Billy Joe Shaver Passes Away At The Age Of 81

K.F. Raizor, author of the website Raizor's Edge and the book We Can't Sing and We Ain't Funny: The World of Homer and Jethro is our guest writer today on That Nashville Sound. She's ever so gracious to provide wonderful tributes to honor those to whom the music we treasure just wouldn't be the same without. Thank you, K.F.

For the third time this month we bid farewell to a Texas country music legend. 

Billy Joe Shaver died this morning (10/28) following a massive stroke. 

Like Johnny Bush and Jerry Jeff Walker, Billy Joe Shaver had success when someone else did his songs.  In this case, “Honky Tonk Heroes,” a hit for Waylon Jennings. Jennings also covered “Old Five and Dimers (Like Me),” the title track from Shaver’s 1973 debut album.  Other hits from Shaver’s pen included “Ride Me Down Easy” and “I’m Just an Old Chunk of Coal.”

Billy Joe Shaver joined the U.S. Navy on his 17th birthday (August 16, 1956).  After his service, he married (one of three times he’d marry the same woman) and took a job in a lumber mill.  When he was 26, an accident cost him his index and middle fingers on his right hand, and infection threatened the rest of the hand.

But he survived, becoming the tough “outlaw” Texan that a lot of the other singers only dreamed of.  He was tried for shooting a man in a bar who pulled a knife on him (“I shot him right between the ‘mother’ and the ‘f***er,’” Shaver would recount).  The story became legendary and the basis for Dale Watson’s song “Where Do You Want It.”  He suffered a heart attack during a concert at Gruene Hall in August 2001, forcing him to undergo quadruple bypass surgery. 

We’re losing our old five and dimers like him.

Billy Joe Shaver was 81.