Billy Joe Shaver – Greatest Hits

Like Barry Bonds’ home run record, Billy Joe Shaver’s Greatest Hits should come with an asterisk and fine print, this one explaining that these are more recent recordings of much older original material. The album is packed with beer-joint-quality reprises of “Georgia On A Fast Train”, “Old Chunk Of Coal”, “Honky Tonk Heroes”, “You Asked Me To”, and “Old Five And Dimers” taken from 2003’s live-in-Austin Try And Try Again that offer different takes on Shaver’s Outlaw-period classics covered by the likes of Waylon Jennings and Bobby Bare. The R.S Field-produced “Freedom’s Child”, a haunting nonpartisan patriotic anthem that is easily the stoutest track in the collection, resonates even more pointedly now than it did in 2002 just before the Iraq war began, while “Step On Up” displays the nasty licks of Eddy Shaver, the son and guitarist who before his death in 2000 put the drive in his father’s 1990s band. True to the complicated man who still shakes his hips suggestively at one point and calls upon Jesus at another, other selections here range from the reverent “When Fallen Angels Fly” to the ribald “That’s What She Said Last Night”. While the Greatest Hits title may be a bit of a stretch, this is still a fine sampler of one of the revered giants of outside-the-box country songwriting and a key influence behind the Texas sound of today.