Stagecoach 2016: Robert Earl Keen on Merle Haggard and Blaze Foley - Los Angeles Times
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Stagecoach 2016: Robert Earl Keen on Merle Haggard and Blaze Foley

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Texas troubadour Robert Earl Keen has always had a great capacity for spinning yarns in song, but it was a tale straight from real life that he shared over the weekend about his meeting once upon a time with Merle Haggard.

“We were both playing some festival in Texas,” Keen, 60, recalled backstage a few minutes before his performance Friday at the 2016 Stagecoach Festival in Indio, where he’d headed after wrapping up some recent tour dates with Lyle Lovett.

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“It was in the ‘80s or ‘90s, and at one point he walked up to me and said, ‘Well.....tell me about Blaze Foley’,” Keen said, referring to the esteemed Arkansas-born, Texas-reared songwriter perhaps best known for “If I Could Only Fly,” which Haggard recorded around that time.

The chorus is a haunting statement of yearning to be with a loved one from whom he was separated:

If I could only fly, if I could only fly

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I’d bid this place goodbye to come and be with you

But I can hardly stand and I got no where to run

Another sinking sun and one more lonely night

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“He asked me, ‘Did you know him? What was he like?’” Keen said, expressing surprise at the depth of Haggard’s interest in a fellow songwriter known for his eccentricities. During the “Urban Cowboy” craze in the early-’80s, he put duct tape on the tips of his boots to mock those who suddenly started sporting western boots strictly as a fashion statement.

After his death in 1989, when the son of a friend shot him in the chest and killed him, Foley’s life became the stuff of legend. (The shooter was acquitted on grounds that he was acting in self-defense.)

Fellow songwriter Townes Van Zandt wrote “Blaze’s Blues” in tribute to him, and Lucinda Williams composed “Drunken Angel” in honor of Foley on her 1998 album “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.”

Foley’s own recording career is checkered, as several recording projects disappeared under mysterious circumstances. A documentary on his life, “Blaze Foley: Duct Tape Messiah” was released in 2011.

“Merle wanted to know if he really was strange,” Keen said. “I told him, he was strange in every sense of the word.”

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One of the best descriptions of Foley came from Van Zandt, who once said of him: “He’s only gone crazy once. Decided to stay.”

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