Billy Joe Shaver

Billy Joe Shaver was born in Corsicana, Texas, in 1939. His family was very poor and Billy Joe would sing in the street for spare change. While growing up during The Great Depression, Billy Joe’s father left the family when he was very young. His mother was a cotton picker for a while and later worked in a Waco honky-tonk called the Green Gables. He was mostly raised by his grandmother until he turned twelve years old. After that he would hang out in the Green Gables, where he got a lot of his musical background. He would play songs for the soldiers in the honky-tonk and spend their tips in the jukebox.

Before pursuing a career in music, Billy Joe Shaver had an ill-fated stint in the Navy and held several odd jobs, including one in a sawmill that claimed half the fingers of his right hand. A doctor was able to sew a few of the fingers back on but he almost lost his arm in the process. While working a construction job, he fell of off a scaffolding and nearly broke his neck. While living in Houston, Billy Joe met another struggling musician, Willie Nelson. As soon as Billy Joe figured out how to hold a guitar pick, he decided that music was looking better and better for him so he decided to try his luck in Los Angeles, California.

Billy Joe Shaver planned to hitchhike to LA. As fate would have it, he couldn't catch a ride going that way, so he went to the other side of the road and caught a ride heading to Memphis on the first try. So in 1966, while riding in the back of a cantaloupe truck, Billy Joe arrived in Nashville and got a job for $50 a week writing songs for Bobby Bare’s publishing company. He got the job with Bare after riding his motor cycle up the front porch and into the front door of Harlan Howard, the dean of Nashville song writers. Harlan suggested he go to Bobby Bare's office and pitch his songs. Not having a demo tape, Bobby told him to play him a song and he would either tell him to leave (if he didn't like it) or give him a job. Bobby Bare knew that he didn't have just an ordinary drifter from Texas in his office that day, he recognized Billy Joe's potential right off. As one of his hits for Bare, “Ride Me Down Easy,” was hitting the charts, the Outlaw Movement was beginning back in his home state of Texas. In fact, his songs caught the attention of quite a few of the popular artists of the ‘70s like Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash and Tom T. Hall. As mentioned earlier, in 1973, Waylon Jennings did an entire album of Billy Joe’s songs called Honky Tonk Heroes. With the success of that album alone, the Outlaw Movement was born and took off running. In the early eighties, John Anderson has a hit with another Billy Joe Shaver song, “I’m Just An Old Chunk Of Coal (but I’m going to be a diamond some day).”

By the mid eighties, Billy Joe Shaver had joined his son, Eddy, and formed a band named Shaver. This proved to be a powerful combination and put a fire into Billy Joe’s songs. Eddy was a guitar prodigy and brought a lot of his heroes like Jimi Hendrix and Dickey Betts influences into the music. Although Billy Joe Shaver never reached super stardom in his career, he feels that he has been rewarded by artists like Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson recording his songs. He is arguably one of the best song writers to come out of Texas or anywhere else for that matter. He has recorded over a dozen or more albums and has been accompanied by many artists along the way.

Billy Joe Shaver has led a colorful life and at the same time had a hard life. He has mastered a way to put all of his experiences and travels into poetry and place it into a song. He has suffered hardships all his life including the loss of his mother and wife to cancer within months of each other. He also lost his son, Eddy, to a drug overdose on New Years Day, 2000. Despite all of that, he continues to write and make music the Billy Joe Shaver way.

From: http://www.texasmusicmovement.com/Billy%20Joe%20Shaver.htm

For more Billy Joe Shaver information please see the sites below:

http://www.dimple.com/pages/type1u.asp?StoryID=1460

http://entertainment.msn.com/Artist/?artist=120868

http://www.countrystandardtime.com/billyjoeshaverFEATURE.html