Billy Joe Shaver ~ Honky Tonk Heroes

Billy Joe Shaver

August 16, 1939 - October 28, 2020 (Age 81)

"Singer/song writer Billy Joe Shaver. Gone but not forgotten. Rest In Peace Billy. Loved your music. Shaver wrote numerous songs for artists such as Patty Loveless and Willie Nelson. Shaver was born in Corsicana, Texas. He will be deeply missed", says Gaylon King (Former D.J. at KKYX & KCWM in San Antonio and Hondo, Texas.

Country Outlaw Songwriter Billy Joe Shaver Dies at 81

By Gil Kaufman

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Billy Joe Shaver photographed at Wise Fool's Pub in Chicago on March 23, 1980.

Kirk West/Getty Images

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Country songwriter Billy Joe Shaver, whose songs were recorded by Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Elvis Presley, died at 81 on Wednesday morning (Oct. 28) following an undisclosed illness, according to a spokesperson.

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After news of his death broke, some of his famous friends shared their remembrances of him.

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"Having been a longtime friend and fan of Billy Joe Shaver, there was so much about him to love and enjoy," ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons said in a statement to Billboard. "He was a great singer, songwriter and performer and, above all, a great storyteller. He will be missed."

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Gone But Not Forgotten: Musicians We Lost in 2020

https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/obituary/9474417/billy-joe-shaver-dead

"I lost one of my greatest songwriting friends, Billy Joe Shaver. It’s a sad day and I’m just so torn between raising hell and lowering heaven a little bit. I felt it all the way from Nashville to Waco when he passed. I just go from looking back on our wonderful memories together to tears, then back to memories again," Tanya Tucker said in a statement. "The whole songwriting community has suffered a huge loss today, and most importantly, the fans of country music. Billy was one of a kind, he wasn’t like anyone else. When he loved, he loved hard and I loved him right back."

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Though he was never an A-list headliner on par with his most famous collaborators, Shaver had a sterling reputation for writing heartfelt, hard-luck songs about strivers looking for a break, or just a shoulder to cry on. The "good Christian" with an eighth-grade education who worked on his uncle's farm instead of going to high school and lost part of his fingers while working at a sawmill got all his country learning while "picking cotton, raising hell and bailing hay," as he wrote in the 1993 song "Georgia on a Fast Train."

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Shaver was born in Corsicana, Texas, on Aug. 28, 1939, and was raised mostly by his grandmother after his father left the family before he was born and his mother, Victory, took a job at a juke joint in Waco more than an hour away. He left home at 16 to serve in the Navy and took a series of gigs to make ends meet, including working at a rodeo and at the sawmill where the loss of his digits pushed him toward trying songwriting.

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Shaver hitchhiked to Nashville in 1965 and got his first break in 1968 when he wandered into singer/songwriter Bobby Bare's Nashville office and insisted on playing a song, soon after landing a $50-a-week gig that would make him a go-to for some of the city's brightest lights. One of his first successes was Bare's recording of his song "Ride Me Down Easy."

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He became a reliable storyteller, logging songs with Kris Kristofferson ("Good Christian Soldier"), Tom T. Hall ("Willie the Wandering Gypsy and Me"), the Allman Brothers ("Sweet Mama") and Elvis ("You Asked Me To"). When Jennings invited Shaver to Nashville to work on what became his 1973 outlaw country landmark album Honky Tonk Heroes, Shaver burst into national prominence. He landed credits on 10 out of 11 tracks on the album that is often tagged as the first, and some say best, "outlaw" LP from a back-to-basics 1970s movement that included Willie Nelson, Kristofferson, Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash and a number of others.

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In 1973, he also released his Kristofferson-produced solo debut, Old Five and Dimers Like Me, which included his beloved songs "Willie the Wandering Gypsy and Me" and "Georgia on a Fast Train." Cash covered his song "I'm Just an Old Chunk of Coal (But I'm Gonna Be a Diamond Some Day)," which he wrote after giving up drugs and alcohol. In all, Shaver released nearly 2 dozen albums on a variety of labels (MGM, Capricorn, Columbia, new West, Sugar Hill), earning a Grammy nomination for Best Southern/Country/Bluegrass Album for his 2007 effort Everybody's Brother. His most recent release, 2014's Long in the Tooth, was his first to chart on Billboard's Top Country Albums tally and it featured a duet with Nelson on "Hard to Be an Outlaw."

