Billy Joe Shaver – Freedom’s Child

The hard part to remember now is that this man was once regularly described by many, himself included, as a rough-edged, brawling fight-picker and general maker of trouble.

It’s hard because the 63-year-old performer we see onstage these days, the man reflected also in this first Billy Joe Shaver “solo” record in fifteen years, is, for all his big-shouldered, working-man Texas strength, an anomaly in country music. He’s the walking embodiment of a profound sweetness — the sweetness of a Mississippi John Hurt or Louis Armstrong that leaves those who encounter him no choice but to share the informed warmth he exudes.

Yet, for a man of simplicity, this is one complicated guy.

To watch Billy Joe dance onstage, with his patented exploratory jerks and lunges, full of glee, is to see that he remains every bit as much the unreconstituted free spirit and barrelhouse beatnik as he is the committed Christian. Freedom’s Child, indeed. That this is where and how he lives even after such a string of devastating losses (parts of a hand, a wife, a mother, a son, a healthy heart) only makes the man more astonishing.

Shaver’s the name of a man again, not a band. With the death two years ago of his son Eddy silencing that soaring electric blues guitar, the question loomed large as to what this new effort on a new label would even sound like. Another question was where the writing would stand; the last outing with Eddy, The Earth Rolls On, was another peak for Billy Joe as a tunesmith.

Freedom’s Child is far from a “solo” effort. There is backing throughout by an accomplished band including Will Kimbrough and Jamie Hartford (John’s son) on guitars, Chris Carmichael on fiddle, and a serviceable rhythm section. But the sound does return to rough-hewn, sometimes quite stripped-down country, whether old-time murder balladry (“Honey Chile”), raucous honky-tonk (“Wild Cow Gravy”), or even western swing (“Good Ol’ U.S.A.”). This one’s not the work of a hillbilly fronting a blues-rock band.

“Hillbilly” is the right description, though. With the singing up front again, we’re reminded that Billy Joe may be the least “southwestern” sounding Texas singer; he most often delivers his songs in the high and spiritual southeastern tones of Roy Acuff and the Acuff-influenced part of Hank Williams, if in a less dramatic, more laconic way.

Shaver has repeatedly told interviewers that his more personal songs function as a sort of auto-therapy. Yet the powerful, shareable specificity of his lyrics here, and his ability to turn multiple (sometimes contradictory) feelings into workable, impassioned songs, reveals that he’s a very seasoned pro who doesn’t just purge — he produces.

Some of the strongest songs on Freedom’s Child pair off against each other in mood, one-on-one. The low-key but frisky opener, “Hold On To Yours And I’ll Hold On To Mine”, suggests that for two independent people, there’s always a second shot at love. The slow, majestic “We”, contemplating the marriage to the late wife he wed three times, suggests that relationship caused irreparable damage.

On the larger, even political plane, the revived “Good Ol’ U.S.A.” number is a bit of unabashed, jubilant flag-waving that can say of the country, sans irony, “We’ve got faith in the Lord, we got Chevrolets and Fords/All the people of the earth are gonna get their money’s worth”) — though here, at least, nobody is threatened with getting kicked in the butt in the process. A Tennesse Two-style salute to Johnny Cash (“That’s Why The Man In Black Sings The Blues”) speaks to abused women and children, hunger in the world, bombs that should be banned, and seeing to it that “every working stiff across the land won’t have to lose.” (The number also fills in the dots for those who didn’t quite get just why Cash received the Americana Music Association’s Spirit of America Free Speech Award” on the same September night that Shaver was recognized for Lifetime Achievement as a songwriter.)

Even in the partly-hidden bonus cuts on this disc, there’s that double-edged aspect. One’s a a sweet Christmas song actually about the holiday (“For those who believe, He’s the gift we receive, Merry Christmas to you!”); the other, “Necessary Evil”, is one last lamentation of entrapment from Eddy, an extended blues solo with vocal, clearly about the powerful attraction of deadly drugs.

Midway through the disc, the family tragedies and Billy Joe’s own near-suicidal moments are matter-of-factly recounted in the unforgettable new song “Day By Day”, which looks toward reunion in heaven — right on the trail of “Corsicana Daily Sun”, full of sprightly nostalgia and dreams of somehow recapturing lively days with a long-gone grandma.

Clearly, what Shaver’s had on his mind, understandable in its personal immediacy and universal in its interest, is the question of what we can hold onto, and what slips away, what lasts. Sometimes, he tells us, we concern ourselves with “filling up the empty space left by one who’s gone”; sometimes, we can be sure that “songs from the family…never will die.”

It was years ago, in one of his most celebrated and oft-performed songs, that Billy Joe Shaver suggested, in line with the homespun old metaphor of A.P. Carter’s “Diamond In The Rough” and in the spirit of Roy Acuff, that he was just an old chunk of coal that would someday be polished to diamondhood.

The precious jewel metaphor works, of course — as far as it goes. But it doesn’t quite fit this singing songwriter, because diamonds are created not just by polishing, but by intense hardening. And it’s precisely being hard that Billy Joe has let go.

This music, like the man who made it, is not hard, but sweet, touching, flexible — and resiliently strong.