In 2002, Billy Joe Shaver sat in a chair in an open studio room, still finishing the words to “Day by Day” while Will Kimbrough tuned a 12-string guitar across from him. The song told the story of Shaver’s family. By then, nearly everyone in it was gone.
The Year Everything Fell Apart
In 1999, Shaver lost his mother, Victory, and his wife, Brenda, to cancer within about a month of each other. He had married Brenda three times. They met when she was 16 and he was 20, and their only child, John Edwin Shaver, was born in 1962. Everyone called him Eddy.
Eddy grew into one of the most feared guitar players in Texas. He was tutored by Dickey Betts of the Allman Brothers Band, and for 24 of his 38 years he played lead guitar in his father’s band. From 1993 on, father and son recorded together simply as Shaver, and together they had just finished an album called The Earth Rolls On.
The end of 2000 should have been a beginning for Eddy. He had married in October. The Friday before New Year’s weekend, he signed a solo deal with the Antone’s label, and he was due to start recording on January 2.
Instead, his wife found him unresponsive in a Waco motel on the night of December 30. He was taken to Hillcrest Baptist Medical Center and pronounced dead at 2:58 a.m. on December 31, 2000. The official cause was a heroin overdose. When police first called his father, Billy Joe told them it had to be a mistake, because his son was in Austin.
That same night, Billy Joe walked onstage as booked, at the Hilltop Bar & Grill in Spicewood, where Willie Nelson joined him for a tribute to Eddy. Shaver later explained his choice in a single line.
I’m not proud of my misfortune. I’m proud of my survival.
A Man Who Did Not Plan to Record Again
The Earth Rolls On came out in the spring of 2001, and Shaver was unhappy with how it was handled. He left his label and told interviewers he was not sure he could make another album at all. That summer, during a tour with his old friend Kinky Friedman, he suffered a heart attack onstage at Gruene Hall in New Braunfels and needed bypass surgery.
The call that changed his mind came from R.S. Field, who had produced Tramp on Your Street for Billy Joe and Eddy in 1993. Field heard Shaver was down and asked him to try one more record, and a new Houston label, Compadre Records, signed on.
Twenty Years in the Making
“Day by Day” was not a new idea. Shaver had been working on it for about 20 years, and it kept changing because the story kept changing. When Brenda died, he could barely touch it. After Eddy died, he decided to leave it alone for good.
Field would not let it go. When Shaver played him part of it, the producer told him the album needed it. Shaver went into the sessions with hundreds of songs and narrowed them down, but this one he held back on purpose. He asked Field to make it the very last thing they recorded, because he wanted every minute he could get, and something else might happen before they finished. He laughed when he said it.
He had doubts about making something so private public, but he believed writing was how he got through things.
I’ve always said that the cheapest psychologist was writing songs.
Tears Across the Room
When the moment came, there was no band. Shaver sat in a chair in an open room, and Kimbrough sat directly across from him with the 12-string. Shaver was still writing while Kimbrough tuned up. Then they recorded it right away.
Shaver said afterward that Kimbrough got deep into the song, and that he could see tears in the guitarist’s eyes. Of all the songs on the album, it was the slowest to come together and the quickest to record.
What the Song Tells
The song runs about four minutes and covers a whole family: a young couple marrying at 21 and 17 with a baby on the way, a husband working horses and a sawmill, years of love that keeps growing. Then the mother dies, the son follows her, and the father falls to his knees. It ends with him rising again, carrying the family’s songs. Shaver called it the hard center of the whole album.
Eddy’s Last Word on the Record
“Day by Day” was the last song recorded for Freedom’s Child, but it is not the last sound on the original CD. After the final listed track comes an unlisted one called “Necessary Evil,” and it is Eddy alone.
Not long before he died, Eddy was out in the garage at night, playing through a cheap little amplifier. Billy Joe set up a tape recorder. Eddy played it through once, and his father thought it was perfect. That single take is the one that closes the album.
Asked whether he felt his son with him in the studio, Shaver said he did. He said Eddy had melted into him, and that playing without him had made him stronger.
After the Song
Freedom’s Child was released in November 2002, the first album credited to Billy Joe Shaver alone since 1987, and it became a hit on Americana radio. He believed the song could help strangers too, that people who heard it would feel less alone in their own losses.
When you help yourself, you wind up helping someone else.
Billy Joe Shaver kept writing and touring for almost two more decades. He died in Waco on October 28, 2020, at 81. He is buried at Waco Memorial Park, beside Eddy and Brenda.