Billy Joe Shaver

Billy Joe Shaver is a Texas singer-songwriter and an outlaw country icon. His 1973 album Old Five and Dimers Like Me remains a classic, and Waylon Jennings' career-defining Honky Tonk Heroes released the same year includes many of the same songs as Shaver wrote or co-wrote 11 of the 12 tracks on the album.

Shaver’s biography is full of legend and heartbreak. He spent his childhood in a honky-tonk, broke into country music by threatening (on separate occasions) Bobby Bare and Waylon Jennings, cut off two fingers in a sawmill accident, lost his mother, wife, and son within a single year, shot a stranger to make him apologize, and has suffered a heart attack on stage. He is a born again Christian and continues to write and perform today.