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Shaver received the first-ever Lifetime Achievement Award in Songwriting from the Americana Music Association in 2002 and was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2004 and the Texas Country Music Hall of Fame in 2006. His highest praise, however, came from the men who towered in the genre and whom he called friends. Cash once referred to Shaver as "my favorite songwriter," and good pal Nelson said he was "definitely the best writer in Texas... Everything he writes is just poetry."

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His rough-and-tumble songs often emerged from a life that had its share of tragedies and heartache, from his son Eddy's 2000 death from a heroin overdose to the nearly fatal heart attack he suffered onstage in 2001 and a notorious incident in 2007 when a bar fight ended with Shaver shooting another man in the face; he was acquitted of the charges and turned the scuffle into the song "Wacko From Waco."

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Shaver also acted in a number of films, including Secondhand Lions, The Wendell Baker Story and Bait Shop, and his song "Live Forever" was performed by his friend Robert Duvall in the Oscar-winning film Crazy Heart; Duvall cast Shaver in his 1996 movie The Apostle and produced the 2004 documentary A Portrait of Billy Joe.

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"The creative relationship between Outlaw country figures Billy Joe Shaver and Waylon Jennings looms extra large in country’s canon—Jennings’s revered 1973 album “Honky Tonk Heroes” was almost entirely written or co-written by Shaver. But as Shaver tells it, that relationship took a little… call it “work” to develop. After a chance meeting at Willie Nelson's 1972 Fourth of July Picnic in Dripping Springs, Texas, Shaver caught rising star Jennings’s attention but didn’t catch his follow-through. Many phone calls, an uninvited studio visit, a few colorful threats, and an impromptu song-sharing session later, country history was on its way to being made", says Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum

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A Honky-Tonk Hero

by: Dan Rather on May 31, 2005

CBS News at https://www.cbsnews.com/news/a-honky-tonk-hero/2/

Dan Rather Talks to Billy Joe Shaver, The Biggest Country Music Star You've Never Heard Of

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Just about every country singer you can think of – from Waylon Jennings to Johnny Cash to Willie Nelson – has turned the songs of Billy Joe Shaver into hits. Even Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan have recorded Shaver's songs.

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Those songs have an edgy, raw style that grew out of the music of Texas bars and honky-tonks, where Shaver misspent a good deal of his youth. His songs, not so much his voice, have made Shaver a honky-tonk hero, and a troubadour of the human condition.

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His philosophy can be summed up in a few words: "The devil made me do it the first time; the second time, I done it on my own."

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Correspondent Dan Rather and a 60 Minutes Wednesday crew went to the Piney Woods Pick'n Parlor, in the east Texas town of Minneola, to meet this unsung hero of country music.

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Shaver says he's probably written between 300-400 songs: "Not that many, maybe. But they're all good."

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His life is a lot like a country music ballad, and it has provided material for many of his songs.

Abandoned by his parents, he was raised poor by his grandmother in Corsicana, Texas, a farm town where long freight trains roll through on their way to unknown destinations.

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"When I was just a kid, I would go across the railroad tracks. There was an African-American settlement over there, the cotton-pickers, and they had a stand-up piano on one of the porches there, and I would go over and I'd listen to that bottleneck they'd play and all that," says Shaver, who ended up writing "Georgia On A Fast Train."

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Sixteen different singers have recorded that song, including Johnny Cash, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Willie Nelson and Commander Cody.

One of the things that's hard to miss when you meet Shaver is his right hand, his picking hand. He explained that when he was 21, he worked in a sawmill in Waco, Texas. One day, his right hand slipped and a fast-whirling blade cut off two of his fingers. Shaver hoped a medical miracle would save them.

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"So I just took my fingers, and drove over to the doctor's office. He says, "Got a little trouble there, ain't you?" I said, "Can you sew these fingers back on?" He said, "What?'" says Shaver. "I said, 'I read a Japanese article that they sewed 'em on, and they worked. He said, "Hey, this is Waco." You know, made that clear real quick (that he was not going to sew the fingers back on.)"

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How can he play a guitar with two missing fingers? "Not very well," says Shaver, laughing. "But I do get by."

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Shaver "gets by" performing his own music at least 200 nights a year. He also regularly records new CDs.

