Tampa Bay The grizzled songwriter emerged as a songwriting force in 1970′s Nashville before breaking out as a solo artist in the ’80s with hits like Guitar Town and Copperhead Road. At 56, Earle is as prolific as ever.
Steve Earle: I'll never get out of this world alive!
He’s still an acclaimed Americana artist, but these days he may be better known for his political activism and roles on David Simon’s HBO series The Wire and Treme, for which he also writes music.
Plus, he has a debut novel I’ll Never Get Out Of This World Alive, which is also the title of Earle’s latest album, which last week received a Grammy nomination for Best Folk Album.
Steve Earle (R) with Roseanne Cash
The Guardian The circumstances surrounding the death of the country singer Hank Williams are mysterious and much disputed. All that is known for certain is that the 29-year-old singer died in the back of a Cadillac en route to a concert date in West Virginia, having apparently summoned a doctor to administer a shot of vitamins mixed with morphine to ease his chronic back pain.
Legendary Hank Williams Features Prominently in Steve Earle's Book
Steve Earle’s debut novel borrows the title of Williams’s final, posthumous release; though some would say it’s a minor miracle that Earle is still around to participate in this world at all. In the early 1990s, Earle’s songwriting career derailed in spectacular fashion when he received a jail term for drugs and firearms offences. But at the age of 56 he has settled into his seventh marriage (two of which were to the same woman), while joining Kinky Friedman and Rosanne Cash among the small but distinguished corpus of country musicians with parallel literary careers.
Singer songwriter Steve Earle is a musician and activist
Earle’s protagonist, Doc Ebersole, is an unlicensed medic struck off as a result of his rapacious morphine habit, who may or may not have been the doctor who gave Hank Williams his fatal dose in that freezing December of 1952. A hallucinatory reminiscence of the fateful car journey occurs, though it is difficult to tell whether the passage is a factual reminiscence or a drug-induced fantasy as Doc has an addict’s way with the truth. But the outcome is that he is haunted by the spectre of Williams, “as pitiful an excuse for a ghost as he was as a human being”, who pursues the protagonist like a honky-tonk Jacob Marley: “He could easily read the house rules posted on the door through the visitor’s transparent torso. There were some things about being haunted that Doc would never get used to.”
Earle offsets these metaphysical speculations with a sleazy parable set amid the derelicts and deadbeats of San Antonio’s skid row, where Doc performs illegal abortions on Mexican prostitutes in a blowsy flophouse that doubles as a brothel. It would be very easy for this to become a parodic pile-up of maudlin country-music clichés such as you would expect to find on a Hank Williams record, were it not for the fact that Earle has listened to those records extremely carefully: “Ol’ Hank, still taking their nickels and making them cry … When one of Hank’s records fell into place even the initial rumble of the needle in the well-worn grooves sounded lonesome.”
Steve's book is the same title as his latest album
For a country singer, this is an important distinction; and Earle supplies his own definition: “Not Lonely. Lonesome. Lonely’s a temporary condition, a cloud that blocks out the sun for a spell … Lonesome’s a whole other thing. Incurable, terminal. A hole in your heart so big and so deep that no amount of money or whiskey or pussy or dope in the whole goddam world can fill it up.”
Earle seems to have little trouble expanding his range from a three-minute song to a 300-page narrative. He clearly knows what it feels like to stagger towards the first fix of the day: “Nothing but paper-thin shoe leather separating broken pavement and raw nerve.” But he also demonstrates a good working knowledge of Catholic diocesan politics and takes the opportunity to give his vocabulary a workout. (Having offended the ghost of Hank Williams, Doc “braces himself for some sort of paranormal conniption”. While hysterical outbursts are a fairly common occurrence in country songs, it’s unlikely that any Nashville studio writer has searched for rhymes with “conniption” before.)
Purchase the book from Steve
Perhaps only another great country singer would have the courage to cast Williams in the guise of a malignant hillbilly harpy, whose presence inevitably heralds imminent doom. The narrative incorporates a fleeting appearance by John F Kennedy, who drives through San Antonio on the way to his fatal appointment in Dallas. And in the tumultuous grief that follows, Doc finds temporary respite from his tormentor: “Hank can’t tune into him like he usually can. It’s heartbreak that Hank homes in on, but tonight there’s some kind of static in the air, millions of voices out there and they’re all hopeless, all hurting.”
With this book, Earle seems to have provided as good an explanation as any for the morbid appeal of country music. To devotees such as Doc, Williams’s songs are a kind of cosmic sponge, capable of absorbing any amount of human misery before pouring it all back “in that heart-rending wail that got down in your bones like a cold wet day”. And though the novel comes no closer to establishing the facts of Hank Williams’s death, it certainly reveals a good deal of the truth behind it.
