May 2002

When Billy Joe Shaver gives directions to his modest house on the outskirts of Waco, he says to disregard the handwritten sign on his front door. “Please do not disturb. I haven’t slept in two days,” it says.

“That’s just so some ol’ drunks don’t come by at 5 in the morning to talk,” Shaver explains. ” ‘Course I used to be one of ’em, so I really can’t complain too much.”

The self-effacing “lovable loser and no-account boozer” left the bottle behind long ago and has returned to his honky-tonk hero status with a stunning new album. Critics are gushing over Shaver like they haven’t since 1993’s Tramp On Your Street and fans are packing his shows and lining up afterward to shake his two-fingered right hand and give him homemade gifts.

The 61-year-old in the blue work shirt, whose face is the map of Texas music, can’t fully enjoy the attention, however. He doesn’t even listen to the record he’s so proud of, because hearing it just reminds him of the hole in his band, the hollow in his heart, where his son Eddy used to be. The 38-year-old ex-prodigy, who looked like a Guitar World cover in the making when he started playing professionally with his dad at age 12, succumbed to a heroin overdose on Dec. 31, 2000, the morning after he received an advance to record a solo album for Antone’s Records.

“We knew going in that it was our last record together,” Shaver says. “So we worked really hard to make it a good ‘un. I really think that Eddy did some of his best playing ever on this record.” The theme of The Earth Rolls On, which opens with the positively bouncing “Love Is So Sweet,” is that life is hard, but worth it. Often accused by Texas singer-songwriter purists of overplaying, Eddy shows relative restraint here, finger-painting the moods of songs such as “Star of My Heart,” which his father wrote in early 2000 while Eddy was in treatment for heroin addiction. At the end of the album, the guitarist finally cuts loose, breaking free from the past. The song, the album’s title track, is about finding a light in the darkness of tragedy.

“I always figured I’d be the first to go,” Shaver says. Looking back on a rough-and-tumble life of bare feet, bare knuckles and bared soul, you believe him.

His father bailed on Billy Joe before he was born, and with his mother having to work two jobs, baby Shaver and his older sister were raised by their grandmother in Corsicana. “She gave us reality,” Shaver recalls. “Our grandmother told us straight out that there wasn’t no Santa Claus, but just play along with the other kids. Unless the Salvation Army dropped off something, we didn’t get no Christmas presents.”

Grandma was also a strict disciplinarian. When a 10-year-old Billy Joe snuck off to see comic hillbillies Homer and Jethro, as well as a little-known opening act named Hank Williams (an experience recounted in “Tramp On Your Street”), his guardian was waiting up with a switch in her hand. “I think the reason I remember that show so well was because of the whippin’ I got,” he says.

When his grandmother died, 12-year-old Billy Joe moved to Waco to live with his mother, who worked as a waitress at a honky-tonk called the Green Gables. “I was barefoot, wearing overalls held together by safety pins, and people would give me nickels for the jukebox,” he says of nights spent with the bouncer as his baby sitter. “There were a lot of military people around Waco then, and I guess I reminded them of their kids back home, so they treated me real good.” Shaver had felt at home in a roadhouse that smelled of beer and smoke, where the jukebox always seemed to play Lefty Frizzell when he walked in.

Back at home, Billy Joe clashed with his stepfather and often took off on freight trains or rode his thumb right outta Waco. When he turned 17, his mother signed the papers for him to join the Navy. “I was glad to go, and they were glad to see me go,” he says.

The Navy experience didn’t turn out too well for the hotheaded recruit, however. Shaver spent the last several months of his enlistment in the brig at Portsmouth, N.H., after he decked an officer at a party. Billy Joe was facing a court martial, but after penning a plea to the commanding officer, explaining his side of the scuffle, Shaver says he was released with an honorable discharge. He’s always managed to find the words that would get him out of seemingly hopeless situations.

TO KNOW BILLY JOE SHAVER AND NOT HAVE A STORY TO TELL IS LIKE COMING HOME FROM A WILLIE NELSON PICNIC WITHOUT A SUNBURN.

