Ride Me Down Easy Lord
A shy and restless spirit was released last week to the care of the one he learned to follow the hard way.
Billy Joe Shaver famously never did anything the easy way. He lived knee deep in a stream of consciousness life marred by “come to Jesus” moments that he mined into some of the most succinct country music prose to ever grace a G-C-D progression. Billy Joe was a fully qualified poet of the common language.
It is somehow fitting a man raised in the Baptist stronghold of Waco, where “Jesus was our savior and Cotton Was Our King” would come to marvel about “Jesus Christ, What a Man”. I am saddened by his passing but heartened by the good company I am positive he is now keeping. I think he’s finally achieved diamond status as he heads for Heaven.
Hey I'm just an old chunk of coal But I'm gonna be a diamond someday I'm gonna grow and glow till I'm so blue pure perfect I'm gonna put a smile on everybody's face
--I’m Just An Old Chunk of Coal
I am also comforted by his lyrics, some of which ought to go on his tombstone or else mine:
Hey ride me down easy Lord, ride me on down Leave word in the dust where i lay Say "I'm easy come, easy go and easy to love when i stay"
I discovered Billy Joe like a lot of people, on the liner notes of Waylon Jennings seminal Outlaw Country album, “Honky Tonk Heroes”. Captain Midnight, who was a ne’er do well Nashville radio personality in the 1970s before I came to town, revealed Billy Joe had written just about the entire album. Waylon possessed the best male country voice I ever heard and pairing him with a lyricist that turned phrases so simple and down home pure was nothing short of magic.
The story is Waylon liked Billy Joe’s songs and said he was going to cut a whole album’s worth, then didn’t move fast enough to suit Billy Joe. Billy Joe threaten to whip Waylon’s butt if he reneged on his promise. Waylon was a pretty tough West Texas hombre himself, but needless to say, the album is part of country music history.
Billy Joe as a lyricist ranks right there with any of my all-time favorites: Mickey Newbury, Kris Kristofferson, Guy Clark, John Prine, Bob Dylan, Tom. T. Hall or Bob McDill. However, if a barroom brawl ever broke out I would take Billy Joe for my side every time. If Billy Joe could buffalo Ol’ Waylon I’d simply hand him a pool cue and point him at the other guys.
Billy Joe was probably cut from the same restless cloth as Woody Guthrie, who could go out for a pack of cigarettes in New York City and end up in California without a word of explanation. Billy Joe got to Nashville because he was hitch hiking heading west to California but was getting no rides. So, he crossed the road and stuck his thumb out eastbound and ended up in Nashville. He kept the road hot for the next 50 years between Music City and Waco.
Three fingers whiskey pleasures the drinkers And moving does more than the same thing for me Willy he tells me that doers and thinkers Say movin' is a closest thing to being free?
--Willie the Wandering Gypsy and Me
The line about “movin’ being the closest thing to being free” is every bit the literary equal of Kris Kristofferson’s “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose”. Of course, Kris was a Rhodes scholar while Billy Joe had an eighth-grade education. Shaver said he went to the college of hard knocks and didn’t quite live the charmed life of Kristofferson.
I've been to Georgia on a fast train honey I wasn't born no yesterday Got a good Christian raisin' and an eighth grade education Ain't no need in y'all a treatin' me this way
Willie the wandering gypsy was a fictionalized rodeo cowboy based on Willie Nelson and probably Billy Joe himself. The two shared a gypsy spirit and probably a lot of liquor and contraband. Their adventures sparked a chorus that warms the heart of anyone who ever spent a winter in Lubbock, Tx, where the wind starts in Canada and gets a running start before freezing all parts protected or not.
Willy you're wild as a Texas Blue Norther Ready rolled from the same makins as me Well, I reckon we're gonna ramble till Hell freeze us over Willy the wandering Gypsy and me
--Willie the Wandering Gypsy
Maybe the best way to find Jesus is to go looking where He’s not. If so, Billy Joe looked a lot of places and some of his best lines were the result. He looked in Mexico:
There ain't no God in Mexico Ain't no way to understand How that border crossing feeling Makes a fool out of a man.
If I'd never felt the sunshine Hell, I would not curse the rain If my feet could fit a railroad track I guess I'd a been a train.
--Ain’t No God in Mexico
Billy Joe didn’t exactly find God in love and women, though he was certainly persistent. He married the same woman three times. He said he wrote his best songs as a way to try to get back into the house. He did pen the best description of some of the women who walk by in a man’s life who thankfully stay just out of reach if one is smart. I guess Billy Joe wasn’t:
When the devil made that woman Lord, she threw the pattern away She was built for speed with the tools You need to make a new fool every day.
