Editor’s Note: This show sold out before we published this article on January 1.
Outlaw Country legend Steve Earle will preview songs from an upcoming musical based on the 1983 film Tender Mercies at the Orpheum Theatre in Saugerties on January 18. Daisy Foote, daughter of the screenwriter, Horton Foote, will narrate the story.
Nowadays, a movie with such a title would be about a serial killer, but back in 1983 Tender Mercies was about tender mercies. It’s the story of a washed-up country singer (played by a weathered and bearded Robert Duvall) who hits bottom, and by pure luck, meets a gorgeous but lonely widow, Rosa Lee, who runs a forlorn rural gas station in Texas, while raising a towheaded boy named Buddy. Rosa Lee is devout, praying every night to the Lord, thanking Him for His mercies.
The film is kind of “jukebox musical”—a tale propelled by songs of a particular artist. In this case, the musician is a fictitious country singer named Mac Sledge. Among other things, the film celebrates country music, the roughhewn poetry of waitresses and truckers.
It’s a fable—I’m tempted to say a “Christian fable”—about the evils of wealth and the virtues of old-fashioned hard work. Horton Foote was a Christian Scientist, and the screenplay reflects his faith. The stages of Sledge’s redemption closely mirror the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Foote, who grew up in Denton, Texas, captures the texture of Texan speech, dry and flat as the surrounding plains. He notices what isn’t said; the meaningful silences between laconic phrases. After seeing the film, I thought: “The entire state of Texas needs psychotherapy.” No one ever discloses an actual emotion, except by jumping into a pickup truck and slamming into a brick wall. The politicsof Tender Mercies are also understated. The tragedy of the Vietnam War is alluded to distantly, but effectively.
Daisy Foote explained the genesis of the screenplay: “My father had a nephew who dropped out of college to form a band, who’s from Texas, and Dad became fascinated with the story. Subsequently, the band broke up, but the lead singer of the band, a guy named George Strait, became a huge deal, and the nephew became George Strait’s road manager.”
One of Foote’s first screenplays, for To Kill a Mockingbird, won an Oscar, but he did not attend the ceremony, assuming he wouldn’t win. There are nine plays in Foote’s “Orphans’ Home Cycle,” loosely based on the story of his parents’ marriage, set in the fictitious town of Harrison, Texas. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for his play “The Young Man from Atlanta.” Horton by the Stream, a festival devoted to Foote’s plays, has been held in Hunter for the last 30 years.
Though known mostly for theater, Foote wrote Tender Mercies for the screen. Daisy, who is also a playwright, began adapting the story for the stage in 2020, with all new songs by Steve Earle. Earle has released 22 albums of mostly original material, written a novel, and appeared as an actor in the TV series “The Wire.” He was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2020, and recently became a member of the Grand Ole Opry. The January 18 event, a benefit for Upstate Films, will be the first time the two collaborators perform excerpts from their musical.
I asked Daisy if her father helped her as a playwright. “I worked with him a lot when I first started, and he would look at my plays, and give me an honest assessment,” Daisy recalls. “He was very kind, and he never lied to me. He always gave me the truth.”
This article appears in January 2026.
