Texas Loses Trio of Dancehall Legends in 2020
Texas lost three of its major troubadours, Johnny Bush, Jerry Jeff Walker, and Billy Joe Shaver in the latter part of 2020. These three diverse gentlemen represented a wide portion of the beautiful scope of Texas music. Their skills that set them apart was that all three could write and sing eternal songs that influenced hundreds of other future musicians and defined Texas music in the late 1900s and still are today. All three were beloved in Texas and it was because of their abilities to sing from the heart and to tell the story from their personal experiences. Any association with major record labels were short lived and prevented the massive marketing which would have boosted their voices outside the Texas borders. This meant that none of their songs were ever Number 1 on national music charts.
The Texas Caruso
Johnny Bush was born in northeast Houston in 1935 listening and singing along to Bob Wills, Ernest Tubb, and Hank Thompson on the radio. His uncle recognized that his voice had exceptional range and got him singing on the radio as a teenager. In 1952, he moved to San Antonio and was soon singing and playing drums in various bands including the Texas Top Hands and a band led by a Pleasanton disc jockey named Willie Nelson. After a decade of honing his craft in the Texas honky-tonks and dance halls, he continued his journey by learning the big leagues of country music by joining Ray Price’s Cherokee Cowboys which included Darrel McCall, Roger Miller, and steel legend Buddy Emmons. Willie Nelson had just left the Cherokee Cowboys and had recommended Bush to Price. In October of 1968, Bush had been performing in Willie Nelson’s band, The Record Men, doing one-night stands across Texas including Riverside Hall in East Bernard. By 1972, Bush had acquired a contract with a national record company when Chet Atkins heard Bush’s operatic voice. Bush had written the honky-tonk anthem Whisky River, that received tremendous feedback from country stations across the country. A national promotional tour was poised to catapult Johnny Bush into stardom, when fate intervened, and Bush’s vocal talents evaporated for an unexplained reason. Bush believed that he knew the reason why: being raised Baptist, he believed that God was punishing him for his promiscuous behavior and bad choices. His life-long friend, Willie, opens every one of his hundreds of shows per year and has recorded it, ensuring frequent royalties to Bush.
Johnny Bush had been living the traditional life of the mid-1900s country musician who was trying to make a name for himself. He was working over three hundred nights a year, never in the same place twice concurrently, a road food diet, drinking whisky and whatever else was available, popping pills and smoking pot. Bush tells a story of sharing a joint with Jimmy Day out behind Schroeder Hall when Willie walks by and they offer him some, Willie replied with “Naw, that doesn’t do anything for me”. Bush was also oversampling the pleasures of the road; he once had his own groupies (with monogrammed shirts), a steady girlfriend, and a wife at the same time.
After the loss of his voice (not entirely, he was able to sing, but nowhere near the quality that he was known for), he tried numerous doctors to no avail which fueled his downslide into decadence. He was periodically releasing albums which got airplay in Texas and sold well in Texas due to his constant gigging. A friend recommended a doctor who performed a chancy procedure. The application of Botox to Bush’s vocal cords healed slowly. After many years of vocal exercises, his voice was back to seventy percent of what it had been.
Bush continued doing what he does best, playing the dance halls of Texas and writing songs (Undo the Right, I’ll Be There, and Green Snake on the Ceiling) which were picked up by other artists. Despite bouts with other health issues, he in early 2020 he celebrated his 80 th birthday with several dance shows. He still had the stage magic that sixty years of performing give you.
Gypsy Songman
Jerry Jeff Walker, finally left the stage in October of 2020. I say finally as most of his acquaintances related that his lifestyle should have ended Scamp Walker’s life forty years ago.
In his early years in the 1960s, Jerry Jeff Walker was a troubadour in the full sense of the word. Just a guy and a guitar with some old folk songs being a “lover of the other side of the hill” and playing for tips on the sidewalks and one night stands in the folk clubs and bars of America.
After several not-so-profitable records, he found himself in a New Orleans jail, as it was often his night’s lodgings due to his fondness of alcohol. His conversation with a cellmate by the name of Bojangles whose occupation was the same as Walker’s, resulted in the creation of the American classic song, Mr. Bojangles. Walker had been working on the song intermittently and finished the final draft backstage at a club in South Austin.
