August 16
Today is the birthday of Billy Joe Shaver of Corsicana, Texas. He would be 87 today.
Shaver wrote country songs like a man paying off a debt in cash. The Billy Joe Shaver story starts in Corsicana, Texas on August 16, 1939. His father walked out before he ever arrived. So his grandmother raised him on her old-age pension in that Navarro County cotton town. Meanwhile, his mother worked a Waco honky-tonk called the Green Gables, some sixty miles south. Sometimes young Billy Joe tagged along. Those jukebox nights became the raw material for a lifetime of songs.
A Sawmill, a Picnic, and Honky Tonk Heroes
He quit school after eighth grade to pick cotton with his uncles. Then, at 21, a Waco sawmill blade took most of two fingers off his right hand. He taught himself guitar anyway, with whatever the mill left him. Later he hitchhiked toward Los Angeles but landed in Nashville instead. Kris Kristofferson cut one of his songs and invited him to Willie Nelson’s Fourth of July Picnic. There, Shaver cornered Waylon Jennings in a travel trailer and refused to leave until Waylon listened.
Waylon heard plenty. His 1973 album Honky Tonk Heroes carried Shaver songs on nine of its ten tracks. The record reached No. 14 on the Billboard country albums chart. More importantly, it became the blueprint for outlaw country. “Old Five and Dimers Like Me” and “Ride Me Down Easy” sounded like a Texas farm road after midnight. Shaver’s own debut, Old Five and Dimers Like Me, arrived that same year.
Billy Joe Shaver, the Poet Nashville Couldn’t Polish
Fame never quite caught up with him. Still, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, and Willie Nelson all recorded his songs. Willie later called him the greatest living songwriter. Bob Dylan even dropped his name into a 2009 song. Then the hard years came. His son and guitarist, Eddy Shaver, died on New Year’s Eve 2000. Months later, Billy Joe survived a heart attack onstage in New Braunfels. Yet he kept writing, and 2014’s Long in the Tooth became his first charting album.
Billy Joe Shaver died in Waco on October 28, 2020. Corsicana gave Texas a poet with eight fingers and no filter. Every honky-tonk hero since still owes him a round.