Five and Dimers

There’s a song that lives in the long shadows of the jukebox, somewhere south of what the world calls famous, and it’s called “Old Five and Dimers Like Me” by Billy Joe Shaver. If you’re dusting the attic of country music, year 1973, it’s one of those wax findings with fingerprints that never quite left. Billy Joe—he was never a mainstream hero, no Garth-Brooks-level commotion, just a raw-boned poet speaking in cracked barroom syllables.

Sometimes I wonder why his voice—thin, sandpapery, lonesome—cuts so deep across my memory. Maybe it’s because, like him, I always felt on the sidelines of joy, catching only the off-hand remarks of happiness as others sat at the table. The first time I heard him sing, I was nineteen, hunched in a corner booth of a village café that smelled of coffee gone stale. The radio was hissing just loud enough to beat the clatter of saucers, and then that voice:

“I’ve spent a lifetime making up my mind to be
More than the measure of what I thought others could see…”

Even now, I can’t hear those words without my chest tightening, because that has been my lifelong labor—trying to be more, desperate to be seen. Billy Joe called them “Five and Dimers,” men and women who barely scraped together a living, who believed, often for no reason, that tomorrow might be soft and bright. My parents were five and dimers too, the way folks here can be—gathering crumbs of something finer, surviving, assembling fragments of hope from discount bins and borrowed Sundays.

There’s an unease that comes at night, a quickening in the heart. I think you only feel it if you don’t quite trust the world’s affection, if you’ve always been too odd, too quiet, too honest, or too poor. As a boy, I spent a lot of time measuring myself, and by “measuring myself,” I mean cataloging my inadequacies. Too tall and angular, forehead too big, accent too thick for the city but not rounded enough for the farm. Feeling unchosen.

Billy Joe Shaver never sang for the chosen. He put it plain:

“An old five and dimer is all I intend to be.”

It’s a declaration, maybe even a gentle curse. He wasn’t striving for anything glossier. He found a certain dignity in being modest, unpretentious, a patchwork of what the world threw away. Listening to that, I started to see my family’s thrift-store pride in a new light: there’s a kind of nobility in “making do,” in not complaining when life gives you jelly instead of jam.

But what turns “Old Five and Dimers Like Me” into a song I return to, arms crossed and eyes shut, is the pain that flickers underneath its restraint. You hear it in the second verse:

“She’s stood by me through life’s shifting sands
And I’d not be alone without her loving hands…”

Loyalty, the kind that doesn’t show up in pop ballads or TV movies. My relationships have sometimes felt like mismatched socks—held together by hope more than faith, never quite right. Loving isn’t easy if you don’t believe you’re worth it, and Shaver seems to understand that dissonance. He worships his partner not just because he loves her but because he needs her—needs that rare soul who sees through all your failures and stays anyway.

I’m not ashamed to say I’ve spent entire evenings with this song looping quietly, glass sweating in my palm, thinking about what it means to be basic and broken and still lovable. My shrink tells me this is a developmental wound—childhood stuff, the hunger for unconditional warmth. Shaver’s voice is the blanket I never quite got, a reassurance that even if you’re frayed at the edges, you’re music to someone.

Sometimes I perform this song for Dutch crowds who don’t always catch the accent, let alone the ache. Yet the room gets quieter, a shiver of recognition pulsing through strangers who’ve never set foot in Texas. Maybe it’s because the struggle to measure up—to find value in being small, being overlooked—isn’t uniquely American. There are five-and-dime hearts everywhere, even here in Helmond, behind tidy curtains and in quiet garages where country ballads leak through window cracks.

Shaver closes with:

“But if you see me passin’ by and you sit and you wonder why,
Run on up and say ‘hi’ or at least give a wave
It takes a whole lot of livin’ for a man to look that way…”

That’s the part that unzips me. Whatever scars your life hands you, you carry them into the daylight, let them be seen. Maybe you sing them into the barlight, or your kitchen, or your friend’s cracked phone speaker on a silent Tuesday. We are what’s left after the shine wears off. If that sounds sad, it shouldn’t. Some souls only get softer with wear.

When the world gets too loud, or when I feel like a spare part even in my own hometown, I pull out “Old Five and Dimers Like Me” and let Billy Joe hum truths that ought to be shouted. Not every song needs millions to matter. Some need only one troubled heart listening, nodding, healing.

Maybe that’s what I’m doing here. Maybe that’s what you’re doing, reaching for this little sliver of forgotten country. If so, I hope you see yourself in Billy Joe’s song—a little battered, a little sweet, and absolutely, heartbreakingly enough.

Sing on, five and dimers.

Kroes den Bock