HE SLEPT ON FRIENDS’ COUCHES FOR YEARS — THEN MERLE HAGGARD CALLED HIS SONG THE BEST HE’D HEARD IN 15 YEARS. Blaze Foley never had a home. He crashed on couches, slept under pool tables in Austin bars, and held his boots together with duct tape. They called him the Duct Tape Messiah. He refused to get a day job because he said it would betray his music. But what most people didn’t know about that night — February 1, 1989 — was why he was even at that house. He went to his friend Concho January’s place to confront Concho’s son Carey, who he believed was stealing the old man’s pension checks. Carey shot him in the chest with a .22 rifle at 5:30 in the morning. Blaze was 39. The jury needed just two hours to acquit Carey on self-defense. His friends held a benefit just to scrape together enough money to bury him. His coffin was wrapped in duct tape. And “If I Could Only Fly” — the song he wrote with nothing to his name — became the title track of Merle Haggard’s acclaimed 2000 album. Ethan Hawke directed a film about him in 2018.
Blaze Foley: The Outlaw Songwriter Who Never Had a Home Blaze Foley lived as if music mattered more than comfort,…