Presley, Ricky Nelson, and Hank Williams. The girls screamed when he sang, “because it was in vogue at the time,”
    Where I Lead Me
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    Townes figured. “I went through the crowd, everybody patted me on the back, and I got instant acclaim in my junior high,”
    he said. “I fell in with all the best guys and girls immediately.”11
    And he had his first taste of what he’d sensed when he first saw Elvis on television: the thrill of stardom. Townes’ mother later said that she had secretly observed the performance from outside, looking through the ground-level window of the basement cafeteria on her hands and knees. This was Townes Van Zandt’s first public performance.12
    Townes coasted through his classes at Barrington High School, not particularly inspired. He was getting B’s and C’s, with a few A’s in English, social studies, and physical education, but he was still not well settled—understandably—and, according to his siblings, he was desperately craving stability.13 “Townes was afraid we were going to move again,” Bill recalls, “and he wanted to go to the same school