Billy Joe Shaver

He was born in Corsicana, Texas, on 16 August 1939. His mother, Victory, worked at a nightclub in Waco, and he spent much of his childhood with his grandmother in Corsicana; going along to his mother’s job was how he first heard country music. He left school after the eighth grade, went into the Navy as a teenager and afterward took whatever work he could find, including rodeo work. At twenty-one he lost most of two fingers of his right hand in a sawmill accident, taught himself to play the guitar without them, and turned toward songwriting.

In Houston in the early 1960s he met Townes Van Zandt at a club called the Old Quarter. He hitchhiked to Nashville in 1965, apprenticed himself to the songwriter Harlan Howard, and in 1968 talked his way into Bobby Bare’s office, which led to a $50-a-week writing job; Bare recorded his “Ride Me Down Easy.” His first singles came out on the Texas Record Company in 1968 and on Mercury, recorded in Nashville in July 1970. Kristofferson recorded “Good Christian Soldier,” Tom T. Hall cut “Willy the Wandering Gypsy and Me,” and Elvis Presley recorded “You Asked Me To.”

Kristofferson brought him to the Dripping Springs Reunion in Texas, and at a song swap there Shaver played “Willy the Wandering Gypsy and Me” for Waylon Jennings, who asked for more. Jennings built Honky Tonk Heroes (1973) from Shaver’s songs, among them the title song and “You Asked Me To.” Shaver’s own first album, Old Five and Dimers Like Me (Monument, 1973), produced by Kristofferson, was recorded around June 1973 at the House of Cash studio in Hendersonville, Tennessee, with Tommy Jackson on fiddle; Monument went out of business soon after.

Capricorn issued his next two albums. When I Get My Wings (1976), produced by Bob Johnston, had Dickey Betts on guitar, Charlie Daniels on fiddle and Chuck Leavell on keyboards. Gypsy Boy (1977), produced by Brian Ahern, had Willie Nelson on guitar, Ricky Skaggs on mandolin and fiddle and Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell among the backing singers. For Columbia he recorded I’m Just an Old Chunk of Coal (But I’m Gonna Be a Diamond Someday) (1981), made around December 1980 at Fireside studio in Nashville and Caribou Ranch in Colorado with the producer Eddie Kilroy, his son Eddy Shaver and Bobby Thompson on guitar and Kenny Lovelace on fiddle. Johnny Cash later recorded its title song. Two more Columbia albums followed, Billy Joe Shaver (1982), again with Skaggs, and Salt of the Earth (1987).

In the 1990s he and Eddy recorded as the band Shaver: Tramp on Your Street (Praxis, 1993), the live Unshaven (1995), Highway of Life (1996) and Victory (New West, 1998). Eddy died on the last day of 2000, and The Earth Rolls On, the last album they made together, came out in 2001, followed by Freedom’s Child (2002). His gospel-leaning Everybody’s Brother (2007) earned a Grammy nomination, and Long in the Tooth (Lightning Rod, 2014), with the Willie Nelson duet “Hard to Be an Outlaw,” was his first album to reach Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart.

“Live Forever,” written with Eddy, became his signature song, and Robert Duvall sang it in the film Crazy Heart. Shaver acted in Duvall’s The Apostle (1996) and in Secondhand Lions and The Wendell Baker Story, and Duvall produced a documentary about him, A Portrait of Billy Joe (2004). He kept recording and touring to the end; in January 2020 he joined Tanya Tucker at the Ryman Auditorium to sing “I’m Just an Old Chunk of Coal.” He died in Waco, Texas, on 28 October 2020, at the age of eighty-one.

• 2002: Americana Music Association, first Lifetime Achievement Award in Songwriting
• 2004: Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame
• 2006: Texas Country Music Hall of Fame
• 2019: Academy of Country Music Poet’s Award