I never much cared for doing what everyone else was doing—not even when I was a boy in the back alleys of Helmond, where the only music blaring from radios was Abba and The Sweet and, if you were real lucky, a bit of Don Williams on a late night after football. Back then, country music was as out of place as a tumbleweed rolling over the Marktplein. But there was a small record shop tucked into a corner not far from the Zuid-Willemsvaart, where strange things gathered dust and quiet souls with wide ears went to find their salvation.
It was 1978 when I first heard “Old Five and Dimers Like Me” by Billy Joe Shaver.
Now, some of you might raise an eyebrow—Billy Joe’s name is whispered with reverence in certain circles now, but back then, even in America, he was something of an outlaw’s outlaw, a songwriter more famous for what others did with his words than for any fire he kindled himself. His music made it across the ocean less as a wave, more as a ripple.
I remember it clearly because I was sixteen, trying to pick out chords on my battered guitar underneath the flicker of our kitchen’s fluorescent light. The radio announcer had just mispronounced “Shaver” in a way only a Dutchman could, and my mother laughed from behind her crossword. Then, that first loping guitar and Billy Joe’s sandpaper voice started up, like an old tractor coughing into life:
**“I’ve spent a lifetime making up my mind to be
More than the measure of what I thought others could see
Good luck and fast bucks are too far and too few between
Cadillac buyers and old five