Billy Joe Shaver closed out his three-album Columbia Records run in the 1980s with Salt of the Earth, an effort that also marked his first collection of entirely new songs after a six-year gap and his final studio release for another six. The set neatly frames the full spectrum of his signature approach, stretching from the hard-charging honky-tonk drive of “Whiteman’s Watermelon” to the tender restraint of “Hill Country Love Song.” Shaver’s divided sense of right and wrong lets him proclaim with conviction “You Just Can’t Beat Jesus Christ” only to follow it immediately with “The Devil Made Me Do It the First Time,” whose inevitable tagline admits, “the next time, I done it on my own.” Within that universe, men labor intensely and carouse just as intensely, while religious belief registers more through aspiration than consistent observance. The songs, laced with self-reference, humor, and genuine feeling, gain their impact from a voice delivered with weathered conviction and arrangements propelled by raw, low-end force, thereby embodying the outlaw aesthetic as fully here as anywhere else in his catalog. The 1987 release drew limited notice at the time, yet Sony’s Lucky Dog imprint performed a service for listeners when it remastered and reissued the album on September 19, 2000, as part of the Pick of the Litter series spotlighting worthy but overlooked older titles.
