For the Sake of the Song is the debut album by country singer/songwriter Townes Van Zandt, released in 1968. 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. When I heard it I said, 'This is a brilliant songwriter.' I told Jack right then and there that I would sign Townes and make a record with him. Townes was brilliant from day one." Clement, who had been an engineer for Sam Phillips at Sun Records and an established songwriter himself, offered to produce the album with Jim Malloy. 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. Although Nashville had become known as the epicenter of commercial country music, by the late 1960s it had also produced hit albums by artists in rock, pop, and folk circles, such as Blonde On Blonde, John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline by Bob Dylan, Bookends by Simon and Garfunkel, and Sweetheart of the Rodeo by the Gram Parsons-led incarnation of the Byrds.