The Unyielding Spirit: Billy Joe Shaver‘s Ode to Resilience and the Open Road
A gritty anthem of perseverance, faith, and the cowboy’s never-ending journey toward the light.
When we talk about the titans of Outlaw Country, men who lived the hard-scrabble lives they sang about, few names ring with the genuine authenticity of Billy Joe Shaver. His career wasn’t a smooth, polished ride on the charts; it was a testament to enduring tragedy, addiction, and constant setbacks. It’s this lived experience that pours into every lyric of “Try And Try Again,” a song that feels less like a piece of music and more like a hard-won philosophy whispered from an old, dusty trail.
The song “Try And Try Again” was originally featured on the 1999 album Electric Shaver, credited to the band Shaver, which included Billy Joe and his prodigiously talented guitarist son, Eddy Shaver. This particular track, a staple in Billy Joe‘s later live shows, embodies the quintessential spirit of its creator. While it wasn’t a radio smash hit and did not secure a position on the major Billboard Country charts at the time of its release—Billy Joe‘s genius often bypassed the mainstream, resonating instead with artists and true country aficionados—its impact is immeasurable in the outlaw canon. The very nature of Billy Joe‘s career meant he rarely chased chart glory, preferring the raw honesty of the performance and the truth of the lyric. Its lack of chart visibility simply reinforces its purity as a work of art, untainted by commercial compromise.
A Story of Grit and Grace
The heart of “Try And Try Again” is the raw, almost biblical narrative of a life defined by stumbling, yet always managing to get back up. Billy Joe Shaver’s life story—losing two fingers in a sawmill accident, his on-again, off-again marriage, the tragic loss of his mother, wife, and son Eddy within a year’s time, and even the infamous shooting incident in a Texas bar—reads like a series of trials from which no ordinary man could recover. The song is the crystallization of this resilience. The meaning of the track is wonderfully straightforward: life is going to knock you down, but your only choice is to keep trying. It’s a message steeped in the kind of working-class humility and profound, simple faith that defined the Texas songwriter.
It’s easy to hear in the simple, driving rhythm and Billy Joe‘s gravel-and-whiskey voice an echo of the common man’s struggle. The lyrics don’t offer complex solutions; they offer a cowboy’s truth: persistence is prayer. The song suggests that failure isn’t the end, but merely a pause before the next attempt. For those of us who have walked this earth for a while, who have accumulated our own share of scrapes and scars, this song is a tonic. It doesn’t sugarcoat the pain—the trying is hard—but it promises that the simple act of enduring is a victory unto itself.
When you listen to “Try And Try Again”, particularly in its live iterations, you don’t just hear a song; you hear the voice of a man who has genuinely “walked through the valley of the shadow of death” and come out singing about the light. It’s a deeply moving, nostalgic reflection on the simple, essential virtue of not giving up, delivered by a man who was perhaps country music’s most profound poet of perseverance. It’s a track that reminds us that our broken plans and missteps are just part of the grand, rugged tapestry of a well-lived life.