He had lost two fingers to a lumber mill; he had lost his wife and son to cancer and heroin respectively. He had survived several divorces, assault-with-a-gun charges and a heart attack—even the music business. So when he sang, “I’m going to live forever,” that day, it was no idle boast.
Even if you’re not a fan of Shaver’s “chunk of coal” tenor, you’ve probably admired his songs in the handsomer voices of Willie Nelson , Johnny Cash , Waylon Jennings , Emmylou Harris ”), Patty Loveless , Bobby Bare , Elvis Presley and John Anderson . “Willie wrote a song called, ‘Give Me My Bullet Back,’ and asked me to sing it, and I said, ‘No way am I going to touch that.’ But he helped write the last part of ‘Wacko from Waco’ and that made it a better song. When a story becomes a song, it becomes something different, something funny. ‘Wacko from Waco,’ is a funny title and it takes the sting out of what happened.’”
He dropped out of school after the eighth grade, but he didn’t let that stunt his intellectual curiosity or his gift with words. He had a tough time getting others to take him seriously, but he wouldn’t give up. As he sings in his song, “Georgia on a Fast Train,” “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.”
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