The song was recorded by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and made the Top 10 charts in 1970. This ensured a steady flow of money and allowed him to keep living the life he loved, a gypsy songman. Walker played wherever he could get a gig (and showed up). This song was recorded yearly by musicians from Bob Dylan to Andy Williams. President Richard Nixon once told a reporter that the song, as performed by Sammy Davis, Jr. was his favorite. The initial success of this ballad enabled Walker to keep his hitchhiking travels in motion. The continued success of it, enabled him to get a house in Miami, Florida.
Jimmy Buffett was trying to break into the Nashville music business in 1970 when he met Walker who was still living the gypsy songman life, despite owning a home in Florida. Buffett allowed Walker to crash at his Nashville house. There, he created a disturbance and Buffett’s wife threw him out. Before leaving Walker said, if you’re ever in Miami, you can stay at my place. After seeing Walker’s troubadour lifestyle Buffett decided he wanted to travel around playing music. Buffett hit the road with his, playing in various places including Austin and Houston. He somehow landed a gig in Miami. Once there, he stayed at Walker’s house. They decided to make a road trip to Key West to check it out. Once Buffett experienced the Keys, he knew he found his home. He recorded a couple of albums to local success. On one of his tours through Austin, he awoke on the final day with a roaring hangover. Visiting a Mexican restaurant in North Austin, he consumed a couple of margaritas, which eased his headache. On the flight back to Miami, he penned a fun little song which he called Margaritaville. The rest they say is history.
By the time he permanently arrived in Austin in 1971 Walker was, to paraphrase author Jan Reid: “a misfit, unwilling to act his age and conform to the roles that society expected. He thought he would be dead and gone quite soon enough; so he might as well glut his life on impulse before the last impulse claimed him.”.
Walker was hanging around Austin wondering, when his manager said he had gotten him a record deal. Walker acquired one of the best bands in Austin, The Lost Gonzo Band, and headed into an Austin studio with some of his songs and few by Texian Guy Clark. This album, Jerry Jeff Walker, contained the beginnings of the Cosmic Cowboy music phenomena of Texas music: L. A. Freeway and Hill Country Rain. The album was a financial flop, but those two songs were continuously requested for several decades and are definitive of Texas music. His next endeavor would seal his
His next endeavor would seal his legendary status in Texas music. Never feeling comfortable in a recording studio environment, he ventured out to the Hill Country dance hall and community of Luckenbach with a mobile studio. There he recorded some “studio” songs in the truck and then opened up the dance hall and let a crowd in to preserve a sampling of the “real” Jerry Jeff Walker. The result was an album and 8-track tape, Viva Terlingua, that was probably in every pickup truck in Texas from 1973 on. The controlled recordings consisted of the raucous, self-definitive Getting By (…Just letting it roll, letting the high times carry the low/ I'm just living my life easy come, easy go…), Sangria Wine, Backsliders Wine, Desperados Waiting for a Train, and Little Bird were recorded and become favorites of the Cosmic Cowboy crowd. When the hall opened, lightening in a bottle was caught on tape, with Ray Wylie Hubbard’s Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother which instantly became the battle cry of the Cosmic Cowboy. Walker stepped aside to enable Gary P. Nunn to introduce a song of his that became the Texas National Anthem: London Homesick Blues (I wanna go home with the armadillo…). The album went viral across the nation and overseas. A couple of musicians that were on that landmark album are still in the area; fiddler Sweet Mary Egan has been giving fiddle lessons to the Jordan Sisters (TPN Jan. 2015), and guitar genius John Inman has been playing with Bill Pekar & the Rainy Brothers from Shiner.
Jerry Jeff kept doing what he had always been doing, writing songs and playing music until he had accumulated forty albums, Along with Willie, Steve Fromholz, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Michael Martin Murphy, B. W. Stevenson, Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, and Gary P. Nunn they revolutionized the country music scene within the United States with Texas flavored songs. The children dancing in diapers (sometimes) at Willie Nelson picnics later grew up and fostered another revolution of Texas music. Robert Earl Keen, Lyle Lovett, Pat Green, Larry Joe Taylor, and Rusty Wier all attribute Walker and his compadres as the reason Texas music is still strong and vibrant as these Texians have inspired another generation of music that is alive and keeping the spirit alive in the 2020s. The influence of these generations of Texians have greatly influenced a newly sanctioned genre which is known as Americana.
