To say that Billy Joe Shaver could be the poster boy for the school of hard knocks is an understatement.

To say that the Texan also is a man determined to rise up and overcome life's difficulties thrown his way literally since birth also would be entirely true.

The latest ample evidence is his brand new "Freedom's Child" disc - his first outright solo album since "Salt of the Earth" in 1987 - on the new Compadre Records label of Houston.

"We worked hard on it," says Shaver, 62, in a telephone interview from a friend's house in Austin of the album mixing country, a touch of the blues and the usual batch of finely written songs mixing stories and a strong spiritual side. "It was a little kicking around having some fun."

The album was the first since the death of his son and guitarist, Eddy, who died of a heroin overdose Dec. 31, 2000. They recorded under the Shaver moniker. That death was preceded by the death of his wife, Brenda, of cancer, and mother who died within a few months of each other in 1999. Not to mention the heart attack Shaver himself suffered in August 2001.

Shaver didn't exactly take his time in the studio recording "Freedom's Child," needing two weeks to record the 15 songs, although "Salt of the Earth" took a mere two days.

"It was a great mixture of people, and we were all after the same thing, and it wasn't that hard. I think I like it that way instead of a long drawn out thing where they wear you out."

"It was high velocity, swift action stuff, which is what I really like," says Shaver of the recording with R.S. Field at the helm. Field also was the producer for Shaver's biggest album ever, "Tramp On Your Street."

"That's Why the Man in Black Sings the Blues" with a distinctive Johnny Cash beat was done after one take. In the album booklet, Shaver writes, "Call it osmosis or something, but this is a song that Johnny Cash said to me without saying a word."

"We thought we were rehearsing, and Richard (McLaurin) the engineer left the thing running, and we didn't have to do it again," says Shaver. "It was a rehearsal actually. We were going to rehearse it. We said 'let's take it from the top.'"

No need.

Not everything was so quick in happening. Doubtlessly the slowest song to make the cut was "Day by Day," a song chronicling the life of Shaver where the spiritual side shows through.

It's a heartfelt song with Shaver describing how at 21 he married his wife, 17.

Shaver picks up by merging work and music: "While the young man broke horses and worked
at the sawmill/the young
girl would sing to the
baby inside/She'd
sing him the blues
and some rock-n-roll
music/Then drift off to
sleep with a sweet lullaby."
The chorus says that their "love kept on growing...There's hope for the family that God holds together/If they hang on 'till everything turns out alright."
Not everything was all right however as "the young girl went home to her heavenly Father/While the husband and son sang the mother good-bye."

Eddy soon was to follow "to be with his mother/The father just fell to his knees on the ground."

The idea of love continuing to grow was replaced with disconsoling words: "Day by day his heart kept on breaking/And aching to fly to his home in the sky/But now he's arisen from the flames of the forest/With songs from the family that never will die."

Shaver came to the recording sessions with 500 songs, which he whittled down to 42.

"'Day by Day' was the last one that we did," says Shaver of the song with only the accompaniment of Will Kimbrough on 12-string guitar. "I'd been writing that song for about 20 years, and people kept dying. I knew that therapeutically I had to get it out of me, and Bobby (Field) did too. Bobby was saying, 'you got to finish it.' Sure enough, it would up being the last one, and I'm glad I did it."

"It was a continuous story, and I enjoyed working on it. It's a hobby. I just write songs. Sometimes, I'll have a pet project that I'm messing with it. I have a pet project that I mess around (with) for years. That was one of them."

"When Brenda passed away, that just blew it all to hell," Shaver says of the woman he married three times. "Then I went back to work on it, a little bit because it was real hard to mess with it at all. Then Eddy passed away, and I was completely not going to mess with that stuff. Then when Bobby (Field) got back into the deal, I played a little bit for him, and he said you got to play that. Bobby's always concerned about the album being a whole party of work. He's just a marvelous guy, a genius."

With the song so highly personal, Shaver was asked if he had qualms about making those thoughts public. "I kind of did, but Bobby said we got to have it. But I'm a songwriter, and we got to have those gut wrenching things. It's kind of the hard core (center) of the whole album."

Shaver says he is not concerned about playing the song live, even though he had yet to do so. "I'm sure there will be requests (for the song)," he says. "If they request it, I'm sure I will do it...It's a part of me now. It's nothing that I can hide. Not that I was hiding it."

"I always run into people who have been a whole lot worse than me," he says. "Any one of us can look around and find that. I don't feel so singled out. When people (hear) the song, they ' don't feel so singled out. They can move on with their lives."

"Songs have so much power. When you help yourself, you wind up helping someone else. You dig yourself out of a hole, and it actually helps others whether you want to or not."

Shaver's hard scrabble life started before he was even before born when his father left his mother. It turned out the father had another family.

"My father beat her up and left her for dead in a tank," he says. "She said if I was a boy, 'I was gone.'"

The reason was because "she hated my father so much," Shaver says.

