Mid-Night Rider
2010-06-10 01:03:06 UTC
good songwriter
$19.95, hardcover with dust jacket
33% website discount: $13.37
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=A0=A0=A0Honky Tonk Hero
By Billy Joe Shaver
Assisted by Brad Reagan
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Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter One: Jesus Was Our Savior and Cotton Was Our King
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter One: Jesus Was Our Savior and Cotton Was Our King
Chapter Two: Ain't No God in Mexico
Chapter Three: Fit to Kill and Going Out in Style
Chapter Four: Honky Tonk Heroes
Chapter Five: Black Rose: The Devil Made Me Do It the First Time (The
Second Time I Done It on My Own)
Chapter Six: Old Chunk of Coal
Chapter Seven: The First and Last Time
Chapter Eight: Star in My Heart
Chapter Nine: Try and Try Again
Appendix: Complete Lyrics to the Recorded Songs of Billy Joe Shaver
Discography
Introduction
I was not even born yet when my father first tried to kill me.
It was June and the evening light had started to fade, but it was still
hotter than nine kinds of hell. We were outside of Corsicana, a little
cotton town in northeast Texas, and I was in my mother's belly, two
months from entering the world.
Buddy Shaver was convinced that my mother, Victory, was cheating on him.
That was bullshit, and he probably knew it. But he'd been drinking. My
father was half-French, half-Blackfoot Sioux, and one-hundred-percent
mean. He drank a lot, and the booze didn't mix well with his Indian
blood. You know there are some guys who are just born naturally strong,
with big shoulders and a chiseled upper body even though they never work
a lick at it? That was my father, and my mother didn't have a chance.
It's just a story I've heard, told by family members who don't enjoy the
retelling. But I can see it as clearly as if I was there. They were
standing next to a small stock tank with black, still water. It was the
middle of nowhere, with no roads or houses in sight. Who knows what he
told her to get her out there, or whether she knew what was coming when
they stopped there? He held nothing back, yet his cold gray eyes showed
no emotion as he beat her within an inch of her life. When she was down,
he stomped her with his cowboy boots until she stopped struggling. Then
he tossed her limp body into the water like a sack of potatoes. Years
later, when I was a grown man, my momma couldn't stand to be around me
when I wore cowboy boots=97she never could forget what they did to her
that night.
Momma laid there for hours until an old Mexican man showed up to water
his cattle. Even though he knew my kinfolk pretty well, he didn't
recognize her at first. He thought she was dead. But she spoke to him
through the bruises and the blood, and he threw her over the back of his
horse and carried her home.
The violence of that night set the stage for my childhood: It's the
reason my father left, it's the reason my mother didn't want me, and
it's the reason I went to live with my loving grandmother. In many ways,
I think that night is the reason I write country songs.
When you get right down to it, country music is essentially the blues,
and that night introduced me to the blues. In the years since then,
they've never left me. I've lost parts of three fingers, broke my back,
suffered a heart attack and a quadruple bypass, had a steel plate put in
my neck and 136 stitches in my head, fought drugs and booze, spent the
money I had, and buried my wife, son, and mother in the span of one
year.
But I'm not here to complain or ask for pity. Life is hard for
everybody, just in different ways. I'm not proud of my misfortune=97I'm
proud of my survival. For years, my family kept a bundle of life
insurance on me because they were sure I would be the first to go. But
as I write this, at sixty-four years of age, I'm still here and they are
all gone.
The question is=97why? That's something I've been thinking about a lot
lately.
Throughout my career as a songwriter, I've just written songs about
me=97the good and the bad, the funny and the sad. I've written songs
about other people, but I don't sing other people's songs. They're just
little poems about my life, and I've never pretended they were anything
more. Despite all my ups and downs, I've never been to therapy or rehab
or any of that stuff. The songs are my therapy.
But after my shows, people always come up to me and thank me for writing
those songs. They tell me about their lives, and how a song of mine
helped them through a tough patch or made them smile during a difficult
time. Sometimes they say I inspired them=97that if I can make it through
my life, they can damn sure get through theirs. When we're done talking,
I give them a hug and tell them I love them. I know exactly where they
are coming from.
My point is, it's truly a miracle I survived that night by that stock
tank, and I don't mean that the way most people say it=97like it's a
lucky break. I think God allowed me to live. He wanted me to tell my
story.
Chapter One: Jesus Was Our Savior and Cotton Was Our King
The wagons was a-rollin' with a cobble-colored sound
When me and little David rode our first load into town
The cotton gin was a-ginnin' out the pennies for the pound
Like a giant vacuum cleaner sucking lint up off the ground
Our freckled faces sparkled then like diamonds in the rough
With smiles that smelled of snaggled teeth and good ol' Garrett snuff
If I could, I would be tradin' all this fatback for the lean
When Jesus was our Savior and cotton was our king
We are country people, always have been. My family tree is full of field
hands and farmers, people who lived off the land and worked with their
hands.
My grandparents on my mother's side were originally from the Texarkana
area but moved to Corsicana since it was known as a town that was
friendly toward sharecroppers. Located about fifty-three miles northeast
of Waco, Corsicana was a farming community and one of the top
cotton-producing towns in Texas during the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Several of the railroads came right through town,
which made it easy to get the crops to market. Not just cotton, but
corn, tobacco, and pecans too. But cotton was king. The gin there
covered five city blocks downtown and was said to be the largest in the
world for a time.
