Watch John Prine Cover Blaze Foley’s “Clay Pigeons” on ‘Austin City Limits’

John Prine is lauded as one of the greatest songwriters of the 20th century. Prine’s songs ran the gamut from humorous social satires to tear-jerking character studies and ticked nearly every box in between. Because he was such a prolific and talented songwriter, he recorded relatively few cover songs.

It seems that a song had to be special in some way for Prine to record a rendition of it. For instance, he recorded the late Blaze Foley’s “Clay Pigeons” for his Grammy-winning 2005 album Fair & Square. While he didn’t write it, the song’s structure and the thought behind it allows it to sit comfortably among Prine-penned classics like “Glory of True Love,” “Crazy as a Loon,” and “Some Humans Ain’t Human.” Watch him close his 2005 Austin City Limits set with the song below.

[RELATED: 3 Timeless John Prine Songs that Continue to Teach Us the Art of Songwriting]

The Austin City Limits episode aired in November 2005, just months after the release of Fair & Square.

How John Prine Found Blaze Foley’s “Clay Pigeons”

“I don’t usually sing other people’s songs ‘cause I can barely sing my own,” Prine joked as he introduced the song. “About five or six years ago, Merle Haggard put a version of ‘If I Could Only Fly’ out on record. Blaze Foley’s song,” he recalled. It was the title track from Haggard’s 2000 album.

After hearing the song, Prine said he started searching for a Blaze Foley album because he wanted to hear Foley’s version of the song. “The more people I asked, the more people looked at me really strange. It turns out that we knew each other back in the ‘70s. I imagine we probably met at Armadillo World Headquarters. If you walked out the back door there, you could very well hang out with somebody there and not even know their name,” Prine joked. “So, I hope we had a good time.”

After finding a few records and cassettes of Foley’s music, Prine dug in. “I was listening to him sing ‘If I Could Only Fly’ and I heard him sing this song here. It just blew me right out of my chair. I thought ‘My God, that sounds like I should have stayed awake and wrote that some night.’”

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