Blaze Foley

Dep'ty Dawg

Michael David Fuller was born in Malvern, Arkansas, in December 1949, though he sometimes claimed Marfa, Texas, instead. He grew up in San Antonio and sang gospel with his mother, brother and sisters as the Singing Fuller Family. Childhood polio left him with one leg shorter than the other.

He began writing songs in Georgia in 1975, calling himself Dep'ty Dawg, a name from his days as a roadie there. In Georgia he lived with Sybil Rosen in a treehouse in the woods, the life she later described in her memoir. In 1977 the two moved from Austin to Chicago, and he cut off his ponytail and gave it to her. That March he wrote If I Could Only Fly and played it to her shortly before he went back to Austin. The same year he played his first set as Blaze Foley at the Austin club Valentine's.

Lost records

Almost nothing he recorded reached the public while he lived. The master tapes of an early album were stolen from his car along with his belongings. In 1979 he cut If I Could Only Fly as a single for Zephyr at Pecan Street Studios in Austin, with his friend Gurf Morlix playing. Sessions at Loma Ranch in 1980 sat unreleased until 2006. In 1984 he made an album at Broadway Sound in Muscle Shoals with the Muscle Shoals Horns for Vital Records, which was pressed but never distributed: its executive producer was arrested in a drug bust and the DEA took the masters.

He patched his boots and clothes with duct tape, a joke at the expense of the shiny urban-cowboy fashion, and became known as the Duct Tape Messiah. Willie Nelson got Foley's demo of If I Could Only Fly from his daughter Lana, and Nelson and Merle Haggard recorded it on Seashores of Old Mexico in 1987. Haggard called it one of the best country songs he had heard in fifteen years. The engineer John Casner said that for Blaze, the praise proved he was a real songwriter.

The Outhouse

In 1988 he recorded a country album for Heartland Records at Bee Creek Studio, with Kimmie Rhodes singing, but the masters were lost and it surfaced only in 2005 as Wanted More Dead Than Alive. That August he pleaded no contest to unlawful possession of a weapon after a fight involving ax handles and was put on probation. From August 1988 he played regularly at the Austin Outhouse, and on two nights that December Casner taped him on a multitrack cassette deck. He had pawned his own guitar, so he played a borrowed one that Casner miked, and the manager's cash register can be heard in the room. Those tapes became Live at the Austin Outhouse, with Clay Pigeons and If I Could Only Fly.

Mary Street

On 1 February 1989 he was shot in the chest with a .22 rifle at the Mary Street house of his friend Concho January, by Concho's son Carey, whom Foley had confronted over allegedly stealing his father's pension and welfare checks. He was thirty-nine. An ice storm hit Austin for the funeral. The guitarist Mickey White handed out the words to If I Could Only Fly and the mourners sang it, and the casket was decorated with duct tape. Copies of the Outhouse cassette were sold to pay for the burial. In September 1989 a jury acquitted Carey January of murder on grounds of self-defence.

After

His friends kept him alive in song. Townes Van Zandt, a close friend and a major influence, wrote Blaze's Blues, and Lucinda Williams wrote Drunken Angel about him, calling him a genius and a beautiful loser. John Prine put Clay Pigeons on Fair & Square, and Gurf Morlix recorded fifteen of his songs on Blaze Foley's 113th Wet Dream in 2011. The Outhouse CD became a cult favorite, especially in Europe.

Rosen's memoir Living in the Woods in a Tree appeared in 2008. Kevin Triplett's documentary Blaze Foley: Duct Tape Messiah followed in 2011 after twelve years in the making, and Ethan Hawke, writing with Rosen, made the film Blaze in 2018 with Ben Dickey in the title role. Lost Art issued the complete two Outhouse nights in 2023, and in 2026 the tribute Sittin' with Blaze gathered Lucy Dacus, Lucinda Williams, Phosphorescent and others around his early demos.