Once Shaver was born, his mother was gone. He was raised by his grandparents in the small town of Corsicana, Texas, while his mother lived in Waco, about 80 miles away.

"She went to Waco and worked as a honky tonk girl," he says. "She scrubbed floors and picked cotton. I remember her picking cotton with my sister on a cotton sack."

Shaver describes Corsicana as a cotton gin town. "There was something going on there all the time," he says. "There were trains going all around the town. People would bring their cotton into town and bale it and send up north or wherever they were going."

It was in Corsicana that Shaver first gained his loved of music.

"There was a settlement of African-American people who lived across the railroad tracks, and I'd go over there every day from the time I was five, six years old. Someone would be there with a guitar, a bottleneck. I fell in love with that kind of music. Then, I got a radio. I listened to whatever I could."

"My grandmother had to give me a whipping because I went across the railroad tracks," Shaver says, adding, "She'd come over (and ask) 'Where's Bubba?'"

Shaver does not remember exactly what it was about the music that inspired him. "I don't know," he says. "It just went through me."

His Corsicana upbringing included selling newspapers as a kid. "We lived out in the cotton fields, but I'd walk into town, and I'd sing when I sold papers. I sold lots of papers. I got real good at it. I made a lot of money. The other guys weren't making much money."

Apparently jealous of Shaver, they beat him up. "And the next day they beat me again, and the next day when I saw they were going to beat me up again, I said that was the end of the paper job. I went home and told my grandmother, she said, 'go pick some cotton'. The big time didn't last so long."

Shaver apparently was not exactly the model student either and left school in the ninth grade after cheating on a test.

But he also benefited from a high school English teacher, Mabel Leff. Shaver never had her for English himself, but she was his homeroom teacher for about a half hour a day and encouraged him to write poetry.

"She was always giving me something to do," says Shaver. "I wrote (poems) that just knocked her out."

Shaver says he told her, "Don't put my name on there, or I'll get in more fights that I was getting in now. People would call me sissy."

"She was a sweetheart," Shaver says. "She was the person who told that me I was really great at this. I probably would not have gotten into this if it wasn't for her."

"I'd always written," says Shaver. "I'd started doing it when I was five or six."

Shaver still visits Leff, who now is more than 100 and still able to recite Shaver's poetry verbatim. "She's so perky," says Shaver of Leff. She was filmed this fall as part of a documentary being put together about Shaver.

Shaver wrote of leaving the town behind in "Freedom's Child" in "Corsicana Daily Sun." The song fondly describes Corsicana and Shaver leaving it and his grandmother behind.

"It seems like everything went wrong/Since I left my hometown/I wish that I was back there now/Mending fence and milking cows/When Corsicana daily sun was shining bright for me."

Shaver traded school for the U.S. Navy, getting his mother to sign papers for him to be able to join despite his age.

He later returned and worked jobs including ranching and at a sawmill where he lost parts of four fingers, one of a series of physical mishaps.

Shaver says his route to music was counter to what most musicians have where they are chasing their dream while having their job to fall back on.

"I really kind of fell back on music. I lost my fingers," he says. "I had a pipe in my neck. I've had my appendix removed. I've had a lot of knocks on my head."

With a wife and son at home, Shaver went back and forth to Nashville, but that proved no easy row to hoe.

Shaver's first break came when Bobby Bare hired him to be a songwriter for the grand sum of $50 a week, and that included the privilege of being able to sleep in his office since Shaver did not have many financial resources.

Bare expected little of Shaver when he first walked into the office. They went to a back room, and Bare told Shaver that if "I stop you in the middle of this, and I don't like it, you're gone."

Shaver played "Evergreen" and "Restless Wind." "I was stopped in the middle of the first one, and I got my stuff together. He called to (music partner) Harlan (Dick), 'get a contract. We got a songwriter.'"

"I thought sure he'd kick me out, but he hadn't. He actually signed me up."

"I had a number three washtub and just wrote songs," says Shaver. "Furiously. I was getting by on $50 a week. That was rough."

"It's kind of hard to serve two masters," he says. "If all you do is work on songs, you're much better off than working another job and then that."

Shaver sent for his wife Brenda and son Eddy back in Texas when he landed a job. Brenda worked as a hairstylist after Eddy started school.

Life under Bare was not easy. "Every once in awhile, the check would bounce because Bobby was in about as bad shape as I was," Shaver says. "He had an old Cadillac where the trunk was wired together with a coat hanger."

In addition to writing, Shaver performed in honky tonks. He released a single for Mercury, "Chicken on the Ground," but that attracted little attention.

Bare recorded Shaver's "Short and Sweet" the following year, but that also did little.

But Kris Kristofferson got Shaver's career moving in the right direction when he recorded "Good Christian Soldier," which Shaver co-wrote with Bare, and included it on his "Silver Tongued Devil" album.

