Cold Cold World - Blaze Foley

Shorter than usual post, but wanted to put something together for The Blaze Foley song Cold Cold World. Cold Cold World is featured on Live At The Legion, Billy's 2025 release with Bryan Sutton, that was released without any advance fanfare. That version is truly great, but it's not the first time Billy's played that song or other Blaze Foley songs that I suspect he heard on the same record.

The Stats:

Bmfsdb.com has Billy playing Cold Cold World 15 times as of this writing, with the first time played in 2022. I've actually been in the audience for two of those. Once at "Rain Rocks" (Red Rocks night 1, 2023) and in Austin a month later. Here's Rain Rocks:

Given which Blaze Foley songs Billy has covered, and when he started playing some of them, I'm guessing he heard this one on The Dawg Years (which is not a reference to David Grisman). I love this record & highly recommend it. You'll get pretty much the whole Blaze experience on one record.

Blaze Foley is deservedly a legend in Texas & especially in Austin. Texas has a long history of guitar picking songwriters, from Blind Lemon Jefferson to Mance Lipscomb to Lightning Hopkins to Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark. A lot of talent, some demons & generally not a lot of material wealth. It's a rich tradition that Blaze (although not a native Texan) fits right into.