Billy Joe Shaver Freedom's Child (Compadre) Release date: 19 November 2002

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My friend George Lewis -- a professor of sociology at the University of the Pacific with a stunning record collection -- had this to say when he learned I'd be interviewing Billy Joe Shaver: "If a third of the commercial attention being paid to Johnny Cash this year was turned to Billy Joe, the world would be a more just place".

After the interview, I went home to find the new No Depression in my mailbox with -- you guessed it -- Johnny Cash on the cover. That's not to say that Cash isn't a significant artist; it's difficult to overstate his contribution to American music. (And in all fairness, that last year No Depression did do a very fine feature on Shaver.) In fact on his new record, Freedom's Child, Shaver (now 63) pays tribute to Cash with his song "That's Why the Man in Black Sings the Blues".

It's another example, however, of Shaver's career as a singer-songwriter, spent mostly in the shadows. Other musicians, though, have been hearing Shaver for years and covering his songs. It began with Waylon Jennings's 1973 album Honky Tonk Heroes; nine of its ten songs are Shaver compositions. From there, the list is staggering, including everyone from Bob Dylan ("Old Five and Dimers Like Me") to the Gourds ("Omaha") to John Anderson ("I'm Just an Old Chunk of Coal"). And, yes, Johnny Cash has recorded six of Shaver's songs.

The thing about Billy Joe Shaver is that it's pretty much impossible to listen to his music without knowing that you are, in effect, visiting with him because he is just an honest, personal songwriter. Clearly, much on Shaver's mind for this album are the cancer-related deaths of his mother and wife in 2001 and the death of his son, Eddy, a guitar genius and musical collaborator, who died of an accidental heroin overdose on 31 December 2000. In the end, Freedom's Child is a celebration with Shaver opening up the family scrapbook to share his experiences and the stories of those he loves.

If "I've Been to Georgia on a Fast Train" is Shaver's early biography, "Day by Day", a song on Freedom's Child, is its sequel. As the singer chronicles the lives and deaths of his wife and child he realizes the he sings "songs from the Family [sic] that never will die", a very Shakespearean notion.

Recently, Shaver visited with PopMatters about his new album, which was recorded in two weeks during early September and reunited him with R. S. Field, producer of Tramp on Your Street (1993), and the journey he's taken to get there.

PopMatters: Congratulations on winning the Americana Music Association's Lifetime Achievement Award for Songwriting.
Billy Joe Shaver: Oh, thank you very much. It was the first time I'd ever won anything. I was surprised. I actually didn't know it. I was actually supposed to present an Album of the Year award to someone -- I'd agreed to do that -- and I had no idea because I'd never won anything before. I'd been nominated for five different Grammies, but I'd never won anything. I never even dreamed -- I didn't even know I was considered for anything.

PopMatters: What has it been like for you as a songwriter to have your music covered by so many people?
BJS: Oh, it's been great. Yeah, that part's really wonderful because you know you did good work [laughs].

PopMatters: What are some of the covers that stand out?
BJS: I tell you, Patty Loveless on that "When Fallen Angels Fly" -- that was a great cover -- and "Honky Tonk Heroes" was a great cover. Even my own, I like the one that we did called Electric Shaver. It had two razors [laughs]. That was pretty cool. Gosh, I'll probably think about it after -- nobody's ever asked me that question.

PopMatters: Let's go back for a minute to the beginning. How did you become so interested in music?
BJS: I was about -- I was five years old when I started singing. When I'd hear something, I would just sing and sing what I could remember of it and then just make up the rest. My grandmother raised me on her old-age pension, so we weren't really all that well-to-do. We didn't have a radio for a long time -- lived out at the edge of town in Corsicana out in the cotton fields, and I'd hear little pieces and parts of songs, and I would sing. I noticed that people got to really liking to hear me sing, and they liked to hear what I had to say, too. My grandmother had credit down at the general store, and sometimes her old-age pension check wouldn't come in, and she'd need an extension on her credit. The lady down there knew I sang, and she said, "Well, yeah, you can have it, Birdie" -- Grandmother's name was 'Birdie', like a bird, you know -- "if you get that boy to sing". They'd stand me up on a cracker barrel, and I'd start to sing and sing my heart out. I thought I was doing something. I didn't have any idea they were just putting me on. But, anyway, later on, I did start singing and selling papers on the street there in Corsicana, Texas, where I was born, and I made a lot of money selling papers -- just from singing and tapping my foot. No guitar. Just singing and selling papers. And that's one of my songs on the record, "Corsicana Daily Sun" -- that was the name of the paper. [He begins doing his call] "Papers! Corsicana Daily Sun [laughs]"! I was a really skinny little kid, and I sold a lot of papers.