Shaver's star increased big time when Waylon Jennings recorded the outlaw album, "Honky Tonk Heroes," with all songs save one penned by Shaver. Even though he wasn't doing the singing, Shaver says he was pleased.

"I couldn't possibly sing that good. Nobody could. It was great for me to have that kind of help. He helped himself and helped me too."

Shaver had some issues with Jennings at the time. "I was always giving him hell about my melodies and stuff. I didn't realize how blessed I was by having someone like that. I've always been a dingbat."

"He convinced me," Shaver says. "He changed a few things. They worked out great. He did not mess with my words. That's one thing he didn't mess with."

Kristofferson also proved helpful by borrowing money to record Shaver's first disc, "Old Five and Dimers Like Me" for Monument.

"He stuck his neck out for me," Shaver says. "We got into it about four, five songs. We did it at the House of Cash. (Label executive) Fred Foster got wind of it, and here he come. He bought Kris out on the thing. They put the album out. They laid it in the background for a year. It was a good thing they did because Kris was coming out with his own on the same label, and I couldn't have possibly butted heads with him because he was so great. There just wasn't any better."

The album included such Shaver classics as "Black Rose," "I Been to Georgia on a Fast Train" and "Willy the Wandering Gypsy and Me," a tribute to Willie Nelson.

But by the next year, Shaver was on MGM Records, did some recording with Nelson and Bare, but nothing was released.

Shaver also suffered alcohol and drug problems.

But thanks to Dickey Betts of the Allman Brothers Band, Shaver inked with Capricorn, releasing "When I Get to You" in 1976 and "Gypsy Boy" the following year.

Shaver enjoyed greater success as a writer, however. Elvis recorded "You Asked Me To," the Allmans "Sweet Pea" and Johnny Cash "Jesus Was Our Saviour and Cotton Was Our King" and "I'm Just an Old Lump of Coal (But I'm Gonna Be a Diamond Some Day)."

Around this time, Shaver went clean from his excesses and soon signed a writer's deal at the House of Cash, Johnny Cash's firm.

Shaver's bad luck with labels continued as Capricorn folded, but he signed with Columbia, releasing "I'm Just An Old Lump of Coal...But I'm Gonna Be a Diamond Some Day" to critical acclaim. John Anderson took the title track into the top five on the country charts that year with the song also nominated for Song of the Year by the Country Music Association.

He had a few more albums on Columbia with a self-titled disc in 1982 and "Salt of the Earth" five years later.

Little happened career wise for Shaver until he released "Tramp on Your Street" in 1993 on Zoo. The album was by far his best seller ever and achieved many kudos. As he has done periodically, he recorded songs that were previously released including "Georgia on a Fast Train." (The new album contains a remake of "Good 'Ol U.S.A.")

Despite the long gap in between albums, Shaver says, "We had a fan base. Eddy and I did. We played honky tonks, and we just kept playing them. We had a lot of fans just waiting on a record. I think it surprised everybody because we took it around in Nashville, and they didn't want it. We went to LA, and Zoo just jumped up and down."

Shaver released a string of albums including a live one and then three for another new label, New West. Following dissatisfaction with last year's "The Earth Rolls On," Shaver was unsure whether he would record again.

"Actually, I didn't know if I was ever going to record again because of all of the things that happened with me, and I was kind of a little bit disappointed with the way things went down. We didn't do a video. We didn't do this...We didn't do that. I broke ties with New West, and I didn't have an idea I'd do anything."

Shaver said Field had "heard I'd been down. He called me and said, 'let's try to put this together and put together a great album. I thought about it. So, I called him back. He rounded up people. He was the one who got me going (before). It was quite a comeback really, but we hadn't really been anywhere. Here we are."

"I had to make the final decision. I just wanted to prove that I could do one, and these people were so nice," he says of Compadre.

When asked who he had to prove something to, Shaver says, "Me. Me. I knew in doing that it would be good for everybody to listen to it. The timing is perfect. I'm behind all these songs 100 percent. It was time to do them."

Compadre owner Brad Turcotte says in a phone interview from Houston that he wanted Shaver because "he's a Texas legend. And when you think of Billy Joe Shaver, you immediately think (only) of songwriting. And that's a shame. He's been an artist for 30 years. I knew this was going to be his first solo album in (15) years and what better way to market him than as an artist."

He also spends time acting. He appeared in Robert Duvall's "The Apostle" and once again is working with Duvall on "Secondhand Lions" with Michael Caine starring.

In some respects, "Freedom's Child" is a comeback for Shaver due to the personal turmoil surrounding his last album.

But Shaver certainly is not one to wallow in any misery life has dealt him.

"It's not hard at all," he says of playing without his son. "He melted into me. I feel his presence. It made me stronger, really. If it don't kill you, it makes you stronger. A lot of times you feel like committing suicide, and you don't. You realize, of course, you can't do that."

"Coming from the ground up is good," says Shaver. "I wouldn't have it any other way."