Happenstance and community are the forces that’ve kept Blaze Foley’s music trickling to new audiences since the Seventies.
Kevin Dehan, aka Cactus Lee, decided to give the renegade songwriter a heartier listen after former Chronicle Music Editor Kevin Curtin heckled him at a show. “Within the second song, he just starts yelling out in the back, ‘Blaze Foley, Blaze Foley,’” Dehan remembers, thinking afterward: “I should probably get more into that guy, if someone’s yelling that out of this show.”
Twain’s Mat Davidson heard “Rainbows and Ridges” for the first time on a drive through the Sierra Nevada mountains with his buddy. “I just have a really, really vivid association with that landscape and that friend,” he says, the nostalgia coloring his tone.
At the start of a 12-hour yellow cab shift, Kevin Galloway of Uncle Lucius found a dubbed cassette tape in the glove compartment. “It had a piece of tape on it and it said Blaze Foley,” he recalls. He popped it in and a live recording of “Oval Room” came on over the car speakers. He was hooked. “I kept that tape in there the whole time. I just loved it.”
Sittin’ With Blaze, out August 7 from local imprint Lost Art Records, puts a tribute album spin on the folk poet’s serendipitous underground success. Dehan, Davidson, and Galloway are among the baker’s dozen artists handing down Foley’s handiwork to new audiences through their own arrangements.
The Arkansas-born songsmith made his way to Austin in the late Seventies, befriending Townes Van Zandt and becoming a rowdy fixture at bar stages before he was shot in 1989. A decade later, Lost Art Records released Live at the Austin Outhouse and several posthumous albums since. In the intervening years, label co-founder Craig McDonald has heard Foley’s peers acknowledge his impact and watched his songs reach a new generation of ears.
“Recognition and legacy has been growing among contemporary artists too, people covering songs, talking about Blaze,” McDonald says. He, collaborator Jeannie Lawson, and Keeled Scales’ Tony Presley began “herding cool cats,” as McDonald puts it, to capture that growth in a tribute album, which came to include a cover of “Clay Pigeons” from Lucy Dacus and a finale from Foley’s longtime friend Lucinda Williams – in addition to Austin-rooted songwriters.
Dehan shares a guitar-picking predilection with the late songwriter, showcased on his rendition of “Sittin’ by the Road,” the titular song of Foley’s posthumous 2010 album. Flute whistles, piano licks, and a jangly shaker give Cactus Lee’s take an optimistic, easygoing feel.
Like Foley, Galloway moved to Austin, in part, for the music. He got to know the city and the outlaw songwriter side by side, driving that cab, bootleg tape in tow. On the rock band’s version of “Election Day,” Uncle Lucius turns the volume up, cranking the folk protest song into a barn burner.
Davidson, who spent his formative years in Austin before recently decamping to North Carolina, found himself studying Foley’s intonation for his take on “The Way You Smile.”
“If I read it on the page, [it] would be incoherent, but the way he sings it, it says so, so much,” he says.
With a harmonic flourish and Foley’s down-to-earth sensibility, these tribute tracks will likely reach new ears the way the outsider songwriter found his way to these featured artists: thanks to a network of fans and a little luck.
This article appears in July 31 • 2026.