There are famous Billy Joe stories, like how he lost three fingers at the knuckle on his right hand in a saw accident at Cameron Mills when he was 22. Shaver had recently read an article about how a man in Asia had his severed fingers reattached, so in the midst of great pain he gathered up his three lopped digits. “The doctor said he couldn’t do anything for me,” Shaver says. “I told him that in Japan they just sewed somebody’s fingers back together, and he said ‘Well, this ain’t Japan.’ ” He returned to work with his hands bandaged and his fingers in a jar. When a woman at the mill asked for his fingers for some sort of voodoo ritual, he gave them to her.

There’s also the one about the time he spent six months in Nashville tracking down Waylon Jennings, who had promised to do an entire album of Shaver songs after hearing “Willie the Wandering Gypsy and Me” during an impromptu guitar pull in a trailer backstage at the infamous Dripping Springs Reunion show, the precursor to the Willie Nelson picnics, in 1972. “Waylon asked me if I had any more of them ol’ cowboy songs, and I said I had a whole sack full of ’em,” Shaver says. But afterward, Jennings wouldn’t return Billy Joe’s calls.

Mary Jane Farmer — Taken at Larry Joe Taylor Texas Music Festival

Frustrated and broke, Billy Joe finally found Waylon in the hall of a recording studio late at night. “I told him that if he didn’t make good on his promise to record my songs, I’d whip his ass right there. I was so (angry) I didn’t even notice these two big biker bodyguards at his side.” Before the two could pounce on Shaver, Jennings raised a halting hand and sat down with the fuming songwriter to talk about the album that, hey-Hoss-I’m-still-gonna-do-but-I-just-been-busy. “Waylon asked me if I knew just how close I came to getting a major ass-whipping,” Shaver says with a laugh.

When Jennings recorded “Honky Tonk Heroes” in 1973, he broke so many rules that the album turned into the opening salvo of the “outlaw country” movement. Besides playing 10 tracks by an unproven songwriter, Jennings insisted on using his own touring band in the studio. The result was a record that holds up like Creedence Clearwater Revival, riding a great groove on tracks like “Black Rose” and then taking a touching turn on “You Asked Me To,” Billy Joe’s best love song to Brenda.

But even though Shaver, still struggling in his early 30s, had finally caught his big break, he fought Jennings every step of the way. “He wanted to change some lyrics or do the songs a little bit different, and I didn’t want him to,” says Shaver, whose songs are so much a part of him that he has never recorded another writer’s material except on a Merle Haggard tribute album and a collection of Townes Van Zandt covers coming out soon.

Billy Joe ended every show with his prayer, unashamedly Christian to the corn. Photo by. Mary Jane Farmer

But even as he’s stubborn about his precious compositions, the word that friends most often use to describe Shaver is “humble.” Austin guitarist Stephen Bruton, who played on the 1973 debut “Old Five and Dimers” (” Billy Joe couldn’t believe that he was really making a record”), says that whatever success Shaver has attained since then, including writing a top-five hit for John Anderson (“I’m Just an Old Chunk of Coal”) hasn’t changed him a whit. He still carries himself like “the hobo with stars in my crown” of one of his earliest songs, “Ride Me Down Easy.” Ask about his time as a bull rider in the early ’60s, and Billy Joe will say, “Well, I didn’t really ride ’em. I just tried to stay on as long as I could.” Told that he’s the best songwriter Texas has ever produced, and Billy Joe will start talking about Van Zandt and Willie Nelson.

But Shaver earns a nod as the musical poet laureate of the Songwriter State, not just because he has the ability, like Springsteen, like Waits, like Prine, to nail an entire set of emotions and circumstances with a single line (his most famous: “Well, the devil made me do it the first time/ the second time I done it on my own” from “Black Rose”), but also because in Billy Joe’s lyrics you can hear music. The rhythm of his words is all the beat you need, as witnessed by this classic chorus: “I been to Georgia on a fast train, honey/ I wudn’t born no yesterday/ Got a good Christian raisin’ and an eighth-grade education/ Ain’t no need in y’all treatin’ me this way.” Can’t you just hear Eddy’s finger-pickin’ in the background as the tune whooshes down the tracks?