Then he slayed you with the contrition of his chorus:
The devil made me do it the first time The second time I done it on my own Lord, put a handle on a simple headed man And help me leave that black rose alone.
I saw Billy Joe play a couple of times in the Outlaw Country days of the 1980s. As a singer he was best described as enthusiastic and his Texas country twang fit his songs and lyrics. He played guitar despite the fact he had lost two fingers on his strumming hand in a sawmill accident when he was 21. He described his style as fretting with the left and whanging away with the right as he couldn’t use a pick. I saw him in a club show, maybe 12th & Porter, in Nashville with his son Eddy on lead guitar. Eddy Shaver could play enough guitar for them both. He was tragically lost in 2000 to a heroin overdose that affected his dad enormously.
The last time I saw him was in Nashville at the Belcourt Theatre in about 2004. There had been a documentary made about his life and he was introducing it to the audience and played some of his songs. He choked up at one point talking about his lost son. I realized though he looked like a tough old rounder, the high timing good timer, was really someone who felt love and loss deeply. And lived and loved to write about it.
I'm Livin' with a stranger now Girl i knew got away somehow She went out with two bit gasoline I wanna go back - you know what i mean ah
When the word was Thunderbird And the price was forty twice Drinkin' wine and lovin' you was fun
--When the Word Was Thunderbird
I have a piano picking Texas cousin, James Davis, who passed on a story I hadn’t heard about Billy Joe. It seemed Billy Joe said he liked to host guitar pulls at his house because when his friends left all his guitars would be in tune. As someone who has gotten up in front of folks a time or two with a guitar in semi-tune I can relate.
I don’t guess any discussion of the genius that is the life and times of Billy Joe Shaver would be complete without the story about him shooting a guy in a bar in Lorena, Tx. The guy was typified by Billy Joe as a bully who was stirring his drink with a hunting knife. Out in the parking lot, Billy Joe allegedly offered a choice as to where the man wanted the bullet. The man for some reason chose his face, but somehow survived, probably because Billy Joe only had a .22 pistol.
Billy Joe’s lawyer pled he was defending himself from the guy’s knife. Willie Nelson and actor Robert Duvall testified as character witnesses for Billy Joe and he got off. I guess Willie and Duvall are each enough a character themselves to be convincing witnesses. This episode sadly happened after the documentary. Timing was never Shaver’s strong suit. After the acquittal Billy Joe hoped he and guy could become friends so he could get his bullet back. The moral of the story: Don’t take a knife to a gun fight.
It took me a couple days to get started on this because I was searching for his first album, “Old Five and Dimers Like Me”. The title song appealed to my 24-year-old self as I didn’t identify myself with the Cadillac buyers but rather felt like more a devotee of the Five and Dime store. I still probably have that self-image, though I don’t think I’ve ever shopped at a Dollar General. May have to check the new one in Mount Juliet out.
I spent a lifetime making up my mind to be More than the measure of what I thought others could see Good luck and fast bucks are too far and too few between Cadillac buyers and old five and dimers like me
I never located the album among my only semi-alphabetized records. I recall as having liner notes from Tom T. Hall. I searched all the search engines fruitlessly. I don’t remember what Tom T. exactly, but it was something about “there not making any more (insert correct word here) and they aren’t making any more Shaver.
I support strongly they aren’t making any more Shaver and on this election night I approved that message.
I did find a quote from Tom T. attributed on those same liner notes about Billy Joe: “Billy Joe writes the kind of lines that you and he are the only ones who understand him”.
Shaver was a great enough writer Bob Dylan wrote him into a song with a line: “I’m listening to Billy Joe Shaver and I’m reading James Joyce”. Dylan was listening to Shaver because he wrote with a hard scrabble precision that anyone who ever put a pen to paper simply admires. Billy Joe was as plain spoken as Dylan was mysteriously obtuse and hard to interpret. Bobby was probably trying to simplify.
The search engines did turn up a great quote from an unexpected source. Jason Isbell is one of my favorite young guys in Nashville. He said on Twitter: Billy Joe Shaver might’ve been the only true outlaw who ever made his living writing about the inner workings of his heart. The realest of them all”.
As for me, even as I approach my 70th birthday in a year or two, anytime I see a pretty young lady dressed up to turn heads, through my mind Billy Joe will sing: “She was built for speed with the tools you need to make a new fool every day.”
