‘I’m a wacko’ from Waco, ain’t no doubt about it.
Shot a man there in the head but can’t talk much about it.
He was trying to shoot me, but he took too long to aim.
Anybody in my place woulda done the same.
I don’t start fights, I finish fights, that’s the way I’ll always be.
I’m wacko from Waco, you best not mess with me.

That’s not me embracing a new poetic direction, nor is it about gun-hoarding and -slinging cult leader David Koresh and the Branch Davidians, names synonymous with Waco worldwide since the Waco Siege in 1993. Rather, it is the opening verse to a hyper-masculine, apparently autobiographical barnstormer by the late Texan country singer Billy Joe Shaver, recalling an ‘incident’ in 2007, when an argument broke out in a bar after another man flirted with his wife. (Shaver, who claimed to have shot the would-be lothario ‘right between the mother and the fucker’ – face tattoos, perhaps – was acquitted.) In any case, in September last year I spent a couple of weeks in central Texas, with this song lodged in my head thanks to a friend who had sent it to me via WhatsApp on my first day in town.

My happy duty in Waco, before I was to have some time to myself out in the wild Texas Hill Country to the west, was to spend a few days at Baylor, the world’s biggest Baptist University, to give a reading and a workshop, and attend a class for students who had ...