Billy Joe wrote “Georgia On a Fast Train” after repeated snubs by Nashville when he first started hitchhiking there in the late ’60s. He had been trying to find his way to L.A. but couldn’t get a ride West, so he crossed Interstate 10 outside of Houston and caught a truck driver headed to Tennessee. Unable to afford a demo tape, Shaver tried to play his songs for record execs, but was turned away at the front desk. Finally, he got Bobby Bare to listen, and soon Music Row was buzzing about the square-jawed hayseed from Waco who could put complex issues in simple terms, as he did with his Vietnam War ditty “Good Christian Soldier” (“We’re playin’ cards and writing home and having lots of fun/ Tellin’ jokes and learnin’ how to die.”)

Another ubiquitous stance at Billy Joe’s shows. Photo by Mary
Jane Farmer

It was that song that launched Shaver’s Nashville songwriting career. Even with Bare’s backing, Billy Joe was about to give up on the town where songs were written in offices instead of boxcars. But the night before he left for Texas, Kris Kristofferson stopped by to hear what Shaver had. After Billy Joe sang “Good Christian Soldier,” Kristofferson said he wanted it — which was rare, because Kris wrote all his own songs.

Then came the call to come down to Dripping Springs in the summer of 1972, where he would meet Waylon and, eventually, his life and country music would change.

“I really do think that Billy Joe has an angel following him around,” says Freddy Fletcher, the Pedernales and Arlyn studios owner who played drums for Shaver in the late ’70s and early ’80s. “We’d find ourselves in terrible predicaments out on the road, but somehow Billy Joe would find a way out of it.” Once during a snowstorm near Minneapolis, Shaver’s van and U-Haul trailer skidded off the road and was sideswiped by an oncoming truck on the access road. The impact shoved Shaver’s van right back into its rightful lane.

Another time, Shaver escaped unscathed after baiting a crowd in Baton Rouge. “It was at a place called Jim Beam Country, during the “Urban Cowboy” craze, and the audience wasn’t listening to a single word Billy Joe was singin.’ They wanted to hear Johnny Lee covers or whatever,” Fletcher says. “At one point, Billy Joe announced ‘There ain’t a cowboy among the whole bunch of ya. Y’all look silly with your feathers in your hats.’ ” A few roughnecks had to be held back by their buddies after the set, but Shaver and the boys were soon on the road to the next adventure.

These days, the mellower Shaver carries an attache case wherever he goes, even if, on a recent Wednesday afternoon, he’s just going to Griff’s truck stop near Crawford for chicken-fried steak. “It’s something I picked up from Waylon,” he says, tapping his brown briefcase. “Even a gypsy needs to be organized sometimes.” His usual lunch partner when he’s not on the road is mechanic Jim Hollingsworth, his friend since seventh grade. “After he started getting some fame in Nashville, some people asked me if I knew Billy Joe Shaver,” Hollingsworth says. “They said I went to school with him, he was in my class, but I told ’em I didn’t know any Billy Joe Shaver. Only Shaver I knew was Bubba Shaver.”

Billy Joe was Bubba until he started signing his poems with his real name as a disguise. “It was considered a sissy thing to write poems” Shaver says. His words made an impact on his ninth-grade home-room teacher at LaVega High, who was the first to tell Bubba he had real talent. Hollingsworth and Shaver recently paid a nursing-home visit to Mrs. Legg, at age 101, and she recited one of Billy Joe’s old poems from memory.

On the way back from Griff’s, Shaver pulls his white van alongside the Chapel Hill cemetery and gets out. “I prayed every day to Jesus, asking him how I could help my son,” Shaver says as he takes a slow walk to the middle of the graveyard. “But that heroin is stronger than love.” Eddy is buried next to his mother, whom Billy Joe said Eddy never really got over losing in 1999.