In 1894, the town really started to boom. That's when the town leaders
paid these boys from Kansas to come down and find more water for the
growing community, and they hit oil instead. The townsfolk were so
pissed off that they didn't pay the drillers their fee. As it turned
out, that was the first discovery of oil in Texas, and no one had a clue
about how it was going to change the area, not to mention the entire
state. Of course, several businesses started up in Corsicana to take
advantage of the discovery. You've probably heard of two of them: Mobil
and Texaco.
But, as I said, my family wasn't involved in oil. We worked the fields.
We were poor but so was everybody around us. You either owned land=97and
we sure as hell didn't=97or you sharecropped and got by one sack at a
time.
My grandparents had seven kids and the youngest was a girl they named
Victory, because she was born the day the First World War ended. That
was my mother. I always loved that name=97I used it as the title of one
of my albums=97but everyone called her Tincie instead, because she was
so small. She grew into a beauty, with a petite figure, sky-blue eyes,
and red hair that told of the fire inside her.
At eighteen, Tincie married Buddy Shaver, though her parents weren't too
happy about it. Buddy, who never learned to read or write, was a
bootlegger, moonshiner, and bare-knuckle fighter who was just about the
meanest son-of-a-bitch in the county. My mother was tough, though, and I
guess she thought she could tame him. I don't know for sure why she
married that man=97even decades later, she wouldn't talk about it.
Buddy and Tincie had a daughter, Patricia, who was two years old when
Buddy erupted out by that stock tank. Tincie recovered from the beating,
but just barely. That ended the marriage, of course, and Tincie also
made it clear that she wasn't going to raise Buddy Shaver's son.
"If it comes out a boy," she said. "I'm gone."
I was born August 16, 1939. Tincie wasn't quite true to her word=97she
stayed about a month and then took the first chance that came her way.
It was September, so the cotton crop was ready for picking. That meant
she was needed in the fields whether or not she had two young children.
So there she was, picking cotton in the midday sun=97me on her back,
Patricia riding on the cotton sack behind her, and a halo of gnats and
flies swirling around her head.
Then Blanche Williams came rolling up in her black Cadillac.
Blanche was the proud owner of the Green Gables honky tonk outside of
Waco, about an hour southwest of Corsicana. Every few weeks, she'd drive
around the country in search of good-looking, small-town girls who could
read, write, and charm customers out of their cash. On this day, Blanche
settled on Tincie, her red hair glowing amid the sea of black and white
heads. Blanche walked out into the field and asked my mother if she was
interested in a new line of work. She didn't have to ask twice.
My mother left the next day, leaving me and Patricia behind. That's how
I came to live with my grandmother.
My mother's brothers and sisters actually wanted to put me in an
orphanage, but my grandmother wouldn't have it. They tried to convince
her to keep Patricia and get rid of me. The men were especially
persistent since they all had had run-ins with Buddy, and Buddy didn't
lose any fights. They just hated anything that had his blood in it,
especially a son that looked just like him. I know they're not going to
like seeing that in print, but it's the truth. Plus I was sick all the
time. I had chicken pox, measles, the mumps, you name it. Nobody ever
wanted to hold me because they were afraid they'd get sick.
But my grandmother, Birdie Lee Collins Watson, wouldn't let them put me
in that home. She moved away from the rest of the family and got a place
on North 15th Street on the outskirts of Corsicana. It was a two-story
house without running water=97we used an outhouse in the back=97and we
shared three little rooms while Grandma rented out the other half of the
house. It was just fine for me and Grandma.
Patricia stayed with us occasionally, but mostly she was passed around
among my aunts and uncles in town. I saw her at school more than I saw
her at home.
My grandma=97I called her momma until many years later=97had long black
hair down to her butt and the tired face of a woman who had raised six
children with barely enough money to feed them. She wasn't ugly, but she
dipped snuff and had more important things to worry about than how she
looked. My grandfather had already passed on, so my grandma lived
entirely off her old-age pension. We didn't have some basic things, like
a radio or an icebox, but grandma found ways to provide. When I was a
baby, she would feed me by straining pinto bean soup through rags since
I couldn't nurse. And, later, when I was a boy, she bought packages of
lard that came with a pill of yellow food coloring. You popped the pill
and mixed it in with the lard until it looked like butter, then spread
it on toast. Believe it or not, that was my favorite meal, mainly
because grandma sometimes let me do the mixing.
It was a working house, even for us kids. I'd do women's work like
churning butter and milking cows at our next-door neighbors, the
Higginbothams, just so I could bring a little something back home.
Everybody had to do little stuff like that. From the time I was seven, I
worked the cotton fields each summer. I didn't actually pick cotton
because the crop wasn't ready in the summer=97my job was what we called
choppin' cotton, which basically means keeping the weeds out of the
plants. It burned me up that Patricia never had to chop cotton like me.
They brought her out one time, and she couldn't stay within the rows.
Instead of following one row at a time, she moved sideways across the
field. To this day I'm not sure if that was evidence of how smart she
is, or how dumb, but either way she never joined us out there again.
It was a simple life, and a good one in many ways, but it wasn't easy
and grandma didn't let me and Patricia think otherwise. There is no
Santa Claus, she told us as soon as we could understand, nor anyone else
likely to give you something for nothing. But she was not bitter. In
fact, I never heard my grandmother say a negative word. Whenever we'd
complain, she'd always come back with some funny little saying. I'd say,
"Momma, I'm hungry." And she'd say, "Well, tighten that belt up another
loop."
Her philosophy was simple: Be honest, work hard, and don't complain.
There were other people worse off than us, she said, and we should be
grateful for the blessings we have. That simple country wisdom is all my
grandma had to offer me. She knew she wasn't going to be around as I
grew into a man, so she made sure I understood those things as a young
boy.
