This is the eighteenth edition of Honky-Tonk Weekly, a weekly(ish) column here at the Tropical Depression Substack. You can read previous editions here. Every week, I will listen to and share a country song and write whatever comes to mind. Listen along! This week, we’re communing with the spirit of Blaze Foley.
I have a feature on Blaze Foley in the new Oxford American Music Issue (get you one!). It was a wild and wooly one. It’s now online, and you can read everything I have to say about Blaze Foley and me therein. I dug writing it very much, and I hope you’ll dig reading it.
The recording of “Cold, Cold World” (see link above) featured on the OA Music Issue CD took place in a living room in Whitesburg, Georgia, in the fall of 1976. It’s maybe my favorite Blaze recording.
Billy and Margery Bouris, who worked at the Yerkes Primate Center in Atlanta, bought a little bungalow near the Chattahoochee, about an hour outside of the city, in the mid-1970s. They planted a hundred blueberry bushes and got to know the characters in the area, including a songwriter named Deputy Dawg (at one point, they hired him to build a sheep shed after they bought four pregnant ewes—which was just what Whitesburg was like at that particular time).1
Deputy Dawg went by “Depty.” He wasn’t Blaze Foley yet. The Bourises were eager to record every song he’d written, which they did over three sessions at their house. Perhaps they had a hunch that Blaze was precious and fragile—that his songs were something to preserve.
It’s just Blaze and his guitar, captured on reel to reel tape, plus the sound of the Bourises’ new baby crying and cooing in the background. The tape wound up in a box somewhere and was more or less forgotten until Margery turned it up several decades later. There are endless stories of lost Blaze recordings. But this one was found. That baby is all grown up now, roughly fifty years old. And Blaze is long gone. His body anyway. But on the tape, the baby is still a baby, and Blaze is still Blaze.
Here is a very kind writeup on my Oxford American piece by Brendan Fitzgerald at Longreads:
“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.
Meantime, we got a fan letter from Blaze Foley’s late-70s main squeeze and muse, Sybil, who features in the piece:
I am so moved. I’m especially moved by the way Mr. Ramsey chose to render Blaze’s wild, tender, and scattered life, in pieces. I loved the telling — personal, funny, loving, sad —and was delighted to find myself in the mix. More than that, though I don’t like to assume I know what Blaze thinks about anything now, I do believe he too is loving this piece and seeing himself as he wished to be seen.
I wrote Sybil and told her that her note made my day. She invited my family to come out and visit her in Georgia at her place, at a fish camp on the Chattahoochee that likewise features in the piece (not far from where she and Blaze once lived in a treehouse).
She asked for my children’s names and my mailing address. “I’d like to send your kids a little something I have to offer,” she wrote.
Most of the time, it’s a cold, cold world—ain’t it?
But then other times that isn’t so.
These details about the Bourises are from Sybil Rosen’s memoir, Living in the Woods in a Tree: Remembering Blaze Foley.
Your story is one of a kind, David. It’s coloring in the end of the year for me, in all the right places.
Hell yeah, Davey. Gotta get my hands on this issue.