In this compelling autobiography written with the assistance of Brad Reagan, Billy Joe Shaver looks back over a life that some might call a miracle of survival. His father abandoned the family before Billy Joe was born. Troubles in school and in the military turned him into a fighter, and a sawmill accident claimed two fingers and part of a third on his right hand. Yet his innate musical talent and the encouragement of an English teacher set him on the road to being a songwriter—and he never looked back. Shaver recounts his long struggle to break into the music business in Nashville and the success that came when Waylon Jennings recorded his songs on the 1973 album Honky Tonk Heroes, which became a landmark of outlaw country music. Shaver movingly describes his own thirty-year, up-and-down career as a singer-songwriter in Nashville and Texas, his bouts with alcohol and drugs, his pleasure in touring with his son Eddy and their band Shaver during the 1990s, and the pain of losing Eddy, Brenda, and Billy Joe's mother all within the year 1999-2000