BillyJoe with his constant companion and band member, Jeremy Lynn Woodall — Photo by Mary Jane Farmer

“Eddy was always straight with me.” Billy Joe says of the son who was also his best friend. “He told me after he’d first tried heroin that he didn’t know what the big deal was.” Some of Eddy’s friends were using regularly, according to Billy Joe, and it wasn’t long before the son was hooked.

“I don’t blame Eddy, because I’ve been there myself, but I still can’t believe he would do that to himself.” Billy Joe runs his fingers across the letters of Eddy’s name, the closest he can come to touching his only son.

Later, Shaver tells the story of how drugs and alcohol almost drove him to end his life. It was in the late ’70s, and the family of three was living in Nashville. “I wasn’t being a good father or a good husband, and it was eatin’ away at me.” He says one night he saw Jesus sitting at the foot of his bed, shaking his head. “I got up out of bed and got in my pickup and started driving.” He ended up standing on a cliff, and contemplated jumping off. Like the Robert Duvall character in “The Apostle,” in which Shaver had a featured role, Billy Joe asked Jesus for direction, and the Lord told him to go back home and take care of his family. On the walk down the trail, Shaver says he started writing “I’m Just an Old Chunk of Coal (But I’m Gonna Be a Diamond Some Day).” The next morning, he started packing, pulled Eddy out of school and headed down to Houston, where he would be away from his accomplices in sin — the dealers and friends who didn’t want to drink alone.

As he kicked his habits cold turkey, living off random royalty checks and wasting down to 165 pounds, Shaver got a call out of the blue that would put him back on track. It was from Willie Nelson, whom he’d known since the late ’50s honky-tonk circuit. Willie and Emmylou Harris were about to start a tour of arenas and, although there wasn’t time to put his name on the bill, Shaver could open the shows and make a few hundred bucks a night. “I can’t tell you all the times Willie’s bailed me out of situations, but that was a big ‘un,” Shaver says. “I wasn’t sure if I’d ever get up on a stage again.”

Photo by Mary Jane Farmer

It was a call from Willie on the morning of Dec. 31, 2000, that helped Shaver get through his most difficult day. “When Eddy died, Willie said I needed to be among friends. He said I should come on out to Spicewood (to Poodie’s Hilltop Bar, where Shaver had a gig scheduled), but I didn’t decide to go until the last minute.” It was, Billy Joe says, the toughest gig of his life, the memories flooding each song until Willie and pals had to take over. But he got through the night and headed back to Waco, where he still lives — even though his band is in Austin — because his two pit bulls, Etawna and Shade, love the big back yard.

At Eddy’s grave, Billy Joe picks up a little Texas flag that somebody stuck in the dirt, not yet covered with grass. “You will always be around,” it says. “That’s from ‘Live Forever,’ that song we wrote together,” Billy Joe says. “Eddy had that beautiful melody and the guitar part, and after he played it for me, it just stuck in my head. I thought, ‘Man, I gotta really come up with something special for this one.’ ” A few months later, Billy Joe was driving the band back from a gig one night — he always drives — and he started thinking about how some songs seem to have lives of their own. A few years ago, Bob Dylan recorded “Old Five and Dimers (Like Me),” but when it came out on the soundtrack for “Hearts of Fire,” the song was credited as a traditional folk song. “At first I was (angry),” Shaver says, “but the more I thought about it, I took it as a compliment. Every writer wants to write something that’ll last long enough to be part of the public domain.”

With Eddy’s melody in his head on that long drive home, Billy Joe came up with the verse that brings context to the crazy life of a drifter with a sack fulla “cowboy songs.”

“Nobody here will ever find me/ But I will always be around/ just like the songs I leave behind me/ I’m gonna live forever now.”

(Billy Joe Shaver passed way in Oct. 2020 at age 81.)

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