The Week (US)

The Texas songwriter who shaped outlaw country

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As a struggling Nashville songwriter in the early 1970s, Billy Joe Shaver paved the way for his breakthrou­gh in an unlikely fashion: by threatenin­g to beat the tar out of Waylon Jennings. After a casual encounter, the country star had promised to listen to Shaver’s songs, then dodged his calls—until Shaver showed up at a recording session and vowed to “whip your ass right here” if Jennings didn’t follow through. The result was Jennings’ landmark 1973 album Honky Tonk Heroes, on which nine of the 10 tracks were written or co-written by Shaver. It launched Shaver’s legend as the roughneck bard of outlaw country. “I’ve spent a lifetime making up my mind to be / More than the measure of what I thought others could see,” Jennings sang on his version of Shaver’s “Old Five and Dimers Like Me.” The Texan’s plainspoke­n yet poetic songs—“Honky Tonk Heroes,” “Ride Me Down Easy,” “Georgia on a Fast Train”—would subsequent­ly be recorded by artists such as Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, and Willie Nelson. “I think I was born to write songs,” Shaver said in 2014. “That’s why my eyes and ears are so open.”

He grew up in “grinding poverty” in Waco, Texas, the son of a waitress mother and a laborer father who walked out on the family before Shaver was born, said The Washington Post. At age 12, he dropped out of school, and at 17 joined the Navy, “but was reportedly kicked out for fighting with an officer.” On returning to Texas, “he married his girlfriend, then pregnant with their son.” (The couple would divorce—and then marry and divorce twice more.) At age 21, he lost two fingers while working at a sawmill and decided to get serious about music. Shaver hitched a ride to Nashville “on a cantaloupe truck” in 1966, said The Tennessean, and landed a job writing songs for $50 a week. He recorded a debut album in 1973, but as his songs gathered acclaim his own recordings failed to sell, a misfortune that “fueled his stature as a cult hero.”

For years, Shaver “struggled with addictions to drugs and alcohol,” said Texas Monthly, finally swearing off both after finding Jesus at the end of the 1970s. But his life remained the stuff that country songs are written about.

His son and guitarist Eddy died of a heroin overdose in 2000; the following year Shaver suffered a heart attack onstage. In 2007, he shot a man in the cheek during a scuffle outside a Texas bar and was subsequent­ly acquitted of aggravated assault. (Unbowed, he vowed from the stage to seek out the victim and demand “the damn bullet back.”) Shaver continued to write and tour into his late 70s, said Rolling Stone. Songwritin­g was something he couldn’t put down. “The song is like the cheapest psychiatri­st there is,” he said. “And I pretty much need one all the time.”

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