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
Billy Joe Shaver was a quintessential songwriter’s songwriter, as proven by the enduring legacies of the stars who made his tunes into staples. Waylon Jennings’ growling take on the hard-living “Honky Tonk Heroes” is an outlaw country classic, while Elvis Presley himself cut the fool-in-love song “You Asked Me To.” And in the wake of Shaver’s death, fellow Texan Willie Nelson, in duet with Lucinda Williams, brought a stirring poignancy to the uplifting “Live Forever.”