Billy Joe Shaver, Texas songwriting legend, died yesterday at the age of 81.
The sad news took me to one of my favorite Billy Joe songs, Live Forever, a Shaver signature song of love and the afterlife originally released in 1993 and written with his late son Eddy Shaver.
I'm gonna cross that river
I'm gonna catch tomorrow now
You're gonna want to hold me
Just like I always told you
You're gonna miss me when I'm gone
Nobody here will ever find me
But I will always be around
Just like the songs I leave behind me
I'm gonna live forever now
Be good to one another
Please try to raise your children right
Don't let the darkness take 'em
Don't make 'em feel forsaken
Just lead 'em safely to the light
And all the stars fall from the sky
Remember someone really loves you
We'll live forever you and I..."
Now, Billy Joe has crossed that river and caught tomorrow.
He's been led safely to the light.
And, we who admire his work and love his spirit have certainty that, however it works, Billy Joe is with son Eddy, a guitar-phenom who died of a drug overdose in 2000, and with Brenda, his three-time wife who died from cancer in 1999, and Momma, too, up where the Eagles soar and love replaces pain and loss.
Talking about the song Live F0rever in an 2014 NPR interview, Billy Joe said,“[Eddy] actually gave me that melody, and I carried it around for nearly a year,” he said. “It was such a great melody. His spirit’s still with me.
"I do believe that when people pass away, the goodness, the good things they did, it seems like they melt into your likeness. They melt into your likeness, and you become a better person for it.”
For me and others who are part of Billy Joe's small but loyal group of followers, his spirit and voice of truth are still with us and we are better for it.
We will cherish his songs, the times we saw him clubs and at festivals and will try and try again to remember to hope, to laugh, to see the good and seek the truth.
I saw Billy Joe perform many times, anytime he came anywhere nearby. I met and talked with him twice. My two pictures with him are cherished and displayed on one of our music walls.
One, at right, was at Zydeco in Birmingham, the first time we saw him there, and at left, just two years ago, at the Elliston Street Festival in Nashville, where cheesy me wore a shirt with a picture of us together for the picture of us together.
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| Billy Joe Shaver and me at Zydeco |
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| Laughing with Billy Joe in Nashville |
He was my Honky Tonk Hero and dusty Texas guru. He was a songwriter's songwriter who never made it to the official big time, an Old Chunk of Coal who is a diamond now, so blue pure and perfect.
Below is a blog post I wrote about Billy Joe Shaver in August of 2011.
RIP Billy Joe.
But, his shoulder was hurting – he’d had surgery and probably rushed to the tour without doing much of the recommended rehab (plus he told a story about falling and being picked up by that shoulder). And, it was hot, summertime-in-Birmingham hot inside the upstairs bar-slash concert hall. Shaver’s trademark snap-up denim shirt was soaked, and he asked the crew to turn off the white-hot back lights.
Still, he sang and told his stories. A performer and songwriter for most of his seven decades, Billy Joe kept coming back from the brief breaks during drum and guitar solos to sing another one. He gave us Georgia on a Fast Train, Live Forever, Tramp on Your Street, Honky Tonk Heroes, Black Rose and That’s What She Said Last Night. He did Wacko in Waco about the altercation that landed him in court last year, charged with assault. The jury of Texans sided with Billy Joe, whose friends Willie Nelson and Robert Duvall stood by him in court.
Shaver, whose been born again a couple of times, didn’t do many of his “Christian songs,” likely because he needed that painful right arm to properly emote songs like If You Don’t Love Jesus, You can go to Hell and Get Thee Behind me Satan.
Unknown to many in the popular country world, Billy Joe Shaver is a songwriter’s songwriter and is known by loyal fans and other songwriters, especially Texas ones. Bob Dylan name-checked Billy Joe in the song I Feel a Change Comin’ On, from Dylan’s last album, Together through Life, singing “I’m listening to Billy Joe Shaver and reading James Joyce.” Kris Kristofferson, who helped Billy early during their Nashville songwriting years says, “He’s as real a writer as Hemingway. He’s timeless.”
I bought one of the six copies they had of Shaver’s book at the concert souvenir table, an autobiography called “Honky Tonk Hero” and on a normal concert night, he would have signed it for me, because that’s the way Billy Joe is. But, he left while the band was still closin’ it down. His people said Billy Joe just didn’t feel good. We could tell, and we thought, God bless him.
The book, with an introduction that is posted on his website http://www.billyjoeshaver.com/, proves Kristofferson’s real writer statement and tells the stories – how he survived, how he lost two and a half fingers in a saw mill accident, lost his wife to cancer (married three times, divorced twice) and lost their child, guitar-phenom Eddy Shaver, to a drug overdose, and how Jesus helped him see that his gift was telling stories through songs.
The book’s introduction begins, “I was not even born yet when my father first tried to kill me.”
From that rough beginning of his father, who was half French and half Blackfoot Sioux (and 100 percent mean, Billy Joe writes) beating his pregnant mother unconscious and then leaving her to die to today when Billy Joe reads his Bible everyday and looks forward to seeing his wife and son in Heaven, Billy Joe’s life is a testament to God-given talent and overcoming the odds, and sharing some of America’s best songs along the way.
In the book, which includes lyrics to dozens of great songs covered by everyone from Waylon to Elvis, Billy Joe says of his tough beginning and beyond, “I’ve lost parts of three fingers, broke my back, suffered a heart attack and a quadruple bypass, had a steel plate put in my neck and 136 stitches in my head, fought drugs and booze, spend the money I had and buried my wife, son and mother in the span of one year.”
No wonder he didn’t feel good.
But, as Shaver says in the book, “I’m not here to complain or to ask for pity. Life is hard for everybody, just in different ways. I’m not proud of my misfortune – I’m proud of my survival. “
We are too, Billy Joe.
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