OldiesSong

Greatest Hits Oldies But Goodies Ever

In 1997, when outlaw country songwriter Billy Joe Shaver learned his former wife Brenda had terminal cancer, he immediately proposed and married her a third time to become her caregiver. Their story began on December 3, 1966, when they first wed in Waco, Texas, where Brenda Joyce Tindell was a 21-year-old widow with a young son, Eddy. Billy Joe legally adopted the boy, loved him as his own, and later shared the stage with him as his guitarist. Years of rough road life and fierce arguments during the 1970s and 1980s led to a divorce, a second marriage, and another split before the 1990s. When doctors gave Brenda only months to live in 1997, every old grievance vanished. Billy Joe insisted on a third wedding so she would have his insurance coverage, never feel alone in a sickbed, and spend her final days as Mrs. Shaver. Rather than hiring nurses from a distance, he set aside most of his Nashville and Texas commitments to care for her in Waco alongside Eddy. As a young man, Billy Joe had lost most of three fingers on his right hand in a sawmill accident. Every day for nearly three years, he used that scarred, calloused guitar hand to gently clean and bandage an open wound on Brenda’s side as the illness wore her down. With his constant care, she lived far beyond the doctors’ expectations before passing away in his arms in Waco on July 30, 1999, at age 54, just two months after the loss of his mother, Victory Watson Shaver, and before Eddy’s passing at the end of 2000. Keeping his promise to the woman he married three times, Billy Joe returned to the stage and used that same scarred right hand to play the songs he dedicated to her memory.

Please scroll down for the video. It is at the end of the article!

In 1997, inside a modest brick home in Waco, Texas, outlaw country songwriter Billy Joe Shaver proposed to his former wife, Brenda Joyce Tindell, so he could marry her for the third time and care for her through terminal cancer.

Their history in Waco stretched back three decades to December 3, 1966, when Billy Joe first married Brenda, then a 21-year-old widow raising a four-year-old son named Eddy. Born in Corsicana in 1939 and raised around Waco by his mother, Victory Watson Shaver, Billy Joe had recently lost parts of three fingers on his right hand in a Cameron, Texas, sawmill accident before setting his sights on songwriting.

After the 1966 wedding, Billy Joe legally adopted Eddy and taught himself to pick a guitar again using his remaining thumb and pinky finger. While Brenda anchored the household in Texas, Billy Joe hitchhiked to Nashville, eventually earning $50 a week as a songwriter for Bobby Bare and writing nearly the entire tracklist for Waylon Jennings’ landmark 1973 outlaw album, *Honky Tonk Heroes*.

As Eddy grew up in Waco, his mother bought him an electric guitar, and family friend Dickey Betts of the Allman Brothers Band later gave the teenager a Gibson gold-top Les Paul. By age 12, Eddy was backing his father in studio sessions and roadhouse gigs across Texas.

Years of heavy touring, substance abuse, and fierce arguments strained the marriage throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Billy Joe and Brenda divorced, remarried a second time, and divorced again, yet they remained tied together through Eddy.

In the early 1990s, father and son formally billed their band simply as Shaver, blending Billy Joe’s weathered Texas storytelling with Eddy’s blistering rock-and-blues lead guitar. Together they recorded the acclaimed 1993 album *Tramp on Your Street*—featuring their co-written anthem “Live Forever”—followed by *Unshaven: Live at Smith’s Olde Bar* in 1995 and *Highway of Life* in 1996.

That momentum halted in 1997 when doctors diagnosed Brenda with terminal cancer and gave her only months to live. Billy Joe immediately asked her to marry him a third time so she would be covered by his insurance, never face a hospital room alone, and spend the rest of her life as Mrs. Shaver.

Rather than hiring full-time nurses and staying on the road, Billy Joe stepped back from his regular touring schedule to stay at the Waco house alongside Eddy. Every day for nearly three years, he used his scarred, three-fingered right hand to clean and bandage an open cancerous wound on Brenda’s side.

During those caregiving years, Billy Joe and Eddy recorded the 1998 acoustic tribute *Victory*—named for Billy Joe’s mother—and the 1999 album *Electric Shaver*. Victory died in May 1999, and two months later, on July 30, 1999, 54-year-old Brenda died in Billy Joe’s arms at home in Waco.

Before her death, father and son had already begun working on songs for a new record, *The Earth Rolls On*, including tracks written directly for Brenda such as “Star in My Heart” and “Love Is So Sweet.” On December 31, 2000, before the album came out, 38-year-old Eddy died in Waco of an accidental heroin overdose while in town for a New Year’s Eve show with his father in nearby Spicewood.

