True to the Roots (25 page)

schedules haven't worked out yet, but he's somebody we'd like to work with.

"It's so hard to write songs these days with any new sort of substance. There are so many love songs out there. It's difficult to write a love song. Willy [who either wrote or cowrote all twelve songs on the aforementioned CD] does a good job. I guess it's not just a matter anymore of just flat out saying stuff. You have to think about it."

Of his own craft Cody adds: "I guess [playing the fiddle] hasn't really changed much over the years. There are lots of different styles, but I think I've really stuck to the roots with my playing. I try to take the traditional stuff, the old-time styles, and throw it in there where I can. It's nice, in our music, to throw that country stuff in there."

"That country stuff" is etched in the band's background. Cody plays the fiddle, he says, because he got one for Christmas at age seven. Willy got the guitar, and the rest is history. Their father, a musician, enlisted the boys in the family band. They were playing "western music and honky-tonk stuff" from the time they were kids.

What they're playing now, though, has the edge of revolution in it. They're moving the music not away from its roots but sort of parallel to them. It's a sharpened edge on an old blade.

Never was a man so talented and yet, at the same time, so humble.

The great Billy Joe Shaver is now well into his sixties. One of his recent albums,
Freedom's Child
, is so soulful, so moving, and so personal that, of course, it has no chance at all of being played on mainstream country radio.

Plainly, Shaver is too hot for country radio to handle, and what a shame that is because he speaks with the raw human emotion that used to define the genre. That Shaver is a throwback to Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, the Allman Brothers, and even Elvis is underscored by the fact that each one of them recorded his songs at one time or another.

Now, however, Shaver is mostly alone. In recent years he lost his mother and wife to cancer and his son Eddy, a guitarist of world-class skill, to a drug overdose. That Shaver has figured out a way to come to grips with so much tragedy comes across in the simple tranquility of some of his recent songs.

A Shaver concert is characterized by variety. At regular intervals he allows his band to drift into the background as he sings either a quavering a cappella or accompanies himself only with his downsized acoustic guitar. That voice! Gruff, timeworn, and unapologetically twangy, it, like everything else about him, is too good for radio. Radio can't understand him. Radio doesn't get it.

Here is a man whose religious convictions have been tempered by stern tests of enduring tragedy and the consequences of his own temptations and failings. One gets the impression that the battle between good and evil that lurks within every man has etched and shaped the very character of Shaver, yet with age he has found a certain fleeting serenity, the kind that envelops opposing armies as they wearily observe a lull between skirmishes.

Some songwriters imagine. Shaver reflects on what life has taught him. His songs are about the lessons of life, some learned and some regretfully ignored.

It's not unusual in concerts to see Shaver perform one set composed mainly of songs from recent albums and another dominated by old standards. He wrote almost all the songs on Jennings's finest album,
Honky Tonk Heroes
(1973). The title track is about the dive Shaver's grandmother ran in Waco, Texas.
Freedom's Child
includes a song dedicated to the late Johnny Cash, "That's Why the Man in Black Sings the Blues."

Partway through a Charlotte concert several years ago, soon after the release of
Freedom's Child
, when Shaver sang "Tramp on Your Street," an obviously autobiographical tune, the audience spontaneously rose to give him a standing ovation. Shaver said such a thing had never happened to him before. He descended to his knees several times to acknowledge the simple adulation. Once he sang a song with one knee on the ground and the other supporting the little guitar.

Like many of Shaver's songs, "Wild Cow Gravy" mixes humor with wisdom as he ponders just how he managed to live so long through "all the reckless ramblin' and the crazy stuff I've done."

In my regular job I travel around the country writing about automobile racing. My general unsettledness from living many days and nights on the road probably has a great deal to do with the somewhat random nature of this book. I've tried to include the singers and songwriters whom I consider true to the roots, but I've had to settle, in too many instances, for the interviews I could arrange and the concerts I could see. It's surely not wise to cite all the artists I wish I could have interviewed—undoubtedly, I'll manage to leave important figures out—but here goes anyway. I wish I'd had the chance to profile men like Kinky Friedman, John Prine, Guy Clark, Todd Snider, Rodney Crowell, Ian Tyson, and Ray Benson.

I saw Benson perform with his band, Asleep at the Wheel, at Austin's Broken Spoke, but there wasn't time for an interview. It's tricky to talk to performers before or after their shows. They're concentrating on the upcoming show beforehand and exhausted and itching to get the bus—or van or motor home—on the road afterward.

My deepest regret is the absence of female subjects upon these pages. I tried very hard to interview Kimmie Rhodes, the exceptional Austin vocalist. It was a distinct pleasure to see Lucinda Williams in concert a few years ago in Los Angeles, and I admire her work like I admire Steve Earle's. Robbie Fulks wrote an essay devoted to Williams that is probably more eloquent than anything I could muster. Iris DeMent has a voice even more plaintive, if that's possible, than Williams, and no one stirs my soul like Kelly Willis. Among others I wish I could've interviewed are Caitlin Cary, Tift Merritt, Allison Moorer, Cheryl Wheeler, Alison Krauss, and Shelby Lynne.