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He invited 60 Minutes Wednesday to watch him work last month at a small recording studio outside Austin, Texas.

Shaver was working with singer Kimmie Rhodes on his song, "West Texas Waltz." They worked out the lyrics, and the arrangement with the band, and then they put it all together. They got it right on the second take.

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That song will be on Shaver's new CD. His 17th CD is a testament to his enduring popularity in the world of country music.

Back in the '60s, Shaver was just another hell-raising country wannabe when he moved to Nashville. But he soon learned that his songs were more popular when others sang them.

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"I thought, 'Sure, I'd make it singing.' Then I got involved with these producers, and they start telling me how to sing, and I got kind of off-key a little bit," says Shaver.

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Is that when he started writing songs? "Yeah, so I decided that writing, they won't, nobody mess with me on that, because I was real good at it," says Shaver.

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But he was getting nowhere, until he rode up to the house of Harlan Howard, one of country music's most famous songwriters, on a borrowed motorcycle.

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"I rolled up on that thing and I hit his front porch. And, boy, he comes bouncing out of there, and he's a big old guy. And he said, 'What the hell's going on? Who are you?'" says Shaver.

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"I says, 'Oh, I'm Billy Joe Shaver. I'm the greatest songwriter ever lived. And he said, 'Well, I thought I was.' And he said, 'Well, park that thing and come on in.' We drank some whiskey and got to be real good friends."

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With Howard's help, Nashville's biggest stars soon began listening to Shaver's songs. His big break came in 1973, when Waylon Jennings recorded nine Shaver songs on one album, called "Honky Tonk Heroes." It became a big hit.

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That album soon made Shaver the favorite songwriter of many country music stars. Elvis Presley even recorded one of Shaver's songs three times.

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"He has the face of a whatever, but the soul of a poet, this guy," says actor Robert Duvall, who's been friends with Shaver for more than 20 years. "I think he's one of, like Willie Nelson said, he may be the best songwriter alive."

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Duvall cast Shaver in a small role in his 1997 movie, "The Apostle." Shaver, in turn, asked Duvall to appear in his "Freedom's Child" music video in 2002.

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Duvall's wife, Luciana Pedraza, was so taken with Shaver that she made a documentary about him. "He will not lecture at you," she says. "He will tell you about his life stories, and you can take it or leave it, but for sure you will learn something."

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Pedraza learned that Shaver is always willing to take chances, when her camera caught him trying his luck at a betting game that – on family television – can only be described as 'Chicken Bingo.'

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But the documentary also showed Shaver's dark side, particularly his long, tortured relationship with Brenda Tindell, about whom he wrote the song "We." They met as teenagers, married and had a son.

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"We were wild and crazy. I'm telling you we'd get up in the middle of the night, get on our horses and ride bareback, naked, just haul ass all over the farm and everywhere and come back and hose down," says Shaver.

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But it was no simple love story. Shaver struggled for years with drugs, alcohol and even suicide. He often left Tindell for other women. The couple divorced, re-married, and divorced again. They married for a third time when Tindell was diagnosed with cancer. She died in 1999.

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Many of Shaver's songs are laced with pain and loss, especially the loss of his son, Eddy, a promising musician in his own right. Eddy died in 2000 from a drug overdose.

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Here are lyrics from a song that Shaver wrote with his son: "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."

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"He was a victim of heroin abuse and crack cocaine," says Shaver, at a concert. "I thought I gave him a good look at what not to do, but then again, that ain't no way to be a father. But I'm OK with God about it, so I reckon it's all right. He lives here."

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Shaver has never made much money from his music. But after writing hundreds of songs that others have made famous, he is finally getting some attention in his own right, from fans and from the country music industry.

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Last fall, Nashville tipped its hat to Shaver by voting him into the Country Songwriters Hall of Fame.

Recognition has come late in life for Shaver, after some very tough times.

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"You lost your wife, you lost your son, you lost your mother all in a year, and had a heart attack," says Rather.

"And I'm still cooking," says Shaver.

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"But you've been knocked down, but not knocked out," says Rather. "Why is that?"

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"I'm hard-headed, I guess," says Shaver, laughing.

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But despite his losses, and the years of obscurity, Shaver says he never gives up, which is reflected in his song, "Try and Try Again."

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"If at first you don't succeed, just try and try again. If all you do is lose, you better find a way to win. If at first you don't succeed, try and try again."

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