Grandma also introduced me to Jesus, indirectly anyway. Like most small
towns in those days, it seemed like there were more churches than people
in Corsicana. I think people need the Lord more when they live off the
land, or at least feel like they do. They prayed for the right weather
to allow them to feed their families. And it seemed like everybody had
five or six kids, because having a bunch of kids meant plenty of free
labor. So then they had to pray about how to manage all those damn kids.
There was a little one-room church down the street=97the Church of the
Nazarene, it was called=97and my grandmother walked me down there every
Sunday morning. She'd get within about fifty yards and then tell me to
go on in by myself. I don't know why she never went, but the whole time
I lived with her she never darkened the door of a church. Her husband
died young, and maybe she was mad at God about that. I'm not sure, but
she made sure I went.
I enjoyed church. I liked talking to God and knowing that he would
answer my prayers, at least sometimes. It always felt right to me. I
even enjoyed studying the Bible. During Sunday school, the teachers
would quiz us on Bible verses and give us a gold star for each correct
answer. For some reason, they would place the stars across our forehead,
probably so all the adults would know which kids were learning the Bible
and which ones were throwing spit-wads and acting up. I usually did
pretty well, and I'd go home in the afternoon with a row of stars across
my forehead. Ever since then, even during my wild years, I've always
read the Bible each day. I once wrote a song called "Ride Me Down
Easy"=97Bobby Bare took it to number one on the country charts=97and I
referred to myself as "a hobo with stars in my crown." That description
fits me still.
Though I loved Jesus, I was still a crazy little kid. I had my share of
adventures chasing snakes, playing in the creeks, and roughhousing with
the boys in the neighborhood. It's amazing I was never seriously hurt,
considering all the dumb things I did back then. My only close call was
once when I was riding a friend's bicycle down the street, and a car
came screaming around a corner and knocked me flying. I was bleeding
like a stuck pig and had scrapes all over my body when I stumbled back
home. My Uncle Joyce, a notoriously lazy person, was standing there with
a cigar in his mouth ironing clothes and singing "Some Enchanted
Evening." He took one look at me and said, "Boy, you look like a bear
got a hold of you."
The ladies that ran over me followed me home and took me to the
hospital. When I got there, a black boy was waiting to see the doctor
too. He had been trying to tag along with his brothers on the way into
town, and snuck onto the running board of their car before they took
off. Since his brothers didn't know he was there, they took a corner
real fast and threw him off, which chewed him up like ground meat. I
thought I was in bad shape but he looked much worse. The doctor came to
look me over but I told him I was okay=97he should check out the black
boy first. That's the way it worked back then, but I knew he needed help
more than I did.
The doctor couldn't find any broken bones or anything on me. He just
told me to go stand in what looked like a shower and close my eyes. He
doused me with mercurochrome, which stung like hell and turned my skin a
strange red color for about the next three months.
More than anything, I loved to sing. I'd do my own versions of the songs
I heard around, like "Pins and Needles in My Heart" and "The Great
Speckled Bird." During the day I crossed the railroad tracks and hung
out with the black folks on their front yards and porches. There was
always a slide guitar, and I learned a lot of the old blues songs there.
A few times, when we were short, my grandmother took me down to the
general store when she asked for an extension on her credit.
"Yeah, I'll give you an extension if you get that boy to sing," the lady
said from behind the counter.
I thought it was for real. I thought I was really singing for my supper,
so I'd get up on that cracker barrel and just sing my heart out. At
night, my grandmother would sit on the front porch dipping her snuff and
tell me I was going to be on the Grand Ole Opry someday. She was right,
though it took me almost sixty years.
One night, I even came face to face with Hank Williams. I was old enough
to read, so it was probably sometime in the late 1940s. I'd seen signs
around town for a concert by Homer and Jethro and the Light Crust
Doughboys at the Wonder Bread factory. All the kids liked Homer and
Jethro because they sang those old corny songs that were pretty funny,
but I thought they were incredible players too. After grandma went to
bed, I opened the window and climbed out into the backyard. Patricia
woke up and threatened to tell Grandma but I knew she wouldn't.
Like everyone else's, our outhouse was behind the main house. Every
couple of weeks, a wagon came through and emptied them all out=97we
called it the honeywagon. The honeywagon carved a trail through the
bushes and the weeds behind our house and I followed that trail until I
got to the railroad tracks, where I balanced my little feet on the beams
and headed toward town. When I got to the trestles, I walked between the
beams to stay as far away as possible from the hobos who curled up in
there to sleep.
At the Wonder Bread factory they let me in free=97I guess because I was
just a kid=97and I saw all the musicians up on the loading docks and the
crowd standing around in the hole where the trucks parked. Corsicana was
a dry town, but the bootleggers were doing good business down in that
pit that night.
I shimmied up a pole so I could see and so I wouldn't get my feet
stepped on. Homer and Jethro were just finishing up, and they made an
announcement that they were going to let a young man sing who they
thought was going to be a big star. I know during those days Hank used
to go around performing as Luke the Drifter, but they introduced him
that night as Hank Williams. He had on a suit and a hat, and he looked
really spiffy. He only did one song, and most of the crowd wasn't
listening because they'd never heard of him. But Hank saw me up on that
pole and just fixated on me with this hard stare, probably because I was
the only one paying attention. He sang right straight to me, and it was
lonesome and sad and beautiful all wrapped up together.
When I got home, my grandma heard me come through the window and she
whupped me with a switch until I was plum wore out. You remember a
whooping like that, and that's another reason my memories of that night
are so clear.
