By Michael Swanger michael@dmcityview.com

Honky-tonk hero Billy Joe Shaver's songs reflect his wild side and gut-wrenching tales of heartbreak

The title of Billy Joe Shaver's new album, "The Real Deal," is a statement of the obvious to those familiar with the country music outlaw, though sadly, many are not. Like his poetically blunt songs, his life is full of heartbreak and drama. And though he hasn't enjoyed mainstream success like the big-name artists who have recorded his songs, it appears as though the 66-year-old Shaver who walked on the wild side and lived to tell about it in songs like "Georgia On A Fast Train," "Old Five and Dimers Like Me" and "Live Forever" is getting some overdue praise.

Shaver's hard-knock life is like a country music song. Born dirt-poor and fatherless in 1939 in Corsicana, Texas, he was raised in the cotton fields of East Texas where his mother worked and where he first heard country and blues music.

By the age of 9, Shaver was writing and singing his own songs and saw it as a sign of what he was supposed to do with his life. That feeling was reinforced after being mesmerized by a Hank Williams concert he attended in the late '40s.

"I really believe I was born to write songs," he says. "I'm real good at it."

His grandmother raised him until he was 12 years old, when he reunited with his mother who had found work at a honky-tonk in Waco. It was there that Shaver adopted his affinity for raw music, boozing, fighting and womanizing - traits that would shape his personal life and songs like "The Devil Made Me Do it the First Time (The Second Time I Did it on My Own)."

After a stint in the U.S. Navy, from which he was honorably discharged for fighting with an out-of-uniform officer, Shaver worked a series of odd jobs at ranches, rodeos and sawmills. But after breaking his back and cutting off two fingers on his right hand, he decided to learn how to play guitar.

"I fell back into music as opposed to people who fell back on other jobs," Shaver says. "I knew I was real good at it."

In 1966, after hitching a ride to Nashville, he landed a job writing songs for Bobby Bare's publishing company. The gig paid $50 a week, which allowed Shaver to hone his craft without seeking day jobs. It was reassurance that he could make a living in music and support his wife Brenda Tindell and their young son, Eddy.

But success didn't come easy for Shaver as he struggled in the competitive and songwriting-rich Nashville scene. To stave off the pressure, he turned to drugs, alcohol and adultery, the latter of which eventually landed him in divorce court for the first time in 1986.

His big break came in 1973 when Waylon Jennings recorded nine of his songs for the landmark anti-Nashville album, "Honky Tonk Heroes." Legend has it that Jennings made a drunken vow at Willie Nelson's Fourth of July picnic to record an entire album of his songs, but forgot to keep his promise until Shaver threatened to kick his ass. "Honky Tonk Heroes" not only put Shaver in the national spotlight, but it also launched the outlaw movement of the 1970s.

"There was a gang of us knocking a dent in Nashville," he says. "But we were more like outcasts than outlaws because the establishment didn't want us to succeed. They had things going for them and they thought we would mess it up because our music was so raw and honest and different that it would change everything. And it did. It changed for the better."

It also sparked an ongoing trend by artists like Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley, the Allman Brothers, David Allan Coe and Todd Snider to cover Shaver's simple, yet poignant tunes. Over the years, Shaver says, he has written about 2,500 songs, many of which were inspired by his own trials and tribulations.

"Most of my songs are written trying to get back into the house," he says with a laugh. "But they only worked once so I had to write a bunch of them. The rest were written trying to stay alive, and I had to write a bunch of them, too."

Never was that more clear than during the '80s when Shaver's personal life hit rock bottom during a blur of alcohol and drug abuse, thoughts of suicide and marital problems. Even his professional life, marred by lagging record sales and record companies that went belly up, slumped.

Then one night, after having a vision of Jesus Christ sitting on the edge of his bed, Shaver drove to a Nashville mountaintop and asked God for his life back. As he was coming down the mountain, he started writing "I'm Just an Old Chunk of Coal," a signature tune that reinvigorated his faith and resiliency.

"Jesus Christ, he's the one who made us all No. 2," Shaver says. "If you don't like Jesus, go to hell. May the guy of your choice bless you, but I've got Jesus. I'm cool with him."

After getting right with God, Shaver left Nashville and moved his family to Texas, where his life and career began to improve. During the '90s, he would team up with his guitar-playing son, Eddy. Starting with 1993's "Tramp On Your Street," the father-son duo known simply as "Shaver" began turning heads on the country music scene and would record a string of critically acclaimed albums.

But personal troubles reappeared in 1999 when Tindell, whom Shaver remarried for a second and third time, died of cancer. One month later, so, too, did his mother.

Following their deaths, Shaver and his son worked tirelessly on their next record, "The Earth Rolls On." Critics would hail it for its complex range of emotions that included love, faith, rambling, fighting and freedom. Sadly, though, tragedy struck again when Eddy died of an overdose of heroin and crack cocaine on Dec. 31, 2000, months before the album's release.

Devastated by the deaths of the three people closest to him, Shaver toured relentlessly, ignoring his health. It proved to be a near-fatal mistake when he suffered a heart attack onstage at a Fourth of July concert in Texas and almost refused the quadruple bypass surgery needed to save his life.

"Everything went sideways, so I thought I'd start all over again," says Shaver, who in the past few years has reinvigorated himself.

In 2004, he was inducted into the Nashville Songwriter's Hall of Fame and was named Texas State Musician by the Texas Commission on the Arts. And in 2005, Dan Rather profiled him for "60 Minutes II"; he released "The Real Deal" in September with guests like Big and Rich, Nanci Griffith and Flaco Jimenez, marking the first time he produced his own work; he quietly wed his girlfriend of the past three years, Wanda Lynn Kennedy, a few weeks ago; and later this month he'll be a featured writer at the 2005 Texas Book festival in Austin promoting his new autobiography, "Honky Tonk Hero."
"I didn't know if I'd live to see any of it," Shaver says.

Of all the accolades that have been heaped on him, none top those extended to him by his peers.

In May, several singer-songwriters celebrated the ol' five and dimer by recording "Tribute to Billy Joe Shaver - Live," featuring performances by Robert Earl Keen, Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Dale Watson and Jack Ingram. "I thought you were supposed to be dead before that happened," he says. "But I'm glad it happened."

Shaver was also tapped to join Merle Haggard, Toby Keith and Jerry Lee Lewis for Country Music Television's "CMT Outlaws." The concert special, taped on Shaver's birthday, airs next month.

"It was a wonderful thing," he says. "Merle and Toby sang happy birthday to me and gave me a cake. Merle pretty much hung the moon... well, if he didn't, I think he told someone where to put it. I think he's the original outlaw."

Shaver says being an outlaw isn't easy.

"It's hard because a lot of people don't agree with folks who say what they mean and mean what they say," he says. "You have to not worry about what other people think and just do it and live with it."

That attitude still fuels his songwriting. "I don't write 'em unless they're good," he says. "I've come to the point in my life if I like one I keep on going, but if they don't amount to much I just go to the next one."

Through the years, Shaver has learned how to live with his decisions, good and bad, as he moves between the dark and the light. He still spends more than 200 nights a year playing honky-tonks, noting that songwriting is "the cheapest psychiatrist I know and God knows I need one."

His bare-boned faith keeps him in check, too.

"I'm lucky with what I've got, but I'm still a sinner," he says. "You don't have to worry about drinking and stuff like that because it's not what goes in a man's mouth that befouls him, it's what comes out. So you just drink up and watch what you say. Be careful driving home and don't run over us." CV

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