Outlaw Singer Billy Joe Shaver to Perform at the Troubadour

Jonny Whiteside

In the early 1970s, the Nashville formula for Country music had calcified into a stale combination of tried and true formula and tepid pop crossover fodder. There was a small troupe of artistic seditionaries hoping to smash the genre’s rigid limitations and when they all came to the popular fore as the Outlaw Movement, famously spearheaded by Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, one of their greatest creative assets was the Texas songwriter Billy Joe Shaver.

Unruly and brilliant, Shaver’s songs were gloriously unconventional yet rooted in the classic honky-tonk ethos of such illustrious forebears as Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell. Shaver’s deceptively simple lyrics have an economy and immediacy that’s arresting, and while he prides himself on taking pains to ensure that every one of them is “a song that the dumbest guy in the world can understand“ their emotional and psychic content and his wily use of metaphor are dazzling.

Born August 16, 1939 in Corsicana Texas, Shaver’s life was a blur of hard times, hard living, and hard drinking. From an unstable childhood of poverty to a youth of dedicated hell-raising, a love of country music was the one constant in his decidedly unstable existence. Despite that fact, Shaver didn’t get into the business until he was in his early thirties, following a stint in the Navy not to mention losing two fingers from his right hand in a sawmill accident, but by the time he arrived in Nashville in 1973, the atmosphere was crackling with a long overdue need for change.

After Waylon Jennings included ten Shaver songs on his groundbreaking 1974 “Honky-Tonk Heroes” album, and major stars like Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan began recording Shaver compositions, he should’ve been leading a charmed life. Instead, it only grew more chaotic. Over the next three decades, he had two record companies go belly-up after releasing a Shaver album, got screwed out of royalties, quit the music business five times, married and divorced the same woman six times (only to lose her to cancer), and lost his only son — and musical collaborator — Eddy Shaver to a heroin overdose on New Year’s Eve 2000, and in 2007, narrowly escaped hard prison time after a bizarre shooting incident at  a Lorena, Texas tavern.

Following a confrontation, Shaver shot 50-year-old Billy Bryant Coker in the face. Miraculously, Coker survived after the bullet traveled through his cheek, and, almost as miraculously, Shaver was acquitted following a sensational trial where he combatively took the stand, as did old friend Willie Nelson, who served as a character witness.  At one point, the prosecutor asked why Shaver didn’t just get in his vehicle and leave the scene of the shooting. “I’m from Texas.” Shaver replied. “If I was a chicken s#!+, I would have left.”

There is nothing ordinary about Billy Joe Shaver and his music is also just as reliably extraordinary. Now 75, the singer-songwriter has hardly mellowed and with his terrific and widely acclaimed current album, “Long in the Tooth”, he not only upholds but also expands an already exemplary body of idiosyncratic work. Part philosopher, part tradition bearer, and all-around ornery truth teller, Shaver’s performances are never anything less than riveting.

Billy Joe Shaver appears at the Troubadour, March 9. Tickets can be purchased here.