One of country music’s great travelling songs finds another voice.
By the time John Prine recorded ‘Clay Pigeons’ for his 2005 album Fair & Square, Blaze Foley had been dead for 16 years.
That cover introduced plenty of listeners to the Texas songwriter, whose music has travelled much further in the decades since his death than it ever did during his lifetime.
Lucy Dacus is the latest artist to pick up the song, recording a warm, acoustic rendition for the forthcoming tribute album Sittin’ with Blaze.
Dacus does not try to turn the track into a vocal showcase. Her version stays close to the ground, leaving plenty of room around Foley’s story of buying a Greyhound ticket and heading somewhere new without being entirely sure what comes next.
She first heard the song through a friend around six years ago and has since come to consider it “one of the best songs ever written”.
Part of its appeal, Dacus explained, is that the narrator’s intentions remain unclear. He could be giving up and running away, or making one last serious attempt to build a different life. Most likely, he is caught somewhere between the two.
“I hope anyone that hears my version will end up going back to the source material,” she said.
That is probably the right approach to covering Foley. His songs are simple enough to sound familiar on a first listen, but strange and unresolved enough to keep opening up later.
Foley was murdered in Austin in 1989 at the age of 39, shortly after recording what would become Live at the Austin Outhouse.
Recognition largely arrived after his death, as artists including Prine, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson and Lyle Lovett began recording his work.
Sittin’ with Blaze focuses on Foley’s earliest known recordings, made on a home reel-to-reel machine during his mid-1970s “treehouse” years in Georgia.
Those demos were previously collected on the 2010 release Sittin’ by the Road.
The 13-track tribute also features Phosphorescent, Willie Watson, Uncle Lucius, Joshua Ray Walker, Twain and John Moreland with Lydia Loveless.
Lucinda Williams closes the album with ‘If I Could Only Fly’, the same Foley song Phosphorescent uses to open it.
Sittin’ with Blaze is out August 7 through Lost Art Records.
