Ryan Bingham: Pays tribute to Billy Joe Shaver, Jerry Jeff Walker With Shaver’s “Live Forever”

Walker and Shaver, powerful figures in Texas country music, died a couple of days apart in October.

“You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone,” Billy Joe Shaver sang in his unique anthem “Live Forever.” The Texas musician passed on October 28th at 81 subsequent to enduring a stroke, promptly projecting that verse into stark reality.

Only a couple days earlier, Jerry Jeff Walker passed on at 78 after a long bout with cancer. The two men were powerful musicians and characters of the fugitive nation development and their demises hit particularly hard with those they impacted — including Ryan Bingham.

The musician-actor, who is right now shooting another period of the TV farming show Yellowstone in Montana, honored the Texas nation stalwarts with a dismal, solo interpretation of “Live Forever” on Instagram on Tuesday.

“Lost a few more of my heroes over the past couple of weeks,” Bingham composed, devoting his exhibition to Shaver and Walker and summarizing a “Live Forever” lyric: “Just like the songs you leave behind you, you’re gonna live forever now.”

Shaver co-wrote the song with his guitarist son Eddy and recorded it for their 1993 album Tramp on Your Street. They cut it again for the acoustic, gospel-inclining album Victory five years after the fact.

Shaver recorded one more form with Big and Rich for his 2005 album The Real Deal and shot a video with the duo.

Bingham delivered his last album, American Love Song, in 2019. Since quarantine started in the spring, he’s been routinely playing out his own personal tunes and covers in his online video series the Cantina Sessions.

It’s a pattern he’s proceeded while on the spot in Montana, as of late posting forms of Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” Tom Petty’s “Yer So Bad,” and John Lennon’s “Imagine.”