A.V. Club head writer and hip-hop specialist Nathan Rabin recently decided to spend a year or two immersing himself in the canon of country music, a genre he knew little about, but was keen to explore. The result: “Nashville Or Bust,” a series of essays about seminal country artists. After 52 entries, Rabin plans to travel south and explore some of country music’s most hallowed landmarks and institutions.
Blame it on Billy Joe. Billy Joe Shaver has a genius for getting people into trouble, myself included. Long ago, I was known and respected. Then one day I heard Shaver’s “Georgia On A Fast Train” for the first time. My mind was blown. It spoke to me. It spoke for me. The details were different, sure. In place of Shaver’s good Christian raising and 8th-grade education, I had a dodgy Jewish raising and a college education. But the differences didn’t matter as much as the similarities: As with Shaver, my mammy left me the day before she had me; she hit the road and never once looked back.
I had discovered my own personal anthem, a song I wanted played at my funeral. More than anything, I responded to the attitude of the song, its rebelliousness, defiance, and homespun wit. I loved the righteous indignation Shaver breathed into the line “Ain’t no need in y’all treating me this way.” Who hasn’t felt that way at least once a day?
To borrow David Bowie’s line about Bob Dylan, Shaver has a “voice like sand and glue,” an agitated rasp equally adept at tenderness and blustery rage. After I heard “Georgia On A Fast Train,” my whole world changed. I wanted to know more about the strange world that created such a man. The seeds of Nashville Or Bust were born. My life hasn’t been the same since.
Shaver has that effect on people. He is the songwriter’s songwriter, a honky-tonk poet. Shaver’s buddy Willie Nelson says Shaver may be the best songwriter alive. Kris Kristofferson compared him to Ernest Hemingway. Kristofferson also said that if life were television, Shaver would be on at 4 a.m.; his career has been hobbled by a combination of bad luck and bad timing.
Even in an outlaw movement that fetishized nonconformity and grit, Shaver was too wild, ragged, and raw to win the mainstream acceptance and success afforded to his contemporaries like Nelson, Kristofferson, and Waylon Jennings. Shaver has a genius for eluding success. While riding high off the buzz from Jennings’ Honky Tonk Heroes—a wildly influential album Shaver wrote while still a struggling, unknown songwriter—he was offered a chance to be part of the Wanted! The Outlaws album alongside Jennings, Nelson, and Jessi Colter. But Shaver’s wife—whom he loved so much, he married her thrice—decided he’d been entirely too much of an outlaw as of late, and didn’t need to run with such a rough crowd. The Outlaws became the first country album to go platinum, while Shaver struggled to get his solo career off the ground.
Things had never been easy for Shaver. They never would be. The opening sentence in his memoir/lyric collection Honky Tonk Hero sets the tone for a life filled with missed opportunities and psychological scars: “I was not even born yet when my father first tried to kill me.” Shaver goes on to recount how his drunken, abusive father (who Shaver describes as “half-French, half Blackfoot Sioux, and 100 percent mean”) beat his mother nearly to death while she was seven months pregnant.
Shaver goes on to catalog some of the misfortunes to follow:
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, spent the money I had, and buried my wife, son, and mother in the span of a year.