Shaver greets me at the front door with an explanation about the sign and a warning to avoid sudden movements around his two pit bulls. It's clear from the disarray in the living room that the dogs have been using the sofa and recliner as chew toys, and blood droplets on the floor mark the site of a recent tussle. To discourage this behavior, he reads to them from the Bible. "They say if you read the Bible out loud, it'll scare off all the bad spirits," he says, a grin spreading across his broad face as he rubs Shade, the younger and meaner of the two. "My dogs, they got some bad spirits in 'em."

Shaver's face, carved by years in sun-drenched fields and smoky bars, is drawn and tired -- he's been battling pneumonia -- but he laughs easily and often until the subject turns to his family. In 1999, the same year he lost his son, his wife and mother died of cancer. He stands before the mantel that holds their pictures and acknowledges that he has not yet recovered from the terrible trifecta of that year. He spends most holidays, including last Christmas, alone at home with his dogs.

"I'm lonesome, yeah," he says. "I don't do much of nothing around here really. I don't fish or hunt or anything anymore. I just write songs."

There are thousands of them, jotted down on notepads or sung into a microcassette and stuffed into a box in the back room. He's been writing since he was 8, and he'd be doing it even if the dogs were the sum total of his audience. The process is cathartic, as if by documenting his traumas they will somehow start to make sense. Dozens of artists, including Elvis, Johnny Cash and the Allman Brothers, have covered his songs even though they are unabashedly autobiographical. The lyrics, like the man, are entirely unvarnished. After a concert not long ago, a man approached Shaver and told him that he was John Steinbeck's son and that Steinbeck was a big fan. In retrospect, it seems unlikely -- Steinbeck died before Shaver released his first album -- but not inconceivable. Both writers share an affection for the dispossessed and forgotten, even if Shaver's temperament is significantly more rowdy.

In 1973, Waylon Jennings used nine Shaver songs to create "Honky Tonk Heroes," the seminal album that Country Music Television recently ranked as the second-best country album of all time. But Shaver's influence stems as much from his attitude as his music. "Without Billy Joe, there wouldn't have been a Waylon, at least not a Waylon as an outlaw," says Kinky Friedman, an acclaimed songwriter before he became a best-selling mystery novelist. He says Shaver "was the Che Guevara and Waylon was the Fidel Castro who got all the money and the power."

Indeed, thanks to a succession of bad contracts, bad choices and bad luck, Shaver is far from financially secure.

"I don't know what [record companies] do with that money, I really don't," he says. "Don't much care, really. Songs mean more to me than money. If I heard one of my songs on the radio and I didn't write it, I'd have a fit. I'd give everything I own just to have written that song. They're little time capsules, and when I sing 'em I almost feel like I'm there."

Taken together, those time capsules form an outline of his life: the hardscrabble childhood, the hard-living honky-tonking and the drama of recent years. It's all there -- sometimes explicitly, sometimes obscured in the verse. But when he tells his story over hamburgers and tater tots at a nearby greasy spoon, he goes even further back: "My father actually tried to kill me when I was inside my mother."

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