Lucinda, Lucy Honor Blaze Foley On Tribute LP

More than three decades after his death, Blaze Foley’s songs continue to find new believers.

The late Austin songwriter — whose reputation has only grown in the years since his 1989 murder through posthumous releases and tributes from admirers like Townes Van Zandt and Lucinda Williams — will be celebrated on the new compilation Sittin’ With Blaze, due digitally Aug. 7 via Lost Art Records, with a physical edition to follow in the fall.

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The 13-track set assembles a cross-generational cast of artists revisiting songs Foley recorded during his mid-’70s “tree house” era in Georgia (those demos were originally compiled by Lost Art as 2010’s Sittin’ by the Road). Beyond Williams, contributors to the new collection include Phosphorescent, Willie Watson, Lucy Dacus, Uncle Lucius, Riley Downing, Joshua Ray Walker, Twain, Angela Autumn, John R. Miller, John Moreland, Dylan Earl and Cactus Lee.

Leading the announcement are two advance tracks: Uncle Lucius’ take on “Election Day” and Phosphorescent’s rendition of “If I Could Only Fly,” perhaps Foley’s best-known composition. The single artwork features an original drawing by Foley, while Austin artist Jason Stout created the album cover.

“I came to Blaze a while back,” Phosphorescent’s Matthew Houck says. “Like anybody who’s interested in songwriting you’re going to eventually find Lucinda, Townes Van Zandt, Blaze, Guy Clark. But Blaze was kind of a mystery to me. It wasn’t hard to capture the lonesomeness of ‘If I Could Only Fly.’ So really, it was just kind of, like, stay true to the song.”

Uncle Lucius frontman Kevin Galloway, who drove a cab in Austin while pursuing music, says local tales of Foley were impossible to avoid. “Blaze is this big man with the biggest heart and nobody was below him,” he says. “And he was a little eccentric as South Austin is or used to be. And that’s perfectly okay. That’s what makes him what he is.”

Williams, who knew Foley during their Austin days together and immortalized him in “Drunken Angel,” contributes her own version of “If I Could Only Fly,” paying tribute to the man she once described as a “beautiful loser.”

At the time of his death, Foley was largely known only within Austin’s outlaw songwriter circles. In the years since, his songs have been championed by everyone from John Prine and Merle Haggard to Willie Nelson and Billy Strings. “The songs Blaze created resonate and ring truer than ever,” writer Joe Nick Patoski notes in the album’s liner essay. “The hallmark of a great song is outliving its author. In Blaze’s case, there’s a whole catalog of songs like that.”

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