I’m Just an Old Chunk of Coal (But I’m Gonna Be a Diamond Someday)

Shaver made it the title song of his own 1981 Columbia album. The same year John Anderson took it into the country top five: released in March 1981 as the first single from John Anderson 2 on Warner Bros., it reached number 4 on Billboard’s country chart. The Lewis Family recorded it in 1981 as well, as the title track of an album on Canaan Records.

The lyric is a vow of self-improvement built on one image. The singer calls himself a rough old chunk of coal and promises to become a diamond: to learn better words and a better way to walk, to polish off every flaw, to be everybody’s friend, and to pray each day so that he does not turn vain along the way.

Shaver, whose songs filled Waylon Jennings’s 1973 album Honky Tonk Heroes, was among the writers at the heart of outlaw country. The song kept travelling after him: he sang it with Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson on a 1999 release, and in 2022 it was covered twice, by Jamey Johnson on a John Anderson tribute album and by Miranda Lambert on the Shaver tribute Live Forever.