PopMatters: What songs really caught your ear when you were a child?
BJS: Well, actually, across the tracks from us -- my grandmother's place was way out, well, actually I'd say "way out in the country", but back then it was. It was about five miles out of Corsicana, and five miles out of Corsicana was out in the cotton fields. Across the railroad track was a settlement of African-American cotton pickers, and I would sneak over there every day. She'd have to come over and get me and give me a whipping every day -- it was a ritual we went through [laughs]. And I'd go over there every day listen to somebody play. There was always somebody over there had a bottleneck and a guitar, and I'd just stand there and listen to them or sit down on the ground and just listen to them just as much as I could. I got influenced by them more than anybody; then later on, we got a radio, and I listened to the Grand Ole Opry and stuff and Roy Acuff, and Jimmie Rodgers was, like, king to me, and later on Ernest Tubb, and, of course, Hank Williams. I actually got to see Hank Williams one time. Homer and Jethro were playing in town, in Corsicana, and I'd heard from the kids -- kids loved Homer and Jethro, you know, because they'd do [begins singing] "How much is that hound dog in the window"? That funny stuff, you know. The kids loved it -- and they could really play, too. They were real good musicians. I heard about it being this particular night, and I snuck out of the house and walked that five miles down the railroad track because you could walk a straight five -- down the railroad track was kind of scary. I don't know what I was -- I was somewhere between five and ten or eleven or something like that. I was fairly young. And I walked down there. It was at the Wonder Bread Company where the trucks back down into the hole -- I think it was Wonder Bread or one of the bread companies, but I think it was Wonder. Anyway, the trucks would back down into the hole and then get loaded from the docks, you know, and it was all cement. Homer and Jethro were up on the top platform, and they were all playing. When I came in, all the people, there was just smoke coming out of there, and they's all passing bottles around, doing that bootlegging stuff because Corsicana was dry, and they were selling people, I noticed, a drink for a nickel and stuff like that. When you're a kid, you can see all that stuff. I came in, and people were stepping on my feet, so I shimmied up this pole that was in the middle -- they let me in free, of course. They didn't charge me. And Jethro was just getting off, and he said, "Here's a fellow, ya'll ain't never heard of him, but he's going to do a song or two, and I want you to welcome Hank Williams". He came on, and what the deal was nobody knew him, so they just started doing their bootlegging and talking, and they wasn't paying no attention to him. Of course, I was. I was up on that pole, and he saw there wasn't nobody listening, and he just sang right straight to me. He just looked me in the eye and sang right straight to me. He didn't do but one song [laughs].

PopMatters: What song did he do?
BJS: You know, I wish to God I could remember, but I can't. It must have been one of his songs because there wouldn't be any reason of doing nobody else's, I'd think. That's the way I am. I've done my own songs all the way through. I've never done anybody else's. It's so much easier because you can remember the words [laughs]. You know, it's not real hard. But I slid on down that pole, and I went on back home. The reason, I guess, I remember so well is because my grandmother just about beat me to death for sneaking out like that. I actually knew what I could do at that time -- I knew eventually that I would someday be doing this stuff, but I pushed it away so long, and I got my fingers cut off, and my back broke and had several discs replaced and a steel pipe in my neck, and I've had a heart attack and all that kind of stuff, but I finally fell back on the music. When I cut my fingers off at the sawmill, I said, "You know, God, if you can get me through this, I'll go to doing what I'm supposed to do". So that's how I got around to music. I'd been writing, though, for years and years. And my schoolteacher [Mrs. Leff] -- just the other day, we're doing a documentary on me, Robert Duvall's wife is ... and we went by and filmed her. She's 102 years old, and she's still up there clicking, I mean [laughs]. She broke her hip, though, about a week ago, but she still got up in the wheelchair and had a dress on and looked nice. She's sharp as a whip, and they were just so amazed at her. She really wasn't my English teacher; she was my homeroom teacher -- I was only in the eighth grade when I met her. I had some poems and things, and she urged me to write some poems. I wrote them, and I said, "I'll write them if you just won't put my name on them. Put 'anonymous' on there" because back then, if you wrote poetry, or even if you played music, you were considered a sissy, and I had enough trouble already without that. She encouraged me so much -- if it hadn't been for her, I don't guess I'd have went on later and got into it because I knew coming from her, she was so smart and so, so learned on that stuff that she wouldn't tell me that. You know, I didn't hear her telling anybody else that. So actually that turned me; that made me want to go on and get into it.