That night at Poodie Locke’s Hilltop Roadhouse, Willie Nelson encouraged the grieving songwriter to take the stage rather than sit alone, and Billy Joe sang his son’s co-written “Live Forever” through tears. Months later, while singing at the Gruene Hall dance hall in New Braunfels, he suffered a major heart attack onstage, underwent quadruple bypass surgery, and returned to touring weeks later.

When *The Earth Rolls On* was released in April 2001 on New West Records, it stood as the final studio collaboration between father and son and a direct tribute to the wife and mother they had nursed together. Billy Joe went on to record albums including *Freedom’s Child* in 2002 and *Long in the Tooth* in 2014, keeping the modest brick house in Waco where Brenda and Eddy had lived.

When Billy Joe died on October 28, 2020, at age 81 in a Waco hospital, his family brought him to Oakwood Cemetery in Waco to rest directly beside Brenda and Eddy, the woman he married three times and the son who stood beside him on every stage.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oilwusvq5SI

Related Post

When Conway Twitty’s fast-food chain, Twitty Burger, collapsed in 1971, the country star refused corporate bankruptcy protection and spent two years on the road paying back nearly $100,000 out of his own pocket to every person who had trusted his name. Founded in Oklahoma City in late 1968 with a yellow “Twitty Bird” mascot, the restaurant venture had drawn investments from about 75 people. They were not Wall Street financiers, instead including fellow country singers Merle Haggard and Sonny James, members of Twitty’s own band, his manager, and working-class fans who put up their savings because they trusted him. Rapid expansion, supply-chain mismanagement, and an early-1970s economic downturn forced the chain to shut down completely in 1971. Corporate law allowed him to walk away without personal liability, yet Twitty refused. Throughout 1973 and 1974, he packed his touring schedule across dozens of states and poured his personal concert fees and recording royalties into repaying every investor in full, even adding interest on several long-held accounts. When he deducted those payments as a business expense, the Internal Revenue Service challenged him, arguing he had no legal obligation to pay a defunct corporation’s debts. In the 1983 U.S. Tax Court case Harold L. Jenkins v. Commissioner, Twitty explained under his legal name that in country music, a handshake meant more than a contract, and he could not sing about honesty and loyalty from a stage while friends and fans sat in the audience having lost their money because of him. Judge Theodore Tannenwald Jr. ruled in his favor, recognizing that protecting his personal reputation with country fans was essential to his livelihood, and closed the official opinion, T.C. Memo. 1983-667, with a poem honoring the singer’s integrity. Today, the man inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame as Conway Twitty also remains in American law school textbooks as Harold Jenkins, the artist who paid every dime he did not legally owe.

In 1937, when future country legend Conway Twitty was just four-year-old Harold Lloyd Jenkins living in Friars Point, Mississippi, his family saved enough money to order him a small guitar from the Sears and Roebuck catalog. In the Mississippi Delta during the late 1930s, the thick Sears and Roebuck catalog was a wish book for working families, and setting aside a few dollars on a ferryboat pilot’s wages was a real sacrifice for his parents, Floyd and Velma Jenkins. As soon as the package arrived in the mail, Floyd and Harold’s grandfather, both local amateur string musicians, tuned the little instrument right on the wooden front porch. With hands roughened by river ropes and ferry wheels, Floyd gently placed his four-year-old son’s fingers onto the wooden frets to teach him his first basic chords while his grandfather played the fiddle. Too young to read words or sheet music, Harold learned entirely by ear, memorizing the chord shapes his father and grandfather showed him. Every Saturday night, when the family gathered around their battery-powered radio to listen to the Grand Ole Opry broadcast from Nashville, the little boy held that Sears and Roebuck guitar in his lap and tried to follow the melodies of Roy Acuff coming through the speaker. Having an instrument so early also allowed him to learn from an elderly Black neighbor in Friars Point, who showed the boy how to feel the earthy blues rhythms of the Delta. By 1938, at age five, Harold could play and sing complete traditional country songs for his family and neighbors. Those porch lessons stayed with him when the family moved across the river to Helena, Arkansas, where ten-year-old Harold formed his first band, the Phillips County Ramblers. Floyd Jenkins never stood on a major stage himself, yet the chords he and his father passed down on that mail-order guitar in 1937 carried his son all the way to 55 number-one country singles.