Old Chunk of Coal
The third prong of this trilogy of sadness is a man who most people outside of the music world are unfamiliar with. Billie Joe Shaver. This writer will attempt to describe his life with excerpts from his writings, both literary and lyrical; these will be in italics. Your imagination will fill in the details, if it dares.
Willie Nelson proclaims him the best Texas songwriter ever. John Anderson (I’m Just an Old Chunk of Coal), Emmylou Harris (Old Five and Dimers Like Me), Kris Kristofferson (Christian Soldier) and Elvis Presley (You Asked Me To) are some of the higher profile folks who have covered his songs; and then you add on Willie, Waylon Jennings, and hundreds of other Texian musicians that still perform his songs. He was lauded as a poet and storyteller. To me the song is poetry/That’s all it is.
His 81 years of life was one long tumultuous odyssey which produced some of the most beautifully raw songs ever written. The guideline for songwriters is to write about what you know. Well, that’s what he did, of the twenty-three albums he released, only a handful of songs were written by anyone else. He bares his soul, his love of people and Jesus, his personal philosophies: By the sweat of his brow is how a man’s supposed to earn his pay. Until he found Jesus on a mountain top in Tennessee: I used to crank and drink until my back was to the floor/ I’d take it to the limit, then I’d try to get some more/Ain’t no two ways about it, I have been saved by Jesus Christ. He considered himself a fallen angel When I get my wings/Hey I’m gonnal fly/Gonna fly away singin’. Shaver wrote a lotta songs about Jesus with a unique perspective: Jesus Christ what a hell of a man and the bumper sticker phrase: If you don’t love Jesus, you can go to Hell.
His autobiography opens with: I was not even born yet when my father first tried to kill me. He describes that night and surmises I think that night is the reason I write country music, because country music is the blues. In the years since that night, 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. Speaking of his wife, Brenda, he once stated: She was the dumbest woman in the world, she married me three times. True, I heard him say it.
The autobiography was written in 2005, and his scoreboard of life’s impositions have increased. Since then, he has had a major heart attack on the stage at Gruene Hall. He survived it but was disappointed because he wanted to die on the stage of a dance hall. He survived a minor gun battle with a drunk He was trying to shoot me, but he took too long to aim. He escaped legal issues, when he showed up in court with Willie, Robert Duval (actor) and Dick DeGuerin (top lawyer in Texas).
In writing about what he knows: Now, I’d just thought I’d mention my grandma’s old age pension, is the reason why I’m standing here today/ I got all my country learning milking and a churnin’/ Picking cotton, raisin’ hell, and bailing hay. Billy Joe was self-conscious of growing up a poor farm boy: I been to Georgia on a fast train honey, I wuddn’t born no yesterday/ I got a good Christian raisin’, and an eighth grade education/ Ain’t no need in ya’ll treating me this way. His cotton picking raising in the Bible Belt (Corsicana/Waco) countryside was reflected in: When Jesus was our Savior and cotton was our king/ With them hallelujahs ringin’, everybody shoutin’ singin’/ Give me that old-time religion, Jesus loves me, this I know/ When life was finger-lickin’ good and God lived in our neighborhood/At them old campground meetin’s, eatin’ chicken on the ground.
He had been born to write, he had been writing poems since the age of five; when he was eight years old he wrote a five stanza poem to the girl next door, Come on darlin’ let me hold your little hand and his 8 th grade English teacher was the only person to encourage him, which he never forgot.