***
For most of my childhood, I only saw my mother once or twice a year.
Sometimes she came on Christmas, but not always. But even on those
visits she never showed me much affection. She never hugged me, and that
tore me up, but I know now that she just didn't yet know how to be a
mother.
But when I was six, I got to spend the summer in Waco. My grandmother
must have really needed a break. But instead of staying with my mother,
I stayed with Emma Jean, a fat black woman who cooked at the Green
Gables for Blanche. Emma Jean and I spent our afternoons at a tank next
to the General Tire plant where we fished for perch with her old cane
pole. My skinny little butt and her big fat butt sitting by that pond
must have made quite a sight. At night, we played music on her front
porch. Her son, who was blind, was about my age and played the stand-up
piano like a house a-fire. He'd play and I'd sing, and we'd carry on for
hours at a time.
Some afternoons, I hung out at the Green Gables, though I was under
orders not to bother my mother or call her "Momma" or anything else that
would let on that I was her kid. The Green Gables was a wood-frame
building with swinging screen doors and a big, wide dance floor covered
with cornmeal so the couples could slide around while they danced. The
jukebox in the corner played country acts like Jimmie Rodgers and the
Carter Family, but also blues singers and popular artists of the day. It
was on Highway 6 southeast of Waco on the way to Perry, which was the
only town in the area where you could buy liquor. That highway stayed
busy as a one-eyed dog in a smokehouse. They just served beer and
set-ups at the Green Gables, but you could bring in a bottle you bought
in Perry, or you could buy a slug of booze off of one of the bootleggers
for a nickel or something. It was the mid-forties, and there were lots
of bases in Central Texas at that time, so there were lots of military
folks in and out of there, too.
Blanche inherited the place from a previous marriage, one of several
that ended with a funeral. She was a voluptuous blonde woman, and she
turned the heads of all the guys that came through the doors. She kept
the rings from all of her dead husbands and they covered her fingers.
One day=97and I remember this as clear as day=97I was hanging on to the
end of the bar listening to Blanche and my mother.
"Tincie, there's gonna be an old boy come up here in a few hours,"
Blanche said. "He's gonna be a rich 'un, with one foot in the grave and
the other on a nanner peel. And I'm gonna nail his ass to the wall."
It wasn't less than two hours later that this fella floated up in a
baby-blue Cadillac. He wore a floppy hat, and he took it off in the
parking lot and wiped the sweat off his brow. Maybe I imagined it, but
it was like he was trying to figure out what force drew him to this
broke-down roadhouse on the edge of town. He hung around for a couple of
weeks and sure enough Blanche got another ring for her collection. It
wasn't too much later that fella had his funeral.
Between the regulars and the military folks, I got plenty of attention
at the Green Gables. I guess I reminded those soldiers of their kids, so
they would grab me and throw me up in the air and give me nickels.
Sometimes they would throw me so high I'd hit the ceiling, and it felt
great. I'd have a pocketful of nickels at the end of each day. Sometimes
they'd let me put one of my nickels in the jukebox, and it seemed like
it would play forever.
***
When I was twelve, my grandmother died. I'm not sure what the cause
was=97I think she just wore out. My memories of that time are not clear,
which is strange because I always knew she loved me more than anyone in
the world=97and I loved her just as much. But I don't remember who told
me she died, or seeing her lying in the casket. I just remember being in
the house the day of the funeral, and all the relatives were over
claiming furniture and utensils and anything else they could use in
their homes. I was sitting on the floor in a corner and eventually
everybody left, including my mother and Patricia, and I was there by
myself. They finally came and got me the next day.
No one was really sure what to do with me. My aunts and uncles, of
course, didn't want to take me in, which left either my father or my
mother.
I'd only seen my father once since I was born, and let's just say we
didn't exactly bond. I was about five, and he was over at my Aunt
Vinny's. If my grandma had known Buddy was over there she would've never
let me go, but somehow she didn't know.
By this time Buddy was married to another woman=97her name was
Elizabeth, but everyone called her Lizzie. She was full-blooded Indian
with shiny black hair and a temper to match my father's. According to
the stories I heard later, they used to take off to Dallas for a few
weeks at a time and come back with wads of cash. People said they were a
regular Bonnie and Clyde. My father always carried a gun, while Lizzie
carried a long switch-blade knife in her purse. They were a good team
and they stayed together until the end.
The day I went to Aunt Vinny's, I met him in the living room.
"Yeah, kid, I'm your dad," he said, looking down at me with a crooked
grin.
That's all he said. My half-sister, Wanda Jean, was there in a pretty
pink dress=97she was Buddy's favorite, and he doted on her and pretty
much ignored me. But late that day he walked me out in the backyard,
where he grabbed these two old cats, tied their tails together and threw
them over a clothesline. They just tore each other to pieces. It was a
mean-ass thing to do, but he was testing me. He wanted me to watch it,
while he just laughed like crazy.
But I started crying, which made him mad. I tried to run away, and he
chased me around the yard. I wanted to get out of there, and I grabbed
Wanda Jean's hand to bring her with me. When we turned a corner on the
side of the house, she fell sideways into a big basket of tomatoes. She
was covered in tomato juice, and I guess he thought she was bleeding
because he came after me even faster. But I was real skinny and I could
run a hole in the wind. He never caught me, but I believe he'd a killed
me if he had. I ran straight home, and that's the last time I saw him
for about twelve years.
So eventually my mother took me to Waco with her and Patricia. I guess
she didn't really have much choice.
