Blaze Foley

He was born Michael David Fuller on 18 December 1949 in Malvern, Arkansas, and grew up in San Antonio, Texas, where he sang in a family gospel group, the Singing Fuller Family, with his mother, brother and sisters. Early on he was known as “Deputy Dawg”; the name Blaze Foley paid tribute to the country singer Red Foley and the burlesque performer Blaze Starr. In 1975 he was living in an artists’ community outside Whitesburg, Georgia, and from there he took his songs on the road, playing in Atlanta, Chicago and Houston before settling in Austin. He became a close friend of Townes Van Zandt, whose writing greatly influenced him, and his habit of patching his boots and clothes with duct tape earned him the nickname “the Duct Tape Messiah.”

In 1979 Zephyr Records issued his single “If I Could Only Fly,” backed with “Let Me Ride in Your Big Cadillac,” recorded at Pecan Street Studios in Austin with Gurf Morlix. Around the same time he cut an album’s worth of songs with his band, the Beaver Valley Boys, at Loma Ranch Studios near Kerrville, but the master tapes, which he carried around to play for people, were stolen from his car in Houston. An album recorded in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, with Morlix and the Muscle Shoals Horns, was issued by Vital Records as Blaze Foley in 1984, but it was pressed and never distributed after the label’s executive producer was arrested; Foley handed out boxes of copies to friends. His last studio album was a country record for Heartland Records, made with the help of his friends Leland and David Waddell; he was killed before it was finished, and after his death the master tapes were lost.

In December 1988 John Casner recorded two nights of Foley’s solo shows at the Austin Outhouse on a multitrack cassette deck. On 1 February 1989 Foley was shot and killed at a house in Austin’s Bouldin Creek neighborhood; the man who shot him was acquitted on grounds of self-defense. A hundred cassette copies of the Outhouse recordings were sold to pay for his burial, and his friends covered his casket in duct tape.

Most of his music reached the public after his death. Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson had already made “If I Could Only Fly” the lead single of their 1987 duet album Seashores of Old Mexico, and Haggard named his 2000 album after it. Lyle Lovett recorded “Election Day” on My Baby Don’t Tolerate (2003), and John Prine sang “Clay Pigeons” on his Grammy-winning Fair & Square (2005). Lost Art Records issued the Outhouse tapes as Live at the Austin Outhouse in 1999, the recovered Loma Ranch sessions as Cold, Cold World in 2006 and the demo tape Sittin’ by the Road in 2010; a cassette safety copy of the Heartland album came out as Wanted More Dead Than Alive in 2005, and his earliest known recordings, made in a friend’s living room, as The Dawg Years on Fat Possum in 2010.

Other songwriters wrote about him: Townes Van Zandt in “Blaze’s Blues,” Lucinda Williams in “Drunken Angel” on Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (1998), and Gurf Morlix, who also recorded a whole album of Foley’s songs, Blaze Foley’s 113th Wet Dream, in 2011. That year Kevin Triplett released the documentary Blaze Foley: Duct Tape Messiah, and in 2018 Ethan Hawke directed Blaze, a feature film adapted from Sybil Rosen’s memoir Living in the Woods in a Tree, with the musician Ben Dickey as Foley. In 2026 Lost Art Records released Sittin’ With Blaze, new recordings of his mid-1970s songs by Lucinda Williams, Lucy Dacus, John Moreland, Willie Watson and others.