He quit high school and took off and lived a gypsy lifestyle: If my feet could fit a railroad track, I guess I’d a-been a train. He spent some time performing at the Old Quarter in Houston where he befriended Towns Van Zandt and together they lit out to Tennessee on: a U-Haul it freight with very little money in his pocket: My how those eagles fly, Goodbye bottom dollar goodbye. Being a songwriter in Nashville didn’t work out. There’s a whole bunch of cookie cutters up in Tennessee, They’re making stars everyday…
For many decades while writing and playing his songs at night he held many jobs which fed his songwriting. When he first married Brenda, she was pregnant: Her belly was swelled with the child that she carried/ The unwelcome start of a God given dream. For several years he busted broncs on a ranch and worked at a sawmill. While the young man broke horse and worked at the sawmill the young girl would sing to the baby inside. It was at the sawmill, that a fork in the road was reached; he got three fingers caught in a chain and he had to literally pull his hand away losing two and a half of the fingers. Hanging down like wilted flowers. His story of finding his fingers in the sawdust, driving himself to the doctor, asking for them to be reattached because he read they did it in Japan, and a black nurse asking for them to keep is the most horribly funny story I’ve heard. This kind of put a damper on his guitar playing and that is when he decided that his English teacher was right, he should focus on songwriting.
Willie had just began hosting his picnics, and Billy Joe was hanging around backstage. He was in a trailer, playing one of his songs when Waylon Jennings emerged out of a back room, and asked him if that was one of his. Waylon promised him that if Billy Joe ever got to Nashville he would like to hear more of them. Time passed, Billy Joe was in Nashville and heard Waylon was recording. Shaver kept pestering him for months about his promise, cause you know a real man picks his words so he don’t have to eat them. He finally cornered Waylon in a studio and hollered 'Hey Waylon!' I got these songs that you claimed you was gonna listen to, and if you don't listen to 'em I'm gonna whip your ass right here in front of everybody. Waylon offered him a $100 dollars to go away, which Shaver refused. There was more loud verbal “discussion”, then Waylon agreed to listen to him sing a song on the condition, that if he didn’t like it, Shaver would be thrown out by Waylon’s bodyguards. Waylon liked the first one, the second one, the third one, etc. Waylon stopped him after a while and said that settles it, I have to record them all. At that time Waylon was a huge moneymaker for RCA records and had power. Of course, the record executives said that a full album of someone else’s songs had never been done, and wouldn’t sell. Waylon can be very persuasive (particularly with his biker bodyguards) and the record was made. Then Chet Atkins, RCA president, said he wouldn’t release it, it was too bare (no strings, choirs, overproduction, etc. as that was the New Nashville sound), it would lose money. He also demanded at least one song from another writer, in hopes of having a “hit” single. There is a story that a certain Nashville record executive was dangled off his balcony by his boot heels to release an album. Billy Joe claims he thought that was how records got released. Anyway, in 1973, the “loser” album was released with the first cut, Honky Tonk Heroes, as its title. Response at first was mixed, over the months it gained traction as this “new” style of music was being absorbed, and then copied until the “Outlaw Country” style of music blossomed. It was a multi-million seller. It was termed Outlaw because of the rejection of the syrupy, violin (not fiddles) laden music which have pervaded Nashville’s Music Row for years, thus opening the door for Willie and dozens of others to reshape the American music scene.
His career over the decades has been a roller coaster ride, he befriended the actor Robert Duval which gave him some screen time (The Apostle and Secondhand Lions), there has been several documentaries made of his unconventional life, he wrote his own autobiography (no co- or ghost writers) which includes the lyrics to all the recorded songs, which is his autobiography set to music. Here are some samplings of his thoughts: Love: Love is so sweet, it makes you bounce walking down the street. Life’s expectation: Life turned out to be another magazine. Rejection from Brenda: I love you honey, but there ain’t much money in a serenade, I need a man with a real job. Texas: I’m proud to say the Lone Star State is where I’m coming from. Selfrealization: Just like this old rocking chair/I move but I’m getting nowhere. Dealing with tragic personal loss: The Earth rolls on. His distaste of Amarillo/Lubbock: every check they paid us bounced like a basketball/ There ain’t nothing between Amarillo and the North Pole but a barbed wire fence, and it’s down/ There’s some good people in Lubbock but they’re all dead.
If you want to see if there are some Billy Joe Shaver fans just say the word Thunderbird and someone replies What’s the price, the answer is forty twice. A summation his life would be: The Devil made me do it the first time, the second time I done it on my own.
And everyone should remember that God loves you if you dance.