When managers told Harold Jenkins in 1957 that his birth name was too plain to sell rockabilly records, the 23-year-old singer pushed back because he wanted his parents and neighbors back home to recognize him on the vinyl label. Born on September 1, 1933, in Friars Point, Mississippi, he had been named Harold Lloyd Jenkins by his parents, Floyd and Velma, after silent film comedian Harold Lloyd. His father worked as a Mississippi River ferryboat captain, moved the family across the water to Helena, Arkansas, when Harold was 10, and bought the boy his first guitar to teach him basic chords. After a Korean War draft notice forced Harold to set aside a contract offer from the Philadelphia Phillies and early sessions at Sun Records in Memphis brought no breakthrough under his real name, his management insisted on a name with stronger commercial appeal. In the tight-knit working-class neighborhoods of Friars Point and Helena, seeing the family name on a record was the clearest way a son could honor his parents. Harold worried that if a song played on a hometown radio or jukebox under a stranger’s name, his parents and the neighbors who watched him grow up would pass right by it without knowing Floyd and Velma’s boy had made it. Convinced at last that a memorable stage name would give him a better chance to provide for his family, he spread out a road map, spotted Conway, Arkansas, and Twitty, Texas, and joined the two small towns into Conway Twitty. Before the 1957 releases went out, he made sure his parents and relatives back home knew the new name so they would recognize every note as his. That choice carried him to a 1958 chart-topping hit and decades of country music stardom, allowing him to bring his mother and relatives to live with him at his Twitty City complex in Hendersonville, Tennessee. Even at the height of his fame, on legal papers, in private life, and among the people closest to him back home, he remained Harold Jenkins.

Before Brad Paisley ever rode a tour bus, his father spent eight years hauling amplifiers and driving him across West Virginia after his own shifts with the highway department. In Glen Dale, West Virginia, Doug Paisley worked for the state Division of Highways by day and kept an emergency radio beside his bed at night as a volunteer firefighter and emergency medical technician. Whenever an alarm came through in the dark, he got up and went out to help his neighbors. When Brad joined WWVA’s Jamboree USA in Wheeling at age thirteen in 1985 as the youngest regular member in the radio show’s history, Doug became his road crew. Every Saturday night until Brad turned twenty in 1993, he washed up after his shift, loaded heavy speakers, cables, and guitars into the back of their vehicle, and drove the winding Appalachian roads to Wheeling and county fairs across West Virginia and Ohio. Once the equipment was set up inside, Doug stood in the wings or out in the crowd with an old film camera, taking pictures of his son under the stage lights. On long nights, he caught a few minutes of sleep in the truck seat outside the hall to save his strength for the late drive home. Growing up around that quiet work ethic shaped how Brad viewed his own platform once he reached Nashville. Years later, when he and his wife opened The Store, a free grocery market for struggling families in Tennessee, the project carried forward the example of the Glen Dale firefighter who spent eight years behind the wheel so his son could play guitar.

Reba McEntire and Rex Linn first met on a movie set in 1991, though it took nearly thirty years and a season of grief to bring them together. Their paths crossed while filming the 1991 Western The Gambler Returns: The Luck of the Draw alongside Kenny Rogers. For the next three decades, they stayed friendly colleagues on separate roads, including Reba’s 26-year marriage to Narvel Blackstock that ended in a painful 2015 divorce she had not wanted. In January 2020, after both appeared on Young Sheldon, the two old friends reunited for dinner. Two months later, Reba’s mother, Jacqueline McEntire, passed away in March 2020 just as pandemic lockdowns began. With Reba in Oklahoma grieving with her family and Rex in California, they could not even sit in the same room. Instead, Rex called her every morning on FaceTime for a daily routine they named “Coffee Camp.” Over two cups of coffee in different states, he listened for hours as she talked through the loss without stage lights or makeup. Those morning talks grew into a lasting relationship by the fall of 2020. Away from the cameras, the two called each other “Tater Tot” and “Sugar Tot” and held hands in prayer before meals and concerts. On red carpets from country award shows to the Oscars, Rex stood proudly at her side, and the pair brought that easy warmth to screen roles together in Big Sky and the 2024 NBC sitcom Happy’s Place. In December 2024, nearly 70 years old and more than four years after those first lockdown mornings, Reba McEntire and Rex Linn got engaged. The bond that began over two coffee mugs on separate screens had brought her back to a quiet, steady love she could trust again.

