Saturday, August 1, 2009

Shaver: Live Forever

SONG Live Forever

WRITTEN BY Billy Joe Shaver, Eddie Shaver

PERFORMED BY Shaver

APPEARS ON Tramp on Your Street (1993); Unshaven: Live at Smith's Old Bar (1995); Victory (1998); many others

NOTE "Live Forever" is Billy Joe Shaver's best-loved song. He has recorded it many times, both under his own name and under the rubric of Shaver, the band he formed with his late son Eddie.


The older I get, the more I value songs like "Live Forever." More than a simple profession of faith -- the first line is the confident "I'm gonna live forever" -- Billy Joe Shaver explains exactly his understanding of immortality:
  • what one creates ("the songs I leave behind me")
  • one's children ("Please try to raise your children right")
  • love of another person ("Remember someone really loves you")
In this respect, "Live Forever" is unique in that there is no guessing, no resolution of doubt. Shaver knows what it means to "cross that river" and still "always be around." The extent that we can share his understanding resolves some of our own questions about mortality and alleviates the fear of death.

This knowledge came hard for Billy Joe, whose tumultuous personal life reached its nadir on New Year's Eve 2000 when his son and collaborator Eddy died of a heroin overdose. Eddy's mother and Shaver's wife Brenda, who Shaver married and divorced a number of times, passed away the year before along with his mother, both succumbing to cancer.

Although the Shavers wrote "Live Forever" prior to all of this personal tragedy, Billy Joe continues to sing it today. As such it has become a plea to his audience to not make the same mistakes he did. Especially resonant is the verse about children:
You fathers and you mothers
be good to one another
Please try to raise your children right
Don't let the darkness take 'em
Don't let 'em feel forsaken
Just lead 'em safely to the light
The video below emphasizes children, showing a wistful Shaver with the grandchildren he never had.

When it comes to creativity, we can't all be songwriters or authors or painters. But we can appreciate creativity, and in that act recreate a song, a book, a painting and add our grasp of it to the cosmos of art. That's what this blog is about: Evangelizing an art form that contributors care deeply about and find personally meaningful so that we and our readers can participate in a continual cycle of creation and recreation. I hope that Billy Joe Shaver would approve.

LYRICS
I'm gonna live forever
I'm gonna cross that river
I'm gonna catch tomorrow now
You're gonna wanna hold me
Just like I've always told you
You're gonna miss me when I'm gone

Nobody here will ever find me
But I will always be around
Just like the songs I leave behind me
I'm gonna live forever now

You fathers and you mothers
be good to one another
Please try to raise your children right
Don't let the darkness take 'em
Don't let 'em feel forsaken
Just lead 'em safely to the light

When this old world is blown asunder
And all the stars fall from the sky
Remember someone really loves you
We'll live forever you and I

I'm gonna live forever
I'm gonna cross that river
I'm gonna catch tomorrow now...





Joe Ely with Joel Guzman on accordion:




Patty Griffin:

5 comments:

  1. Man, that must have been a tough song for him to sing for a while after 2000, though. I'd like to hear what it sounds like when he sings it now and compare it to how he sang it in the video before everything hit the fan. I'll bet there's a difference!

    I love the Joe Ely version, but then I'm a big fan of his, so I'm biased. Heh, heh!

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  2. Joe is great. We just saw The Flatlanders. They were good, but there wasn't enough Ely!

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  3. I do have to get a Butch Hancock song -- as sung by Ely -- on here.

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  4. This song moves me every time I hear it and now that I'm a father it hits me even deeper. I wrote a song once about losing someone I loved and the only time I performed it live I was moved to tears. It takes a huge amount of courage to be this raw and yet there is something very liberating about it. Thanks for creating this page.

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  5. It just goes to show, it doesn't take too many words to say it all.Bless you and yours Billy. As Chet Atkins said to Les Paul on the Nashville sessions album "...the hardest thing in the world to do is something simple well as there is no place to hide". This song need no place to hide. Great page,thanks.

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