Billy Joe Shaver

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OUTLAW ERA’S TREND-SETTING SONGWRITER

Billy Joe Shaver has recorded more than twenty albums, but his gritty songwriting has always outshined his career as a singer. That was especially true in 1973 when Waylon Jennings chose nine of Shaver’s songs for Honky Tonk Heroes, among the first and the best of the Outlaw albums.

Willie Nelson has declared Shaver “definitely the best writer in Texas . . . Everything he writes is just poetry.”

Born on August 16, 1939, in Corsicana, Texas, Billy Joe Shaver was raised by his grandmother after his father left the family and his mother took a job in Waco, sixty miles away. Shaver grew up listening to the Grand Ole Opry, as well as the rhythm and blues of Corsicana’s African American community, and he began writing songs by age eight. Once out of school, he took different jobs, including one in a lumber mill, where he accidentally cut off two fingers and part of a third on his right hand.

“I wouldn’t ever have gone into music if I hadn’t lost big for me,” Shaver said. “I couldn’t possibly get them my fingers,” he said. across the way [Jennings] could.”

Seeking a career in songwriting, Shaver finally was While there are no major hits on Honky Tonk Heroes, hired in 1968 at Bobby Bare’s publishing company in it is considered Jennings’s first important work of the Nashville. He got his big break in 1972 when Nelson Outlaw era. Shaver attracted other big-name artists, invited him to perform at his Fourth of July concert in including Bobby Bare, Johnny Cash, Tom T. Hall, and Kris Dripping Springs, Texas. After hearing Shaver, Waylon Kristofferson, to record his songs. Jennings promised to record a whole album of his Now a resident of Waco, Shaver continues to write, songs. The next year, Jennings went into the studio record, and perform (he uses his thumb and pinkie and made Honky Tonk Heroes. All but one of the songs finger to pluck the strings of his guitar), but he considers on the album was written or co-written by Shaver. himself a songwriter first. “I think I was born to write To the songwriter, the music and Jennings’s voice were songs,” he said. a perfect match. “The songs were so big, they were too

SOURCES LISTEN Encyclopedia of Country Music, “Old Five and Dimers like Me” NPR.com, Texas Monthly, The Washington Post “You Asked Me To”