=A0
news:alt.music.novelty
$19.95, hardcover with dust jacket
33% website discount: $13.37
=A0=A0=A0
=A0=A0=A0Honky Tonk Hero
By Billy Joe Shaver
Assisted by Brad Reagan
=A0
=A0
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter One: Jesus Was Our Savior and Cotton Was Our King
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter One: Jesus Was Our Savior and Cotton Was Our King
Chapter Two: Ain't No God in Mexico
Chapter Three: Fit to Kill and Going Out in Style
Chapter Four: Honky Tonk Heroes
Chapter Five: Black Rose: The Devil Made Me Do It the First Time (The
Second Time I Done It on My Own)
Chapter Six: Old Chunk of Coal
Chapter Seven: The First and Last Time
Chapter Eight: Star in My Heart
Chapter Nine: Try and Try Again
Appendix: Complete Lyrics to the Recorded Songs of Billy Joe Shaver
Discography
Introduction
I was not even born yet when my father first tried to kill me.
It was June and the evening light had started to fade, but it was still
hotter than nine kinds of hell. We were outside of Corsicana, a little
cotton town in northeast Texas, and I was in my mother's belly, two
months from entering the world.
Buddy Shaver was convinced that my mother, Victory, was cheating on him.
That was bullshit, and he probably knew it. But he'd been drinking. My
father was half-French, half-Blackfoot Sioux, and one-hundred-percent
mean. He drank a lot, and the booze didn't mix well with his Indian
blood. You know there are some guys who are just born naturally strong,
with big shoulders and a chiseled upper body even though they never work
a lick at it? That was my father, and my mother didn't have a chance.
It's just a story I've heard, told by family members who don't enjoy the
retelling. But I can see it as clearly as if I was there. They were
standing next to a small stock tank with black, still water. It was the
middle of nowhere, with no roads or houses in sight. Who knows what he
told her to get her out there, or whether she knew what was coming when
they stopped there? He held nothing back, yet his cold gray eyes showed
no emotion as he beat her within an inch of her life. When she was down,
he stomped her with his cowboy boots until she stopped struggling. Then
he tossed her limp body into the water like a sack of potatoes. Years
later, when I was a grown man, my momma couldn't stand to be around me
when I wore cowboy boots=97she never could forget what they did to her
that night.
Momma laid there for hours until an old Mexican man showed up to water
his cattle. Even though he knew my kinfolk pretty well, he didn't
recognize her at first. He thought she was dead. But she spoke to him
through the bruises and the blood, and he threw her over the back of his
horse and carried her home.
The violence of that night set the stage for my childhood: It's the
reason my father left, it's the reason my mother didn't want me, and
it's the reason I went to live with my loving grandmother. In many ways,
I think that night is the reason I write country songs.
When you get right down to it, country music is essentially the blues,
and that night introduced me to the blues. In the years since then,
they've never left me. I've lost parts of three fingers, broke my back,
suffered a heart attack and a quadruple bypass, had a steel plate put in
my neck and 136 stitches in my head, fought drugs and booze, spent the
money I had, and buried my wife, son, and mother in the span of one
year.
But I'm not here to complain or ask for pity. Life is hard for
everybody, just in different ways. I'm not proud of my misfortune=97I'm
proud of my survival. For years, my family kept a bundle of life
insurance on me because they were sure I would be the first to go. But
as I write this, at sixty-four years of age, I'm still here and they are
all gone.
The question is=97why? That's something I've been thinking about a lot
lately.
Throughout my career as a songwriter, I've just written songs about
me=97the good and the bad, the funny and the sad. I've written songs
about other people, but I don't sing other people's songs. They're just
little poems about my life, and I've never pretended they were anything
more. Despite all my ups and downs, I've never been to therapy or rehab
or any of that stuff. The songs are my therapy.
But after my shows, people always come up to me and thank me for writing
those songs. They tell me about their lives, and how a song of mine
helped them through a tough patch or made them smile during a difficult
time. Sometimes they say I inspired them=97that if I can make it through
my life, they can damn sure get through theirs. When we're done talking,
I give them a hug and tell them I love them. I know exactly where they
are coming from.
My point is, it's truly a miracle I survived that night by that stock
tank, and I don't mean that the way most people say it=97like it's a
lucky break. I think God allowed me to live. He wanted me to tell my
story.
Chapter One: Jesus Was Our Savior and Cotton Was Our King
The wagons was a-rollin' with a cobble-colored sound
When me and little David rode our first load into town
The cotton gin was a-ginnin' out the pennies for the pound
Like a giant vacuum cleaner sucking lint up off the ground
Our freckled faces sparkled then like diamonds in the rough
With smiles that smelled of snaggled teeth and good ol' Garrett snuff
If I could, I would be tradin' all this fatback for the lean
When Jesus was our Savior and cotton was our king
We are country people, always have been. My family tree is full of field
hands and farmers, people who lived off the land and worked with their
hands.
My grandparents on my mother's side were originally from the Texarkana
area but moved to Corsicana since it was known as a town that was
friendly toward sharecroppers. Located about fifty-three miles northeast
of Waco, Corsicana was a farming community and one of the top
cotton-producing towns in Texas during the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Several of the railroads came right through town,
which made it easy to get the crops to market. Not just cotton, but
corn, tobacco, and pecans too. But cotton was king. The gin there
covered five city blocks downtown and was said to be the largest in the
world for a time.