PopMatters: You've talked about singers who've influenced you, but what about poets?
BJS: Oh, yeah, Robert Service. I love Robert Service.

PopMatters: Why?
BJS: I can tell that he really did it. He really went up there in Alaska and did all that stuff. You can just tell. I can tell by the words that there's no made-up stuff in there, just real stuff. And I got off on him real big time. Of course, all the other great poets, I love them, but Robert Service in particular because he got out there and did it, and that's exactly what I did.

PopMatters: Why has personal honesty always been such a central part of your writing?
BJS: Well, I knew that more than likely, for some reason or another, I seem to be snake-bit about getting popular, so I knew that from the very beginning, though. Mrs. Leff instilled that in me. She told me, "Always be honest. Always do quality work, and you will get somewhere. People will listen to you. You'll have friends, and people will care about what you're doing". And that's what I did because I figured if I stayed with the quality and the honesty, that someday the cream would finally come to the top, no matter what happened. And even if it didn't, if I passed or something, my work would speak for itself because it would keep the quality and the honesty in there. That's the only thing I really had going; the rest of them had money and busses and stuff like that, and I just had my quality and my honesty, and I've kept it. And that's cheap, you know. I mean, if you'll stay with it, it don't cost you a thing to be honest and faithful and true and stuff like that. It don't cost a man nothing. And it's so hard to maintain sometimes. You know, I was married to the same girl three times [laughs]. One time, I started telling her lies -- I got so tangled up in them lies, I tell you . . . . I finally came to her and just laid it out there. I said, "I've got to stop this. I've never done this, and I don't want to do this no more", and I just laid it all out there. And, boy, she got so mad at me! She said, "Dadgum you"! She said, "I knew what you was doing. Why'd you have to come and tell me"? She said, "I figured you'd quit after awhile, and it'd blow over, but now you told me, and now it's out in the open. How do you think I feel"? She said, "I guess it's good for your soul, but it ain't very good for mine" [laughs]! She said, "If you ever do anything like that again, don't you dare come to me and confess because I already know what you've done". And most women do -- I don't know, women's intuition. They just . . . you can't get a lie by a woman [laughs]. It's impossible!

PopMatters: How do you write?
BJS: Well, now, I tell you what, with me, I've kept it like a hobby. And it also is the cheapest psychiatrist there is -- I've always said that. It comes to me in different forms. Sometimes it'll come to me as the words or a line or wake me up in the middle of the night. Now here lately, I've gotten where I've mastered it so well that I've got a little tape-recorder thing that I can just tape a little part of it, and then the next day, I can get up and finish it -- if I want to. But I tell you, I never do go back to those tapes. Someday I will, but I've got hundreds of tapes that I've just done in the middle of the night because I wanted to sleep instead of write! When I first started, all I did was write, and I just stayed awake pretty near all the time. I was a slave to it. My well was really full. Now, I do it kind of when I want to. Most of the time, it's a passionate thing with me. When I get moved, I really enjoy doing it. But it's still a hobby. And I'm not really, I'd say, in it for the money, although the money's nice. But I'm still in it for that hobby and also the psychiatrist thing because God knows I need it [laughs].

PopMatters: One last historical question: Any thoughts, in retrospect, about the Outlaw movement that you were so much a part of, especially with Waylon Jennings' recent death?
BJS: Waylon, Waylon really . . . I had to push Waylon a lot to get him to do my stuff, but, you know, if it hadn't been for Waylon, I don't know. The direction that I've gone is great, and Waylon was already headed in that way. I just feel like I was so lucky to catch hold of him because nobody could out-sing him, you know. And I could not even possibly start to sing as good as he could when I came up to him with my songs. My songs were bigger than I was, you know. They were so big, I couldn't start to sing them well, and Waylon was big enough and good enough that he could sing them, and that all clicked. It just worked so well. As far as being outlaws, we were more like outcasts because people didn't want this stuff to work. I lot of people -- well, I'd say people in Nashville -- had a different, big machine going, and it was making them money, and it's their machine. That's a true way to say it, and they had cogs in it that didn't fit ours. And here we come with something completely different, and it just kind of throwed them for a flip, and everyone kind of had to start doing it our way instead of doing it their way, which was a good thing, really, because it got the honesty back into the songs like it was when Jimmie Rodgers and all those old fellows were -- I think about every 30 years it turns over, and then the honesty and the quality starts coming back, and then they stray away. Whoever it is, they or us, veer away from it, and then you have to go back to it again. We just happened to be in that particular spot where it got changed.

