Ben Dickey

Guitarist Ben Dickey, known for crafting introspective alt-country-rock laced with blues influences, assembled multiple groups from the mid-1990s through the mid-2010s prior to issuing his debut solo effort, Sexy Birds & Salt Water Classics, on Max Recordings in 2016. Two years later he made his screen debut as outlaw songwriter Blaze Foley in the biographical feature Blaze, after which he maintained parallel paths in music and film.

Born Benjamin Dickey in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1977, he began playing his grandfather’s 1935 Gibson L-30 at age ten and attended punk concerts covertly while still in high school. At sixteen he co-founded the post-hardcore outfit Shake Ray Turbine alongside guitarist Clay Simmons, bassist Dustin Clark, and drummer Chris Wilson; the quartet issued The Sauce of Solution in 1997 and supported Fugazi at an Arkansas date the following year before relocating to Philadelphia. Following the group’s dissolution in 2000, Dickey joined the short-lived projects Amen Booze Rooster and Blood Feathers, the latter of which tracked an album inside a Nova Scotia residence belonging to actor/writer/director Ethan Hawke, sparking a lasting friendship. His earliest screen appearance came in the form of a wordless cameo in Hawke’s 2006 drama The Hottest State.

Dickey stayed in Philadelphia until a former band manager offered lodging on an inherited cotton farm in Louisiana; he relocated there with his partner in 2014, intent on prioritizing music. During a 2015 visit, an offhand impersonation of Foley singing Live at the Austin Outhouse prompted Hawke to offer him the lead role in a long-planned biopic. Dickey released Sexy Birds & Salt Water Classics that same year, then immersed himself in Foley’s catalog while training as an actor under Vincent D’Onofrio.

After Blaze premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2018—where Dickey received the Special Jury Prize for Dramatic Achievement in Acting—the film reached theaters in August, featuring Kris Kristofferson alongside Charlie Sexton as Townes Van Zandt. The accompanying original cast recording appeared a month later on Light in the Attic Records. Dickey promptly completed Glimmer on the Outskirts, produced by Sexton and slated for March 2019; it became the inaugural release on SexHawkeBlack Records, a Dualtone imprint operated by Sexton, Hawke, and SXSW co-founder Louis Black. Later that year Dickey and Hawke shared the screen again in the western The Kid, directed by D’Onofrio.