Texas outlaw country pioneer
Author Courtney Lennon celebrates Billy Joe Shaver in new book
To no one’s surprise, Billy Joe Shaver continues raising hell from beyond the grave. In June, according to KWTX-TV, a judge in Waco refused to throw out a 2003 will naming Shaver’s nephew as beneficiary. It had been challenged by Willie Nelson’s nephew, who claims a handwritten document dated five years later, naming him beneficiary, is the true will. The case should be before a jury soon.
Shaver, who passed away at age 81 in October 2020, once shot a man in the face the same day of a photo shoot for his gospel album. Onstage, he periodically berated his band members but more often fell to his knees in prayer. Within outlaw-country circles, his gritty and poignant songs — including “Georgia on a
Fast Train,” “Old Five and Dimers Like Me,” “Ragged Old Truck” and “I’m Just an Old Chunk of Coal” — are generally seen as on par with Nelson, Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt and Kris Kristofferson. Some folks believe he beats them all. In Courtney S. Lennon’s new book, “Live Forever: The Songwriting Legacy of Billy Joe Shaver,” the word “poet” comes up again and again.
“Billy Joe is not the most educated man, but in turn, he is one of the most poetic songwriters, and a lot of that poetry comes from sort of the rural and archaic language that stems not only from his upbringing in Corsicana but also the Bible,” says Lennon. “So the pool of language that he uses is either very authentic to this time that he grew up, or words from the Bible that are similar to words that are used in Shakespearean language.”
Lennon, founder of the roots-focused online magazine Turnstyled, Junkpiled (named after a Van Zandt song), grew up outside Buffalo, N.Y. After college, she moved to LA and became friends with the late Gary Austin, founder of famous improv-theater troupe the Groundlings. Raised all over the Southwest, Austin turned her onto Texas music; Guy Clark was his favorite, but Lennon loved it all. “It was just so authentic that I really gravitated towards it almost immediately,” she says.
“Live Forever” organizes its dozens of interviews according to relevant Shaver song titles. “Honky Tonk Heroes” reflects on Waylon Jennings’ 1973 album of the same name, an outlaw cornerstone
for which the then-unknown Shaver wrote nine of 10 songs. In “Salt of the Earth,” meanwhile, musicians who are generations younger describe Shaver as “William Faulkner writing country songs” (Roger Alan Wade); “‘Braveheart’ and Mark Twain with rural Texas lingo” ( Jonathan Tyler); and “country music’s Charles Bukowski” ( Jackson Taylor).
Houston pops up plenty. Lennon opens with Rodney Crowell admiring the way Shaver “opens his coat and shows his heart in a way that’s evocative and beautiful.” Local music-scene fixture Nick Gaitan, Shaver’s bassist for many years, reflects on the 2010 (nonfatal) shooting trial for which his boss was acquitted. Nelson testified as a character witness. After the verdict, Shaver tasked Gaitan with driving the band van down to their Firehouse Saloon gig. Joining both men onstage was Dale Watson, who had already immortalized the incident in his song “Where Do You Want It?” Later, Shaver did too, in a duet with Nelson called “Wacko From Waco.”
Despite all appearances to the contrary, the man who wrote “Live Forever” (the song) ultimately did not. Lennon conducted the interviews for “Live Forever” (the book) in 2018 and 2019, when Shaver was still very much alive. After he passed, she kept the conversations in the present tense. “I chose to keep it
that way because I thought that this is a moment in time that occurred and I wanted to preserve it that way,” she says. “These folks were talking about him when he was alive, and (for) many of them, he just didn’t seem like he was going to die — clearly.”
Outlaw country may no longer be populated by actual outlaws — for the most part — but it is a creatively fertile and (somewhat) commercially viable genre with its own pantheon, its own Sirius XM channel, even its own cruise.
The seeds of its success were sown by Shaver’s hardscrabble, star-crossed life. “When Billy Joe goes to the afterlife, and all the stories are told, generation after generation will find their mark behind him,” says a prescient Marty Stuart. “His songs will live on and on.”
“I do think most outlaw country musicians these days absolutely recognize Billy Joe and his influence,” agrees Lennon. “It’s just the rest of the population may not.”