“Pain is something I’m kinda used to,” admits 62-year-old roots-rocker Billy Joe Shaver. “I’m not whining or nothing. It just happens to me. I’ve got fingers missing, had my head busted a few times. I’m used to working with pain. It’s kinda good. There are so many things going on now, sorrowful things, it kind of takes my mind off that.”

“Sorrowful” is an understatement for what he’s been through. Two years ago the plain-spoken Shaver lost his wife to cancer. And then, this past New Year’s Eve, the body of his son, the fiery country-rock guitarist Eddy Shaver, was found dead of a drug overdose in a Waco hotel room. This was only days before Eddy, who’d backed Dwight Yoakam and Waylon Jennings and collaborated with his father in the band Shaver, was to start work on his first solo album. And as if to prove that things could get worse, Billy Joe had a disc removed from his back and steel plate put in as he waited out delays in the release of the new Shaver CD, The Earth Rolls On (New West).

This rough-and-tumble life has been the source of a catalogue of hard-won songs that have been covered by everyone from Elvis Presley and Waylon Jennings to Patty Loveless and the Allman Brothers, earning him the highest possible regard among Nashville outlaws and singer-songwriters alike. The Earth Rolls On offers plenty of reasons: the dozens of little lyrical chestnuts sung by Billy Joe in a drawl that turns “ought to” into “otter” and makes “Amarillo” rhyme with “killer.” And Eddy’s razor-edged Southern-rock guitar, which seemed incongruous with Billy Joe’s less flashy ways on 1999’s Electric Shaver, comes off as a much more natural fit this time.

The most riveting tune is “Blood Is Thicker Than Water,” where father and son trade choruses blaming each other for their failings. “You come dancing in here with the devil’s daughter,” is how Billy Joe starts things, “spilling beer and doing things you hadn’t ought to.” Eddy comes back with, “Can’t you see I’m down to the ground I can’t get no lower/I’ve seen you puking out your guts and running with sluts when you was married to my mother.” The chorus of the tune is the title, an affirmation sung in unison over and over again. Honesty, brutal or otherwise, appears to run in the Shaver family.

But that’s not the tune that Billy Joe singles out when I ask him which of the album’s tracks touches him the most. Instead, he brings up “Star in My Heart,” a song he wrote for Eddy when the guitarist was headed for a rehab clinic in California. “That one really was gutwrenching and heartfelt.”

He’s talking from an Austin hotel room, waiting for an afternoon appearance at a radio station and an evening gig to kick off the first Shaver tour since Eddy’s death. His current line-up, which he’ll bring to the House of Blues in Cambridge this Friday, includes guitarist Jesse Taylor and bassist Dave Waddell, two players who have been with him on and off for many years. But on the day I talked to him he’d only recently found drummer Mark Patterson: the band had rehearsed with him for the first time the night before at a Ryder truck-rental office run by a friend.

Shaver comes off as a man of few words, most of which he pours into his songwriting. In response to a question about “Love Is So Sweet,” an Earth Rolls On track that’s hardly as sunny as its title suggests, he begins to explain what it feels like to bum a ride into a city and get dirty looks from the business types getting started with their daily routines. After a sentence or two — “They’re carrying their attaché cases and they call you a lowlife . . . ” — he bags the story and just starts singing the tune over the phone. His explanation for “Leavin’ Amarillo,” a tune from the new album that gives the Texas town a playful trashing (“Screw you/You ain’t worth passing through”), goes something like this: “It don’t route. You don’t go through Amarillo to go anywhere. And you can’t buy no beer there.” He also notes that he’s held onto a handful of the bounced checks he’s gotten from club owners in Amarillo over the years.

“I try to say exactly what I mean,” he says of his songs. “I don’t want a tune to be taken two or three different ways. Simplicity don’t need to be greased.”

Despite all that he’s been through, Shaver comes across as an easygoing guy. But he’s pissed at the justice of the peace in Waco, who wouldn’t perform an autopsy on Eddy Shaver, because he’s sure Eddy sustained some serious injuries before he died. “If it gets to me, I’ll have him dug up and prove his jaw is broke and his ribs is cracked. But nothing’s going to bring him back. I’ll forgive everybody, but gosh it’s hard to forget. He was my friend, man. That’s what hurts.”

Billy Joe Shaver plays the House of Blues in Cambridge this Friday, May 18, at 10 p.m. Call (617) 497-2229.