In 1894, the town really started to boom. That's when the town leaders
paid these boys from Kansas to come down and find more water for the
growing community, and they hit oil instead. The townsfolk were so
pissed off that they didn't pay the drillers their fee. As it turned
out, that was the first discovery of oil in Texas, and no one had a clue
about how it was going to change the area, not to mention the entire
state. Of course, several businesses started up in Corsicana to take
advantage of the discovery. You've probably heard of two of them: Mobil
and Texaco.
But, as I said, my family wasn't involved in oil. We worked the fields.
We were poor but so was everybody around us. You either owned land=97and
we sure as hell didn't=97or you sharecropped and got by one sack at a
time.
My grandparents had seven kids and the youngest was a girl they named
Victory, because she was born the day the First World War ended. That
was my mother. I always loved that name=97I used it as the title of one
of my albums=97but everyone called her Tincie instead, because she was
so small. She grew into a beauty, with a petite figure, sky-blue eyes,
and red hair that told of the fire inside her.
At eighteen, Tincie married Buddy Shaver, though her parents weren't too
happy about it. Buddy, who never learned to read or write, was a
bootlegger, moonshiner, and bare-knuckle fighter who was just about the
meanest son-of-a-bitch in the county. My mother was tough, though, and I
guess she thought she could tame him. I don't know for sure why she
married that man=97even decades later, she wouldn't talk about it.
Buddy and Tincie had a daughter, Patricia, who was two years old when
Buddy erupted out by that stock tank. Tincie recovered from the beating,
but just barely. That ended the marriage, of course, and Tincie also
made it clear that she wasn't going to raise Buddy Shaver's son.
"If it comes out a boy," she said. "I'm gone."
I was born August 16, 1939. Tincie wasn't quite true to her word=97she
stayed about a month and then took the first chance that came her way.
It was September, so the cotton crop was ready for picking. That meant
she was needed in the fields whether or not she had two young children.
So there she was, picking cotton in the midday sun=97me on her back,
Patricia riding on the cotton sack behind her, and a halo of gnats and
flies swirling around her head.
Then Blanche Williams came rolling up in her black Cadillac.
Blanche was the proud owner of the Green Gables honky tonk outside of
Waco, about an hour southwest of Corsicana. Every few weeks, she'd drive
around the country in search of good-looking, small-town girls who could
read, write, and charm customers out of their cash. On this day, Blanche
settled on Tincie, her red hair glowing amid the sea of black and white
heads. Blanche walked out into the field and asked my mother if she was
interested in a new line of work. She didn't have to ask twice.
My mother left the next day, leaving me and Patricia behind. That's how
I came to live with my grandmother.
My mother's brothers and sisters actually wanted to put me in an
orphanage, but my grandmother wouldn't have it. They tried to convince
her to keep Patricia and get rid of me. The men were especially
persistent since they all had had run-ins with Buddy, and Buddy didn't
lose any fights. They just hated anything that had his blood in it,
especially a son that looked just like him. I know they're not going to
like seeing that in print, but it's the truth. Plus I was sick all the
time. I had chicken pox, measles, the mumps, you name it. Nobody ever
wanted to hold me because they were afraid they'd get sick.
But my grandmother, Birdie Lee Collins Watson, wouldn't let them put me
in that home. She moved away from the rest of the family and got a place
on North 15th Street on the outskirts of Corsicana. It was a two-story
house without running water=97we used an outhouse in the back=97and we
shared three little rooms while Grandma rented out the other half of the
house. It was just fine for me and Grandma.
Patricia stayed with us occasionally, but mostly she was passed around
among my aunts and uncles in town. I saw her at school more than I saw
her at home.
My grandma=97I called her momma until many years later=97had long black
hair down to her butt and the tired face of a woman who had raised six
children with barely enough money to feed them. She wasn't ugly, but she
dipped snuff and had more important things to worry about than how she
looked. My grandfather had already passed on, so my grandma lived
entirely off her old-age pension. We didn't have some basic things, like
a radio or an icebox, but grandma found ways to provide. When I was a
baby, she would feed me by straining pinto bean soup through rags since
I couldn't nurse. And, later, when I was a boy, she bought packages of
lard that came with a pill of yellow food coloring. You popped the pill
and mixed it in with the lard until it looked like butter, then spread
it on toast. Believe it or not, that was my favorite meal, mainly
because grandma sometimes let me do the mixing.
It was a working house, even for us kids. I'd do women's work like
churning butter and milking cows at our next-door neighbors, the
Higginbothams, just so I could bring a little something back home.
Everybody had to do little stuff like that. From the time I was seven, I
worked the cotton fields each summer. I didn't actually pick cotton
because the crop wasn't ready in the summer=97my job was what we called
choppin' cotton, which basically means keeping the weeds out of the
plants. It burned me up that Patricia never had to chop cotton like me.
They brought her out one time, and she couldn't stay within the rows.
Instead of following one row at a time, she moved sideways across the
field. To this day I'm not sure if that was evidence of how smart she
is, or how dumb, but either way she never joined us out there again.
It was a simple life, and a good one in many ways, but it wasn't easy
and grandma didn't let me and Patricia think otherwise. There is no
Santa Claus, she told us as soon as we could understand, nor anyone else
likely to give you something for nothing. But she was not bitter. In
fact, I never heard my grandmother say a negative word. Whenever we'd
complain, she'd always come back with some funny little saying. I'd say,
"Momma, I'm hungry." And she'd say, "Well, tighten that belt up another
loop."
Her philosophy was simple: Be honest, work hard, and don't complain.
There were other people worse off than us, she said, and we should be
grateful for the blessings we have. That simple country wisdom is all my
grandma had to offer me. She knew she wasn't going to be around as I
grew into a man, so she made sure I understood those things as a young
boy.
