Billy Joe Shaver

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Billy Joe Shaver, 2007
Chart positions
Explanation of the data
Albums
Long in the tooth
  US 157 08/23/2014 (1 week)

Billy Joe Shaver (born August 16, 1939 in Corsicana , Texas , † October 28, 2020 in Waco , Texas) was an American singer and songwriter .

Life

Billy Joe Shaver grew up with his older sister Patricia with his mother Victory Odessa Shaver (née Watson), the father, Virgil Lee Shaver, had left the family before their son was born. Since his mother worked in a nightclub in Waco, Shaver spent a lot of time as a child with his grandmother in Corsicana, Texas. After eighth grade, Billy Joe Shaver dropped out of school and started working as a cotton picker. On the day of his seventeenth birthday, Billy Joe Shaver enrolled in the US Navy . After his army service, he took on a number of temporary jobs, including trying his hand at rodeo. During this time he met Brenda Joyce Tindell, whom he soon married. The two had their son John Edwin in 1962, who went by the name Eddy Shaverbecame a country musician himself. When the child was there, Shaver was hired at a sawmill. One day he got his right hand (Shaver was right-handed) in the machine and lost two fingers almost entirely. Billy Joe and Brenda divorced and remarried several times - there were three weddings and two divorces. In 1999, his mother and Brenda Joyce died of cancer in quick succession, and their son Eddy died the following year.

Shaver released his debut album Old Five and Dimers in 1973. This and his next albums in the 1970s were only noticed by a small country community. This was not changed by the almost exclusive use of Shavers songs by country star Waylon Jennings on his album Honky Tonk Heroes (1973). Billy Joe Shaver was known only to a small group of country fans outside of Texas for years - not even Elvis Presley's version of his song You Asked Me To could change that.

In his songs Shaver repeatedly addresses the lives of ordinary people who, as he says in Georgia on a Fast Train , have “eight years of school and a good Christian upbringing”. In the same song he also addresses being abandoned by parents. Even if Shaver himself was the father, the song says with a paradox: "It means my mother left me the day before I was born." This song is exemplary for the fact that Shaver succeeds again and again, sometimes with extremely simple ones linguistic means to achieve the greatest possible effects. Almost all of his songs have hooklines , i.e. lines that stand for themselves as quotations or paradoxes. Shaver tells the rural population about really essential things in the rough, grammatically often unclean language of the rural population. As a result, many songs written by Billy Joe Shaver achieve a level of credibility that hardly any other songwriter of his generation could achieve.

More songs that u. a. Oklahoma Wind , Honky Tonk Heroes , Music City USA , Live Forever and Old Five and Dimers Like Me depict the self-confidence of an underprivileged class . Much of his pieces have been recorded by other artists from many genres, including Bobby Bare , Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan , Kris Kristofferson , Emmylou Harris and Johnny Cash . Johnny Cash once said he sang the Billy Joe Shaver song Old Chunk of Coal every morning in the alcohol and drug rehab to give himself courage.

In 2006 Shaver was inducted into the Texas Country Music Hall of Fame. On December 6, 2007, he received a Grammy nomination for his country gospel album Everybody's Brother .

Shaver was on September 17, 2008 in Waco ( Texas indicted), on 1 April 2007 a man named Billy Coker in a bar in Lorena to have violated (Texas) with a gun in his face. The charges were grievous bodily harm with a lethal weapon and the unauthorized taking of a handgun into a restaurant. The jury trial against him began on April 5, 2010 in Waco and ended on the evening of April 9, 2010 with an acquittal on charges of aggravated assault. Billy Joe Shaver was represented in this process by the prominent defense attorney Dick DeGuerin from Houston , who had previously defended clients such as David Koresh . DeGuerin had taken the case pro bono . a. the actor Robert Duvall interrogated. Dale Watson wrote the song Where Do You Want It? which was also published by Whitey Morgan . David Waddell & Hellbound Train also addressed the incident in a song called Way Down Texas Way ; in it, Shaver is described as one of the chosen few , i.e. the chosen one.

Discography

Albums

  • Old Five and Dimers Like Me (1973)
  • When I Get My Wings (1976)
  • Gypsy Boy (1977)
  • I'm Just an Old Chunk of Coal… But I'm Gonna Be a Diamond Someday (1981)
  • Billy Joe Shaver (1982)
  • Salt Of The Earth (1987)
  • Tramp on Your Street (1993)
  • Honky Tonk Heroes (1994)
  • Unshaven: Live at Smith's Olde Bar (1995)
  • Restless Wind: The Legendary Billy Joe Shaver: 1973–1987 (1995)
  • Highway of Life (1996)
  • Victory (1998)
  • Electric Shaver (1999)
  • The Earth Rolls On (2001)
  • Freedom's Child (2002)
  • Live From Down Under (with Kinky Friedman ) (2002)
  • Try and Try Again (2003)
  • Billy and the Kid (2004)
  • A Tribute to Billy Joe Shaver (2005)
  • The Real Deal (2005)
  • Greatest Hits (2007)
  • Storyteller. Live at the Bluebird 1992 (2007)
  • Everybody's Brother (2007)
  • Live at Billy Bob's Texas (2012)
  • Long in the Tooth (August 2014)

Movies

Fonts

  • Honky Tonk Hero . University of Texas Press (March 2005)

Web links

sources

  1. ↑ US chart history
  2. ↑ Billy Joe Shaver, Seminal Outlaw Country Songwriter, Dead at 81. Rolling Stone, October 28, 2020, accessed October 28, 2020 .
  3. ^ The Austin Chronicle: Archives: 1997-1998
  4. ↑ Report on Shaver on country.de
  5. ^ "Saving Country Music", website in support of "REAL" Country Music
  6. ^ Official homepage of the band
personal data
SURNAME Shaver, Billy Joe
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Texan country singer and songwriter
DATE OF BIRTH August 16, 1939
PLACE OF BIRTH Corsicana , Texas , USA
DATE OF DEATH October 28, 2020
Place of death Waco , Texas