The colorful yet tragic life of Austin singer/songwriter Blaze Foley -- who was shot and killed in 1989, at the age of 39, while trying to defend an elderly friend -- reads like the most heart-piercing of country ballads. It's no wonder, then, that extraordinary artists like Foley's friend and hero Townes Van Zandt and Lucinda Williams penned odes to him (Van Zandt's "Blaze's Blues" and Williams' "Drunken Angel"). As for Foley's craft, no less than Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard covered Foley's "If I Could Only Fly" in 1987. (Haggard would go on to re-record the song and make it the title track of his 2000 album.) Unfortunately, it seems that a good deal of Foley's energies went toward the art of living; therefore, while he has left listeners with his vivid legend, his recorded output is frustratingly scarce.

Blaze Foley (born Michael David Fuller) was raised in West Texas and sang with his mother, brother, and sisters in a gospel act called the Fuller Family. Taking a pseudonym borrowed from Red Foley, Blaze performed in Houston, New Orleans, and Austin through the 1970s and '80s, developing a strong following and respect from fellow musicians. But it was the Austin music scene, among friends like Van Zandt and Timbuk 3 -- whose work Foley was an early champion of -- that would become his spiritual and geographical home.

While Foley recorded a now impossible-to-find studio album in the early '80s at the famed Muscle Shoals Sound Studios, he's remembered more for his vivid character. He was known as much for his kindness and philanthropy, even in the face of his own poverty, as he was for his drunkenness, ornery nature, and downright weirdness. Foley was also known for his uncanny fascination with duct tape, which he used to hold the various pieces of his life together, most notably his shoes (as immortalized in the lyrics of Lucinda Williams' aforementioned "Drunken Angel").

Fittingly, his one readily available work, Live at the Austin Outhouse, was recorded on December 18, 1988 (his 39th birthday), at one of the few music establishments in town that would tolerate him. The album was released as a cassette and Foley intended to donate a percentage of the profits to a homeless shelter, but after he was shot and killed on February 1, 1989, sales were instead earmarked for funeral costs. Live at the Austin Outhouse, re-released on CD in 1999 by Lost Art Records, captured him in his element. Through the bleed of a guitar microphone, you can hear stools squeaking, snatches of conversation, and general bar ambience -- but at the center of it all is Foley, his deep gritty voice and songs that, much like Van Zandt's, seem to emerge from a place of bruised, yet hopeful, solitude.

Foley was the subject of an episode of Between the Scenes, an Austin-based public television program that focuses on the independent film community. The episode was entitled Duct Tape Messiah: Blaze Foley; the film was later released on DVD. Another documentary about the songwriter, Previously Unknown: The Legend of Blaze Foley, directed by Kevin Triplett, debuted in 2010. That same year, Fat Possum Records uncovered three reel-to-reel tapes from Foley's earliest years (when he was known as Dusty Dawg) in rural Georgia that had lain at the bottom of a closet for 25 years. They released a 20-song album from these source reels entitled The Dawg Years in the summer of 2010. Sybil Rosen, Foley's widow, published a book about their lives together in 2008 titled Living in the Woods in a Tree: Remembering Blaze Foley. In 2018, the book became the basis of the feature film Blaze, directed by Ethan Hawke and starring Benjamin Dickey as Foley and Alia Shawkat as Rosen. ~ Erik Hage

A singer and songwriter of thoughtful alt-country-rock with a bluesy bent, guitarist Ben Dickey started several bands between the mid-'90s and mid-2010s before releasing his first solo album, Sexy Birds & Salt Water Classics, in 2016. In 2018, he launched an acting career when he portrayed singer/songwriter Blaze Foley in the biopic Blaze. He continued to pursue both music and acting as the film led to more work on-screen.

Born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1977, Benjamin Dickey started playing his grandfather's 1935 Gibson L-30 at age ten and sneaking into punk shows as a high schooler. At 16, he formed the post-hardcore band Shake Ray Turbine, which included fellow guitarist Clay Simmons, bassist Dustin Clark, and drummer Chris Wilson. They made one album, 1997's The Sauce of Solution, and opened an Arkansas show for Fugazi in 1998 before relocating to Philadelphia. After Shake Ray Turbine disbanded in 2000, Dickey played in a few short-lived outfits, including Amen Booze Rooster and Blood Feathers. The latter recorded an album in a Nova Scotia home owned by actor/writer/director Ethan Hawke, and Hawke and Dickey became friends. Dickey's first film appearance was a brief, nonspeaking role in Hawke's 2006 film The Hottest State.

Dickey remained based in Philadelphia until he accepted an offer of housing on an inherited cotton farm in Louisiana from a former band manager. He moved there in 2014 with his partner and a determination to focus on his music career. The following year, inspired by Dickey's impromptu imitation of Blaze Foley from Live at the Austin Outhouse during a visit, Hawke approached his friend about portraying the singer for a long-brewing biopic. Dickey released the solo album Sexy Birds & Salt Water Classics via Max Recordings in 2016, then immersed himself in Foley's music as well as studying acting with Vincent D'Onofrio.

After its Sundance Film Festival premiere in January 2018 (Dickey took home the festival's Special Jury Prize for Dramatic Achievement in Acting), Blaze arrived in theaters that August. Among Dickey's co-stars were Kris Kristofferson and, as Townes Van Zandt, Charlie Sexton. The film's original cast recording followed a month later on Light in the Attic Records, and Dickey quickly prepared the Sexton-produced Glimmer on the Outskirts for release in March 2019. It was the first album issued by SexHawkeBlack Records, an imprint of Dualtone run by Sexton, Hawke, and SXSW co-founder Louis Black. That year, Dickey and Hawke could be seen together in the D'Onofrio-directed western The Kid. ~ Marcy Donelson