Grandma also introduced me to Jesus, indirectly anyway. Like most small
towns in those days, it seemed like there were more churches than people
in Corsicana. I think people need the Lord more when they live off the
land, or at least feel like they do. They prayed for the right weather
to allow them to feed their families. And it seemed like everybody had
five or six kids, because having a bunch of kids meant plenty of free
labor. So then they had to pray about how to manage all those damn kids.
There was a little one-room church down the street=97the Church of the
Nazarene, it was called=97and my grandmother walked me down there every
Sunday morning. She'd get within about fifty yards and then tell me to
go on in by myself. I don't know why she never went, but the whole time
I lived with her she never darkened the door of a church. Her husband
died young, and maybe she was mad at God about that. I'm not sure, but
she made sure I went.
I enjoyed church. I liked talking to God and knowing that he would
answer my prayers, at least sometimes. It always felt right to me. I
even enjoyed studying the Bible. During Sunday school, the teachers
would quiz us on Bible verses and give us a gold star for each correct
answer. For some reason, they would place the stars across our forehead,
probably so all the adults would know which kids were learning the Bible
and which ones were throwing spit-wads and acting up. I usually did
pretty well, and I'd go home in the afternoon with a row of stars across
my forehead. Ever since then, even during my wild years, I've always
read the Bible each day. I once wrote a song called "Ride Me Down
Easy"=97Bobby Bare took it to number one on the country charts=97and I
referred to myself as "a hobo with stars in my crown." That description
fits me still.
Though I loved Jesus, I was still a crazy little kid. I had my share of
adventures chasing snakes, playing in the creeks, and roughhousing with
the boys in the neighborhood. It's amazing I was never seriously hurt,
considering all the dumb things I did back then. My only close call was
once when I was riding a friend's bicycle down the street, and a car
came screaming around a corner and knocked me flying. I was bleeding
like a stuck pig and had scrapes all over my body when I stumbled back
home. My Uncle Joyce, a notoriously lazy person, was standing there with
a cigar in his mouth ironing clothes and singing "Some Enchanted
Evening." He took one look at me and said, "Boy, you look like a bear
got a hold of you."
The ladies that ran over me followed me home and took me to the
hospital. When I got there, a black boy was waiting to see the doctor
too. He had been trying to tag along with his brothers on the way into
town, and snuck onto the running board of their car before they took
off. Since his brothers didn't know he was there, they took a corner
real fast and threw him off, which chewed him up like ground meat. I
thought I was in bad shape but he looked much worse. The doctor came to
look me over but I told him I was okay=97he should check out the black
boy first. That's the way it worked back then, but I knew he needed help
more than I did.
The doctor couldn't find any broken bones or anything on me. He just
told me to go stand in what looked like a shower and close my eyes. He
doused me with mercurochrome, which stung like hell and turned my skin a
strange red color for about the next three months.
More than anything, I loved to sing. I'd do my own versions of the songs
I heard around, like "Pins and Needles in My Heart" and "The Great
Speckled Bird." During the day I crossed the railroad tracks and hung
out with the black folks on their front yards and porches. There was
always a slide guitar, and I learned a lot of the old blues songs there.
A few times, when we were short, my grandmother took me down to the
general store when she asked for an extension on her credit.
"Yeah, I'll give you an extension if you get that boy to sing," the lady
said from behind the counter.
I thought it was for real. I thought I was really singing for my supper,
so I'd get up on that cracker barrel and just sing my heart out. At
night, my grandmother would sit on the front porch dipping her snuff and
tell me I was going to be on the Grand Ole Opry someday. She was right,
though it took me almost sixty years.
One night, I even came face to face with Hank Williams. I was old enough
to read, so it was probably sometime in the late 1940s. I'd seen signs
around town for a concert by Homer and Jethro and the Light Crust
Doughboys at the Wonder Bread factory. All the kids liked Homer and
Jethro because they sang those old corny songs that were pretty funny,
but I thought they were incredible players too. After grandma went to
bed, I opened the window and climbed out into the backyard. Patricia
woke up and threatened to tell Grandma but I knew she wouldn't.
Like everyone else's, our outhouse was behind the main house. Every
couple of weeks, a wagon came through and emptied them all out=97we
called it the honeywagon. The honeywagon carved a trail through the
bushes and the weeds behind our house and I followed that trail until I
got to the railroad tracks, where I balanced my little feet on the beams
and headed toward town. When I got to the trestles, I walked between the
beams to stay as far away as possible from the hobos who curled up in
there to sleep.
At the Wonder Bread factory they let me in free=97I guess because I was
just a kid=97and I saw all the musicians up on the loading docks and the
crowd standing around in the hole where the trucks parked. Corsicana was
a dry town, but the bootleggers were doing good business down in that
pit that night.
I shimmied up a pole so I could see and so I wouldn't get my feet
stepped on. Homer and Jethro were just finishing up, and they made an
announcement that they were going to let a young man sing who they
thought was going to be a big star. I know during those days Hank used
to go around performing as Luke the Drifter, but they introduced him
that night as Hank Williams. He had on a suit and a hat, and he looked
really spiffy. He only did one song, and most of the crowd wasn't
listening because they'd never heard of him. But Hank saw me up on that
pole and just fixated on me with this hard stare, probably because I was
the only one paying attention. He sang right straight to me, and it was
lonesome and sad and beautiful all wrapped up together.
When I got home, my grandma heard me come through the window and she
whupped me with a switch until I was plum wore out. You remember a
whooping like that, and that's another reason my memories of that night
are so clear.
