Put snow on the mountain, raised hell on the hill
Locked horns with the Devil himself
Been a rodeo bum, a son of a gun
And a hobo, with stars in my crown

-- From "Ride Me Down Easy," 1982

Shaver's father, Buddy Shaver, was a violent bootlegger who beat his wife and left her for dead in a backwoods pond. He thought she was running around on him even though she was seven months pregnant with Billy Joe at the time. She recovered from the beating, but refused to raise that man's son and left soon after Billy Joe was born. He was raised by his grandmother in Corsicana, Texas, a small town of about 20,000 about an hour southeast of Dallas.

As soon as he could understand, his grandmother steeled him to the reality of their situation: There is no Santa Claus, she told him, nor anyone else who is going to give you something for nothing. She would walk him down to the general store where the proprietor, with a wink, promised to give them groceries on credit if the boy would sing a few songs. And he would, standing on a cracker barrel believing he was literally singing for his supper.

His grandmother died when he was 12 and his mother, by then a honky-tonk waitress in Waco with a new husband, reluctantly took him back. As he grew into a man, he displayed a wild streak that would make his father proud. He dropped out of school after eighth grade, hitchhiked around the country working odd jobs, and eventually joined the Navy. Not surprisingly, his stint in the military was short-lived: He was kicked out for punching an off-duty officer, so he went back to Waco.

At 21, he met Brenda Tindell, who was 17 and pregnant when they married later that year. She was as headstrong as he was, if not more, and they made a rambunctious pair. Eventually, they would divorce twice, marry two more times, and break up and get back together more times than they could count.

Brenda's family owned a ranch, so Shaver worked there breaking horses, but also worked in a sawmill to support his young family. He played guitar and wrote, but a music career was nothing more than a distant dream. He was building a book of songs that he thought were better than what he heard on the radio but, by his mid-20s, he had yet to perform a single one of them in front of an audience. He spent most of his time in bars fighting with men who took a second glance at Brenda, and there were plenty of them.

Then, in 1966, at age 27, he mangled his right hand when it got caught under a blade at the sawmill. He drove himself to the doctor, where they took parts of three fingers and barely saved his arm. Shaver got divorced for the first time shortly thereafter, in part because Brenda thought he was an idiot for cutting his fingers off and in part because she thought his fantasy of becoming a big-time songwriter was one of the most ridiculous things she'd ever heard. He hopped a cantaloupe truck headed to Nashville, Tenn., and set out to prove her wrong.

The devil made me do it the first time
The second time I done it on my own

-- From "Black Rose," 1973

The late 1960s and early 1970s were the heyday of the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. The music was heavily produced and overtly commercial, saccharine pop far removed from country music's origins in the blue-collar confessionals of Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams. Male singers wore sequined suits and kept their hair short, and their songs were thematically and politically conservative. A few iconoclasts, like Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson, chafed at the system but generally met with stiff resistance from label execs.

Shaver fared even worse. For his first several years in Nashville, he slept in his truck and washed dishes to make ends meet. Eventually he opted to make an impression with Harlan Howard, a prolific songwriter who wrote Patsy Cline's "I Fall to Pieces" and had 15 songs in the top 40 in 1961 alone. In 1968, Shaver drove a motorcycle onto Howard's front porch and announced, "My name's Billy Joe Shaver and I'm the greatest songwriter in the world!" Howard replied, "Hell, I thought I was," but after a quick listen, he sent Shaver over to Bobby Bare with a recommendation. Bare was an established songwriter and performer who collaborated with Shel Silverstein, among others, and had a reputation for appreciating unconventional talents. He gave Shaver a job writing songs for $50 per week.

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