Blaze Foley and the Beaver Valley Boys

Foley, born Michael David Fuller in Malvern, Arkansas, in 1949, was working in Austin, Texas, when he made these recordings, his first studio sessions in Texas, at Loma Ranch Studios near Kerrville. Besides Foley on vocals, guitar and bass and Morlix on bass, electric guitars and vocals, the players were Jimmy Don Smith on electric guitar, Tony Braunagel and John Hill on drums and Riley Osbourn on piano and slide guitar. The master tapes, which Foley carried with him to play for people, were stolen from his car in Houston, and for years the only known copy was a cassette Morlix had kept. Around 2005 the studio found a quarter-inch stereo mixdown tape while clearing out, and Morlix, producing with John Hill, restored it and added the few instrumental parts he and Foley had talked about.

The CD of 2006 held seventeen of Foley’s songs, among them the title song, “Cold, Cold World,” and six that had never before appeared on a Foley recording; a vinyl edition of thirteen songs followed in 2013. Foley was shot and killed in Austin on 1 February 1989. Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson had already recorded his “If I Could Only Fly” in 1987, and after his death his songs were taken up by John Prine (“Clay Pigeons”) and Lyle Lovett (“Election Day”), among others; Morlix recorded a whole album of them, Blaze Foley’s 113th Wet Dream (2011).