***
For most of my childhood, I only saw my mother once or twice a year.
Sometimes she came on Christmas, but not always. But even on those
visits she never showed me much affection. She never hugged me, and that
tore me up, but I know now that she just didn't yet know how to be a
mother.
But when I was six, I got to spend the summer in Waco. My grandmother
must have really needed a break. But instead of staying with my mother,
I stayed with Emma Jean, a fat black woman who cooked at the Green
Gables for Blanche. Emma Jean and I spent our afternoons at a tank next
to the General Tire plant where we fished for perch with her old cane
pole. My skinny little butt and her big fat butt sitting by that pond
must have made quite a sight. At night, we played music on her front
porch. Her son, who was blind, was about my age and played the stand-up
piano like a house a-fire. He'd play and I'd sing, and we'd carry on for
hours at a time.
Some afternoons, I hung out at the Green Gables, though I was under
orders not to bother my mother or call her "Momma" or anything else that
would let on that I was her kid. The Green Gables was a wood-frame
building with swinging screen doors and a big, wide dance floor covered
with cornmeal so the couples could slide around while they danced. The
jukebox in the corner played country acts like Jimmie Rodgers and the
Carter Family, but also blues singers and popular artists of the day. It
was on Highway 6 southeast of Waco on the way to Perry, which was the
only town in the area where you could buy liquor. That highway stayed
busy as a one-eyed dog in a smokehouse. They just served beer and
set-ups at the Green Gables, but you could bring in a bottle you bought
in Perry, or you could buy a slug of booze off of one of the bootleggers
for a nickel or something. It was the mid-forties, and there were lots
of bases in Central Texas at that time, so there were lots of military
folks in and out of there, too.
Blanche inherited the place from a previous marriage, one of several
that ended with a funeral. She was a voluptuous blonde woman, and she
turned the heads of all the guys that came through the doors. She kept
the rings from all of her dead husbands and they covered her fingers.
One day=97and I remember this as clear as day=97I was hanging on to the
end of the bar listening to Blanche and my mother.
"Tincie, there's gonna be an old boy come up here in a few hours,"
Blanche said. "He's gonna be a rich 'un, with one foot in the grave and
the other on a nanner peel. And I'm gonna nail his ass to the wall."
It wasn't less than two hours later that this fella floated up in a
baby-blue Cadillac. He wore a floppy hat, and he took it off in the
parking lot and wiped the sweat off his brow. Maybe I imagined it, but
it was like he was trying to figure out what force drew him to this
broke-down roadhouse on the edge of town. He hung around for a couple of
weeks and sure enough Blanche got another ring for her collection. It
wasn't too much later that fella had his funeral.
Between the regulars and the military folks, I got plenty of attention
at the Green Gables. I guess I reminded those soldiers of their kids, so
they would grab me and throw me up in the air and give me nickels.
Sometimes they would throw me so high I'd hit the ceiling, and it felt
great. I'd have a pocketful of nickels at the end of each day. Sometimes
they'd let me put one of my nickels in the jukebox, and it seemed like
it would play forever.
***
When I was twelve, my grandmother died. I'm not sure what the cause
was=97I think she just wore out. My memories of that time are not clear,
which is strange because I always knew she loved me more than anyone in
the world=97and I loved her just as much. But I don't remember who told
me she died, or seeing her lying in the casket. I just remember being in
the house the day of the funeral, and all the relatives were over
claiming furniture and utensils and anything else they could use in
their homes. I was sitting on the floor in a corner and eventually
everybody left, including my mother and Patricia, and I was there by
myself. They finally came and got me the next day.
No one was really sure what to do with me. My aunts and uncles, of
course, didn't want to take me in, which left either my father or my
mother.
I'd only seen my father once since I was born, and let's just say we
didn't exactly bond. I was about five, and he was over at my Aunt
Vinny's. If my grandma had known Buddy was over there she would've never
let me go, but somehow she didn't know.
By this time Buddy was married to another woman=97her name was
Elizabeth, but everyone called her Lizzie. She was full-blooded Indian
with shiny black hair and a temper to match my father's. According to
the stories I heard later, they used to take off to Dallas for a few
weeks at a time and come back with wads of cash. People said they were a
regular Bonnie and Clyde. My father always carried a gun, while Lizzie
carried a long switch-blade knife in her purse. They were a good team
and they stayed together until the end.
The day I went to Aunt Vinny's, I met him in the living room.
"Yeah, kid, I'm your dad," he said, looking down at me with a crooked
grin.
That's all he said. My half-sister, Wanda Jean, was there in a pretty
pink dress=97she was Buddy's favorite, and he doted on her and pretty
much ignored me. But late that day he walked me out in the backyard,
where he grabbed these two old cats, tied their tails together and threw
them over a clothesline. They just tore each other to pieces. It was a
mean-ass thing to do, but he was testing me. He wanted me to watch it,
while he just laughed like crazy.
But I started crying, which made him mad. I tried to run away, and he
chased me around the yard. I wanted to get out of there, and I grabbed
Wanda Jean's hand to bring her with me. When we turned a corner on the
side of the house, she fell sideways into a big basket of tomatoes. She
was covered in tomato juice, and I guess he thought she was bleeding
because he came after me even faster. But I was real skinny and I could
run a hole in the wind. He never caught me, but I believe he'd a killed
me if he had. I ran straight home, and that's the last time I saw him
for about twelve years.
So eventually my mother took me to Waco with her and Patricia. I guess
she didn't really have much choice.
=A0
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