a ( Honky-Tonk ) Hero for the Rest of Us
By Matt Adams Explore Corsicana
I met her one evening in a barroom downtown She was the picture of truth Her shoulders were sagged and her head was bowed down Like me , she was livin ’ the blues
No great poet – Keats , Yeats , Tennyson , Dickinson , Byron , anybody – ever wrote anything more sorrowful or personally revealing than those aforementioned lines by Billy Joe Shaver , from his song “ Fun While it Lasted .”
Over a career that spanned 50 years and 17 studio albums , Shaver , the sharecropper ’ s son from Corsicana who passed away two years ago at the age of 81 , wove a musical tapestry of aphorisms and colloquialisms worthy of hanging in the Louvre , equipped with nothing but an eighth-grade education , some God-given talent and the bruised wisdom that comes from hard living .
Those of us who love Shaver ’ s music have long appreciated the man ’ s downhome genius , but now the academic world has given him his due with the recent publication of Live Forever : The Songwriting Legacy of Billy Joe Shaver , by Courtney S . Leonard ( Texas A & M University Press ).
Through a mixture of artist interviews and analysis , Leonard dissects Shaver ’ s songs and elevates their stature in the country music canon , making a decent case for Shaver ’ s inclusion in the pantheon of all-time great
Fall 2022 | Explore Corsicana 11