PopMatters: Let's talk about the new record. What were you going for with Freedom's Child?
BJS: You know, I never really had a big plan. Well, we had a couple of little things that we were going to do. First, we were going to do an album on "Music City, USA", and R. S. Field, who produced Tramp on Your Street, the album that was really successful for my son and I, Shaver, oh I know it sold over 300,000. I don't know if it's still selling -- it's a great record, you know, and R. S. is a great guy to . . . he takes things, and he'll put different pictures here and there. It's like . . . if the album were a gallery and he had pictures that I had painted, he hangs them in the correct spot. He puts them in line correctly, and he just treats them right. He's just really good at that. And I was so happy to be able to work with him again, and I trusted him so much, you know. He has such a reputation to uphold, too. When I was able to work with him, I was really happy because we got in there and got started, and things started sticking their heads up. When they did, we moved in the direction that we were supposed to. And, just, a lot of those songs, matter of fact, about four or five of them, I wrote in the studio. I usually do that, though. At the last minute, I'll write song that . . . especially "Day By Day". That song there, even though it's not commercial -- it's real long -- for me, I had to write it someday to get it out of me. It was so therapeutical -- I think that's the word -- therapeutic, I guess that's it.

PopMatters: What is it like for you now to hear about your life and the lives of people you cared about so deeply encapsulated in this song?
BJS: Well, actually, what happened was I'd been trying to write that song for about 20 years. And every time I'd turn around, something would change. It was one . . . I have songs, since it's like a hobby with me, I have songs that I'll play with, like a cat playing with a ball of yarn and having fun with it. And I waited all that time. But then, things started changing, and Brenda passed away, and my mother passed away, and then my son passed away, and the song kept changing. Finally, it was the last song that I wrote in the studio. I told Bobby -- I call him Bobby, R. S. Field -- I said, "I mean, I've got to have all the time I can with this one because this one's the hardest one I've ever wrote. It may not be the best, but it's the hardest one. I've just gotta have right down to the last day to write this one". And sure enough: It was the last song we did. There were several others, like "That's What She Said Last Night" [laughs], that's just a made-up thing. I wrote that in the studio.

PopMatters: But that one's so much fun!
BJS: Yeah, it is fun, isn't it [laughs]? Yeah, my son started that thing, about the fax machine and all that. So I decided I would finish that. And there were several others I can't recall right now. But there's probably about four or five songs I wrote, I finished, there, but "Day By Day", I'd been working on so hard and so long. I had to get it out of me anyway, and it helped.

PopMatters: Tucked in there with "That's What She Said Last Night" is "Drinkin' Back", which sounds like George Jones would be right at home with it.
BJS: I wanted everybody to know that I could . . . that I like that kind of music. I like that old-timey stuff, too. I think it worked real good.

PopMatters: You've included some political tracks as well with "Freedom's Child", the Johnny Cash song, and "Here in the USA". Why have you woven these in with these pictures you've created of yourself and your family?
BJS: Well, the times call for some of it. "Good Ol' USA" is not a fight song, and I want things to get back like they were when little kids over in other countries, that's what they dream about is coming to the United States. And I want people to know that this is still a beautiful place full of beautiful, kind people. That song right there, I figure that's good enough to do it and to say what's going on over here and the way that we feel about this and that. But "Freedom's Child", now, is not exactly a protest song; it's a song that's saying, "Look, there's people that join the service, they volunteer, they know that someday this very thing could happen to them, that they could be buried in a grave somewhere, unknown. Yet they go ahead, and they volunteer. These people are heroes; they're just heroes, and it's a good thing we've got them, that there are people that care enough about us that -- I don't know how they feel because no one could actually know how they feel. But they do. They join the service knowing that this could happen to them, and yet they join it anyway. And it's good for us. It's good for everybody, and I'm just kind of patting them on the back was what I was doing. It might be conceived as an anti-war thing, but it's really not. It's more like saying thanks to the ones that volunteer, knowing that they could wind up in a bad situation.