At eleven years old, Brad Paisley walked into a West Virginia hospital with his guitar and met a stroke patient who could only say one word. Around 1984 in his hometown of Glen Dale, his parents, Doug, a state transportation worker, and Sandy, a teacher, encouraged him to play for elderly patients at Reynolds Memorial Hospital. Walking into the ward for the first time, the boy held his acoustic guitar close to his chest as he passed the wheelchairs and quiet hallways. In one room, he stopped beside an older woman who had lost nearly all of her speech to a stroke and dementia. For a long time, the only word she could manage in response to anyone was a quiet “OK.” Paisley stepped up to the side of her bed, leaned down to meet her eyes, and started playing “You Are My Sunshine.” Within a few notes, her expression changed, and she began singing the words right along with him in time to the guitar. Standing near the doorway, Sandy Paisley broke into tears watching the woman find her voice again. Her son had walked into the hospital unsure of what his playing could do, only to see an old melody reach someone whom regular conversation could no longer touch. Decades later, after Grammy wins, packed arena tours, and opening a free grocery store for struggling families, Paisley still credits that hospital bed in Glen Dale with showing him what music is really for.

After two divorces early in his life, Travis Tritt swore he would never get married again, right up until his 32nd birthday party in Nashville. By February 8, 1995, Tritt was a Grammy winner known for a rowdy Southern rock edge and a grueling tour schedule. Earlier heartbreaks before he found fame had left him guarded, convinced that life on the road left no room for a lasting marriage. While celebrating with friends and music colleagues that night in Tennessee, he spotted Theresa Nelson, a college student from Florida, across the crowded room. Onstage, Tritt had no trouble commanding packed arenas. Standing in front of Nelson, the outspoken singer suddenly felt like a nervous kid worried about being turned down when he asked for her phone number. What stayed with him most was how little she cared about his celebrity, talking to him with an easy sincerity that cut right through the noise of the party. He called her the very next morning. In the weeks that followed, the miles between his tour dates and Florida faded through long conversations late into the night. As soon as his shows ended, he would walk offstage still soaked in sweat to find a payphone or reach for his heavy cell phone, ending his nights on the line with her. Two years after meeting at his birthday party, Tritt let go of his old vow. He and Nelson were married on April 12, 1997, on his land in Georgia, beginning a quiet family life that has anchored him for nearly three decades.

Travis Tritt spent years raising his children on a quiet Georgia farm away from the music business, until he heard a voice from the backseat of the family car. For most of her childhood, Tyler Reese Tritt grew up far from the Nashville spotlight that followed her father. During a long drive back to Georgia from a Florida vacation in 2013, the 1992 Patty Smyth and Don Henley duet “Sometimes Love Just Ain’t Enough” came through the car speakers. Fifteen-year-old Tyler Reese began singing along from the backseat, hitting the high notes and phrasing with an ease her parents had never heard before. Catching her reflection in the rearview mirror, Tritt saw how completely she was absorbed in the melody. Once they got home, he and his wife, Theresa Nelson, talked it over and decided to bring their daughter into a recording studio. With Theresa watching through the control room glass, father and daughter recorded the ballad for Tritt’s 2013 album, The Calm After…. The release soon brought Tyler Reese onto the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. In front of thousands of listeners, Tritt stepped back half a pace, giving the center spotlight to the teenager who had just been singing in the family car a few months earlier. Recording the duet opened the first door, though Tritt refused to use his name to hand her an easy career. He told her that a famous last name might get her into a room, but only vocal discipline and hard work would keep her there, leaving his daughter to build her own path one stage at a time.

Tim McGraw had played to packed stadiums for decades, yet his hands shook when Lorrie Morgan handed him Keith Whitley’s acoustic guitar at the Country Music Hall of Fame. Long before his own records reached the radio, a young McGraw met Whitley at a show in Louisiana in the late 1980s. Whitley was already the voice behind “Miami, My Amy,” and the brief encouragement he offered that night helped push McGraw to load his old truck and drive to Nashville. Years after Whitley’s death, the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville brought together family and fellow artists to honor his music. For the ceremony, Morgan and the Whitley family carried out the acoustic guitar Whitley had used through years of road dates and studio sessions, placing it in McGraw’s hands for the performance. Sitting alone on a stool under the stage lights, McGraw set aside the energy of his arena shows. He traced the scratches and worn spots on the wood where Whitley’s hands had rested, closed his eyes, and took a slow breath to steady himself before playing the first notes of “Don’t Close Your Eyes.” With no band behind him, he sang the ballad in a quiet, weathered voice that let the old instrument fill the room. Out in the seats, Whitley’s family wiped away tears as the guitar rang out in a Nashville hall once again. When the last chord faded, McGraw stayed on the stool for a moment before facing the crowd. He rested his hand along the guitar neck and lowered his black cowboy hat over the wood, offering a quiet thank you to the man who helped start his journey.