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—she 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—I'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—why? That's something I've been thinking about a lot lately.

Throughout my career as a songwriter, I've just written songs about me—the 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—that 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—like it's a lucky break. I think God allowed me to live. He wanted me to tell my story.

 

 

Praise be songs of sin and salvation

CARL WILSON

"(c) The Globe and Mail  2002, All Rights Reserved" 

Outside the walls of church or school, the first time music met God in my life was in the back of a station wagon one night, driving from somewhere to somewhere. My cousins already had said the rosary by the dashboard light, a spooky enough experience for a visitor from a far-less-observant family. And then came the Johnny Cash eight-track.


I don't know what album it was, but it had A Boy Named Sue and a lot of gospel.  I'd never heard Cash before, and felt like we'd tuned in some fire-and-brimstone preacher: Since when were hymns entertainment? It seemed like cultish indoctrination, and a cruel letdown from my Toronto relatives -- they were supposed to show me urban sophistication, and this was what I found?


Sometime on that same trip, I knuckled under and went to confession at my cousins' church; the priest cursed me out violently for not making my mom take me to mass more often, and my already rocky relationship with Catholicism ended in bitter divorce.


From then on, the only religious references I allowed in my music were at least partly blasphemous -- Jim Carroll's heroin-shooting altar boy was a favourite, and I loved to hear Patti Smith sing, "Jesus died for somebody's sins/ but not mine." Leonard Cohen got a pass (his Christ-besotted Zen Judaism wasn't anybody's orthodoxy) and Jesus Christ Superstar held a perverse fascination.  But that was about it.


Adulthood brought a few encounters with Bible-thumping musicians, most memorably New York free-jazz giant Charles Gayle screeching out imprecations against abortion between sax solos. But I would skip over the gospel numbers on Al Green albums. I learned to appreciate Johnny Cash, but his Christianity continued to give me the wig, as did Bob Dylan's gospel phase.


Today, God, in all his or her or their forms, still strikes me as one of the most wanton bogeymen the human imagination ever loosed on the world. But I have to admit that half the world's great music has come out of the mystic. Seeing Billy Joe Shaver in Missouri in June was the last straw for my gospel phobias.


Shaver, who hails from no less a faith-plagued locale than Waco, Tex., hauled his 6-foot, 63-year-old self up on stage to play the most moving set of country music I've ever heard. Through cussedness and bad luck, Shaver has never achieved the fame of some of his friends, but when he takes the stage he has all the force of legend -- as Torontonians will witness at his first local gig in eight years, on Wednesday at Hugh's Room (2261 Dundas St. W, 8 p.m., $20,  416-531-6604).


He played the classics he wrote for everyone from the late Waylon Jennings (whose 1973 disc of Shaver songs, Honky Tonk Heroes, was the Rosetta Stone of the "outlaw country" movement) to the Allman Brothers, Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley, George Jones, Jerry Lee Lewis, Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, Billy Paul, Scott Walker, and Dylan and Cash themselves. He sang lines like "The devil made me do it the first time/ The second time I did it on my own," and "I'm just an old lump of coal, but I'm gonna be a diamond one day."


He did material from The Earth Rolls On, his great album with his only child Eddy on guitar, recorded after Shaver's mother and wife died within a month of each other in 1999. And he previewed some of Freedom's Child, his first recording since Eddy died of a heroin overdose on New Year's Eve, 2000.  Meanwhile, Shaver has undergone back surgery, had a heart attack on stage last year and ended up having a quadruple bypass.


Songwriting is a profession Shaver has said he "fell back on" after severing two fingers on his right hand in a sawmill accident at 28, and after stints as a bronco buster, Navy man, roofer, boozer and brawler.


His father abandoned Shaver's honky-tonk-waitress mother, and Shaver himself divorced Eddy's mother Brenda twice and married her three times (first when she was 17, and last while she was dying of cancer).


This is a man whose life was a country song already, and he makes the most of it in tunes such as I've Been to Georgia on a Fast Train ("I've got a good Christian raisin'/ And an 8th-grade education/ I don't need y'all to treat me thisaway").


So when he gently, humbly mentioned on stage that he owed it all to Jesus -- who he's said came to him when he was drugging, drinking and cheating, and pulled him back from the lip of a cliff where he was about to jump -- all I could think was, "Whatever gets that man through the day is fine by me."


My world already had been rocked that weekend by the electric gospel of "Sacred Steel" guitarist Calvin Cooke, but I could chalk that up to sonics. What impressed me was the unassuming character of Shaver's creed: You might have your own beliefs, but Jesus works best for him. Who could object?


When a rural Texas cowboy poet sings of sin and salvation, it's as natural and potent as the great Pakistani quallah singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan chanting transcendent love songs to Allah. And not necessarily a campaign for converts. Sometimes, we squeamish secularists are the ones who need to learn to live and let live.


"There's many a moonbeam got lost in the forest," Shaver sings on his stunning new family saga, Day By Day. "And many a forest got burnt to the ground/ The son went with Jesus to be with his mother/ The father just fell to his knees on the ground."


I hope I never get that deep into the woods. The point is that Shaver (much like Cash) found his way out, not which light he travelled by. And when the songs he's brought back run so deep and ring so true, you can't help wanting to give thanks and praise.