The majority of the songs, including the title track, "Tecumseh Valley", "(Quicksilver Daydreams of) Maria", "Waitin' Around to Die", and "Sad Cinderella", were re-recorded in more stripped-down versions for subsequent studio albums.

For the Sake of the Song would be the flagship release on Poppy Records, a label operated by Keven Eggers, with whom Van Zandt would have a long and complex professional relationship.

According to John Kruth's book To Live's To Fly: The Ballad of the Late, Great Townes Van Zandt, Eggers first heard Van Zandt's song "Tecumseh Valley" when producer Jack Clement played a demo of it recorded at a Houston recording studio in 1966, with Eggers marveling, "I thought it was an absolute classic song.

Van Zandt, who had gained a small but devout following among the folk "purists" who attended his shows in coffeehouses and dive bars, agreed to travel to Nashville for the recording sessions.

Van Zandt's voice - already unconventional for mainstream country fans - is drenched in echo and surrounded with ethereal organs, medieval recorders and harpsichords, and the overproduction would lead the singer to rerecord many of the songs on his subsequent albums.

Throughout his career, Van Zandt would maintain a flippant attitude towards recording, always more interested in songwriting itself, and was likely overawed by the charismatic Clement, who had produced Jerry Lee Lewis's smash hit "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" and written "Ballad of a Teenage Queen" for Johnny Cash.

In the spring of 1994, Van Zandt elaborated to Aretha Sills: "Got a publishing company, made a record, For the Sake of the Song, and it’s now been re-released under the title The First Album.

The song chronicles the life of a fictional drifter as he passes sadly through the experiences of an abusive father, the abandonment of his mother, substance use disorders, fast women, and even prison.

The title track has also garnered much praise, with John Kruth writing that the song "reveals the complexity of an unrequited relationship burdened by the pitfall of desire.

John Kruth notes in To Live's To Fly that "the overproduction of Van Zandt's music ultimately had a boomerang effect, alienating Townes's small but devoted following...who believed he was the genuine article, 'the Real Deal,' the last link in the long line of troubadours that stretched back to Woody Guthrie and Jimmie Rodgers."

With the passing of time, however, a clear distinction has been made between the production and Van Zandt's poetic, often brilliant songwriting, with Mark Deming of AllMusic enthusing, "Townes Van Zandt wrote songs with an uncommon grace and poetic clarity, and he sang them with a voice that was at once straightforward, eloquent, and mindful of the arid beauty of his images...the album's production and arrangements occasionally suggest that Jack Clement and Jim Malloy didn't always know what to make of what he brought them."

Some notable examples include "For the Sake of the Song", which was recorded by Azure Ray on their EP November and William Boyd Chisum on his 2006 album Chasing The Wind.

"Tecumseh Valley" has been recorded by Bobby Bare, Nancy Griffith, Matthew Cook and Van Zandt disciple Steve Earle.