Simplicity is Billy Joe Shaver's signature

While many artists have sung his praises, as well as his lyrics, Billy Joe Shaver is owning his music on two upcoming albums.

Memphis turned out to be a kind of crossroads for Billy Joe Shaver.

Back in the late-'60s, the Texas native was hitchhiking his way to Los Angeles to pursue a career as a musician, but he only got as far as the Bluff City, where he found himself on I-40 trying to thumb a ride west.

"I was going to LA, but I couldn't get a ride on that side of the road," recalls Shaver, "so I jumped on the other side, and the first car that passed stopped and picked me up. So I went east to Nashville, and that's where everything happened to me. Guess it was all supposed to have gone down that way."

On Saturday, the 72-year-old Shaver returns to Memphis for a concert at the Hi-Tone Café. These days he's regarded as one of the finest songwriters in country music history and an avatar of the outlaw movement, having turned the twists of his roughhewn biography into the highest art.

Though his tunes have been covered by everyone from Elvis Presley to Toby Keith over the years, Shaver remains modest about his standing in the pantheon of songwriters. "Tell you the truth, I'm still an amateur," he says. "I do this stuff because it makes me feel good. I just get a kick out of it."

Next month, Shaver will release a concert CD, Live at Billy Bob's. "It's got three new songs on it, besides the hits," he says. "Well, I never had any hits myself, but the hits other people had on my songs."

The live disc will serve as a prelude to an eagerly awaited studio album, his first new record in five years. "I've waited a long time to do anything. I had such a store of records, it almost seemed there was like no point to doing another one if it wasn't going to get the attention. That's the way I felt about it."

Shaver says the new record will continue to explore his well-worn themes: faith, love and loss, albeit with a fresh slant. "You know me -- I'm always searching for something a little different. But simplicity is the main thing. I've got a corner on simplicity," he says.

"There are some new thoughts and new ways of thinking about this and that. I dunno what you'd call it exactly. For some reason or another all my songs have a little bit of a spiritual thing to them, and I am a born-again Christian. But there's some humor in it, too. I just hope everybody likes it."

He adds that the record will be called Shaver: Back With a Vengeance and will be released under the "Shaver" moniker -- the name of the band he had with his late son Eddy, who died of a drug overdose in 2000 at the age of 38. The record will include a clutch of Eddy's unreleased songs. "I got some things of his that I'm gonna do on there," says Shaver. "He finished writing them but didn't get them on record."

In a sense, the new album -- due later this year -- would seem to offer a kind of summary of Shaver's musical life, one that began with him as a barefoot kid near Waco, Texas, sneaking off to the African-American juke joints outside town.

"There was a place across the railroad tracks, a community where cotton pickers lived. And I'd go over there every day and listen to music," says Shaver. "I was barely 6 years old; I'd crawl across them tracks, and I'd listen to all the stuff they played. That's where most of my foundation came from."

"They were singing a lot of Jimmie Rodgers, but they thought Jimmie Rodgers was black -- and I did too; I didn't know. So I loved Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams of course, Ernest Tubb. I probably got influenced by all that inherently; I didn't mean to. Well, I won't say influenced; I got inspired."

That inspiration would fuel some of Shaver's finest work: autobiographical story songs that chronicled his journey from wayward child to sawmill worker (where he lost a couple of fingers) to proverbial honky-tonk hero.

While his own solo career never quite got off the ground commercially -- he recorded a trio of brilliant but overlooked LPs in the '70s -- the songs kept coming, with Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Waylon Jennings among those singing Shaver's words and praises.

"I used to get up and write every day; that was when my well was so full I just couldn't keep up with it, hardly," says Shaver. "From '69 on, up until about '77, that was a real hot time for me. I was so hot I went a little crazy and blew a bunch of years that I coulda been more productive."

Shaver would find success again in the '90s, when he teamed up with guitarist son Eddy to form Shaver, which released a quartet of classic LPs, turning Billy Joe onto a new generation of fans.

But Eddy's death, as well as the passing of Shaver's wife and mother in an 18-month period, marked a devastating start to the 2000s. "You know, I've always written a lot of poetry. I used to just stick them poems in the storeroom. I figured it would be good insurance policy for my family one day. But now my family is all gone," says Shaver.

"It's so strange; I've still got all these poems. Every once in a while I'll grab two or three of them and make a song out of them. I like writing poetry. It's the cheapest psychiatrist there is," he says, chuckling. "And I sure need one."

Even though he's into his seventies, Shaver is still on the road, touring heavily with his three-piece band. He admits that it's becoming tougher to do these days; the guarantees are less substantial, the bookings less glamorous -- and yet, he keeps on.

"It is getting harder; I don't know why. But, you know, somebody's gotta play these honky tonks. I was raised in one, so I don't have no trouble with it," he says, laughing. "I just need enough money to get to the next gig."

Billy Joe Shaver, John Paul Keith

Saturday 9 p.m. at the Hi-Tone Café, 1913 Poplar. Tickets: $17; available at the door or hitonememphis.com. For more information, call (901) 278-8663.

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