Sometime-Texan Lee Hazlewood passed away Saturday in Nevada at age 78 after a lengthy battle with renal cancer. His latest, Cake or Death, was essentially his death album, his sign-off, but not his swan song. The Haze wasn’t that kind of cat. His self-deprecating sense of humor and lyrical tongue solidified much of his career. I only recently got into Hazlewood’s early albums, but the lyrics to 1966’s “My Autumn’s Done Come” seemed eerily prescient:

Kiss all the pretty ones goodbye
Give everyone a penny that cry
You can throw all my tranquil pills away
Let my blood pressure go on its way
For my autumn’s done come
My autumn’s done come

This article appears in August 3 • 2007.

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