PopMatters: Since you've brought up Jimmie Rodgers twice, I have to ask about "Deja Blues" -- and what was working with Todd Snider like?
BJS: Actually, I was writing that song when Todd and I went to Nashville, and we were going to go over and have a couple beers at this place there in Nashville -- I'm not going to name it. But there's these two redneck brothers that work there and run the place -- they're from Texas; I know them from way back. I thought, well, this is innocent enough. We can get in there and get this done. Todd was waiting on his girlfriend, and, of course, he's walking around barefoot. We go in there, and we ordered a beer, and we were having a drink. I drank about one, now, or two . . . [laughs] two's my limit. But anyway, I hadn't seen Todd in a long time. There was a phone on the wall right there, and it rang. And the guy behind the bar who runs the place -- he's an old redneck -- and he says, "Don't answer that phone". Todd started walking toward the phone, and he said, "Hey, buddy, don't answer that phone". And Todd just kept on walking toward it. He said, "I said don't answer that phone". Todd said, "Well, my girlfriend . . . " He said, "I mean don't answer that phone". And Todd reaches over, and he answers the phone. Of course, whoever's on the other end hangs up -- I don't know what was going on. Maybe some kind of deal or something. But they hung up. And he said, "Well, wasn't nobody on the other end". And that guy said, "I thought I told you dammit not to answer that phone". And Todd said, "Well, dude . . . " [laughs]. And that guy said, "Dude? Dude? You calling me a 'dude'"? And he started coming out from under the counter with hogleg, man! He's gonna shoot [Todd], you know, because people don't really realize that down here in Texas, you call a guy a dude, you're calling him a greenhorn that don't know nothing. It's not like in the movies [laughs]. I finally got between him and Todd, and I said, "Look, man, I been knowing you a long time". I said, "Please just let us walk out of here". I said, "This guy is a notorious treehugger [laughs]. Man, he don't know what he's saying". He said, "Well, he better not say it in here. He better not dare call me a dude. You better not open your mouth". And I said, I told Todd, "Don't say a word". We eased on out of there, and I was writing on that song at the time, and I said, "You've just got to help me finish this song" [laughs]. And so we did. That had a little something to do with it -- just talking in there, anyway.

PopMatters: So how did the Jimmie Rodgers' blue yodels come mixed up in all that?
BJS: I don't know. That's just the way I started it. It was just a fun song, and it almost wound up getting us killed [laughs].

PopMatters: What about the final tracks on the record. First the "Merry Christmas" song.
BJS: Well, it just came to me one night that I should write a simple song about Jesus Christ because that's His birthday. I looked at it this way: Jesus Christ has a whole lot better chance of getting off the ground than that big fat guy. And I just wanted kids to know what's it's really all about and what Christmas is all about, and I think no one's ever really explained that. There's a lot of, you know, "Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer" and stuff like that -- great songs, though, don't get me wrong -- but maybe they'll hear this one and know what it's all about.

PopMatters: And then, of course, the hidden track, which is your son, Eddy, playing some pretty amazing blues. Is that original?
BJS: It's an original. I caught him out in the garage one night, and he was just playing away, and I said, "Eddy, I'm going to set this tape recorder up". I just set it out there, and he just started playing, and from front to end, he went ahead and laid that down for me. You know, it's such a long thing, and he never missed a lick anywhere. It was pretty amazing, and I kept it -- it's called "Necessary Evil", that's the name of it. And we decided, R. S. and I -- of course, R. S. is a big fan of his, too -- we decided, well, let's just put it on there as a hidden track, and maybe somebody will find it, and they think they've found gold or something.

PopMatters: It's fantastic.
BJS: It is. It's awfully good. He just had a little bitty amp and just his guitar -- a real little bitty amp. Gosh, that was way back. Wow, I can't remember exactly. Actually, it was way back from here, but it was right before he died, really.

PopMatters: In the near future, will we be hearing any of the stuff Eddy was working on?
BJS: I have a lot of that stuff, and I've also got a whole album of stuff that I'm thinking I'll go in and just do a duet with him. If this album, if it does well enough, I feel like I'll be able to call a few of my own shots after this album because I can't imagine it missing too far. I think it's really good. Being really honest, I really think it's going to open doors for me to be able to maybe do something that I really want to do.

PopMatters: What do you really want to do? And what are your future plans?
BJS: Well, I'm doing some movies and things -- Robert Duvall's a huge fan of mine, and he helps me get into these movies. As a matter of fact, I'm doing this one called Second Hand Lion, and I just have a small part in it, but they made the part for me because he really didn't know if I wanted to do it or not until the last minute. He asked me, and I said, "Yeah", and he said, "Well, we'll make you a part", and they did. So it's a small part, but anytime I want to do any movies, he'll help me. He's a really good friend. That's where the quality came in because as long as you keep quality like that -- you know, he's a direct descendant of William Shakespeare?

PopMatters: No, I didn't.
BJS: That's pretty amazing, isn't it? So if it gets by him [laughs] . . . .