Ain’t It a Cold, Cold World?
December 11, 2025 at 12:37AM“What I love best about Blaze Foley songs,” writes David Ramsey, “is that they are sad, but also a good hang.” Same goes for this absolute gem from the latest Oxford American music issue. Foley, a songwriter beloved by Merle Haggard and Townes Van Zandt, lived an outsized and unsteady life, the former giving flight to myths and wild tales before the latter concluded, at just 39 years old. Ramsey’s profile of Foley wears its considerable research lightly, works an impressively lyrical touch on the flotsam of Foley’s life, and includes one of the finer concluding sections I’ve read in a few years.
Blaze Foley was six foot three and looked like trouble. He thought people with silver collar tips on their shirts were ridiculous so he made his own with duct tape. He put duct tape on his cowboy boots. And on his guitar strap. He made himself a duct tape tuxedo. It was a fitting signature: A prankster trying to mend the broken parts with grit and half-baked ideas. “What I lack in sense, I make up for in zeal,” he said. A 1979 article on Blaze in the Daily Texan was headlined “Strange singer debuts in Austin.” The reporter said he looked like a “cross between Lee Harvey Oswald and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.” He had a preacher’s way of singing. His voice was low and full and spooky, and paired with the hillbilly-groovy finger picking on his guitar, he sounded like a weary traveler from the nation’s dingy, haunted past. There was a tenderness and a violence to the way he sang. He wrote songs about cheeseburgers and celestial Cadillacs. He hated Ronald Reagan. He briefly went by Tex. His carpentry skills were adequate. “I’m no Jesus but I can pass,” he said.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/12/10/blaze-foley-texas-townes/
via IFTTT
Watch