Steve Earle

Early life

Earle was born in Fort Monroe, Virginia, where his father, Jack Earle, was stationed. His father was an air traffic controller. The family returned to Texas before Earle's second birthday. They moved several times but Earle grew up primarily in the San Antonio area.

Earle began learning the guitar at the age of 11 and was placed in a talent contest at his school at age 13. He is reported to have run away from home at age 14 to follow his idol, singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt, around Texas. Earle was "rebellious" as a youngster and dropped out of school at the age of 16. He moved to Houston with his 19-year-old uncle, who was also a musician, where he married and worked odd jobs. While in Houston Earle met Van Zandt, who became his hero and role model. Earle's sister, Stacey, is also a musician and songwriter.

1974 to 1999

In 1974 at the age of 19 Earle moved to Nashville, Tennessee, and began working blue-collar jobs during the day and playing music at night. During this period Earle wrote songs and played bass guitar in Guy Clark's band and on Clark's 1975 album Old No. 1. Earle appeared in the 1975 film Heartworn Highways, a documentary on the Nashville music scene which included David Allan Coe, Guy Clark, Townes van Zandt and Rodney Crowell. Earle lived in Nashville for several years and assumed the position of staff songwriter at the publishing company Sunbury Dunbar. Later Earle grew tired of Nashville and returned to Texas where he started a band called The Dukes.

In the 1980s Earle returned to Nashville once again and worked as a songwriter for the publishers Roy Dea and Pat Carter. A song he co-wrote, "When You Fall in Love", was recorded by Johnny Lee and made number 14 on the country charts in 1982. Carl Perkins recorded Earle's song "Mustang Wine", and two of his songs were recorded by Zella Lehr. Later Dea and Carter created an independent record label called LSI and invited Earle to begin recording his own material on their label. Connie Smith recorded Earle's composition "A Far Cry from You" in 1985 which reached a minor position on the country charts as well.

Earle released an EP called, Pink & Black, in 1982 featuring the Dukes. Acting as Earle's manager, John Lomax "sent the EP to Epic Records," and they "signed Earle" to a recording contract in 1983. In 1983 Earle signed a record deal with CBS and recorded a "neo-rockabilly album".

After losing his publishing contract with Dea and Carter, Earle met producer Tony Brown and after severing his ties with Lomax and Epic Records obtained a seven-record deal with MCA Records. Earle released his first full-length album, Guitar Town, on MCA Records in 1986. The title track became a Top Ten single in 1986 and his song "Goodbye's All We've Got Left" reached the Top Ten in 1987. That same year he released a compilation of earlier recordings entitled, Early Tracks, and an album with the Dukes, called Exit 0, which "received critical acclaim" for its blend of country and rock.

Earle released Copperhead Road on Uni Records in 1989 which was characterized as "a quixotic project that mixed a lyrical folk tradition with hard rock and eclectic Irish influences such as The Pogues, who guested on the record". The album's title track portrays a Vietnam veteran who uses his family background in running moonshine to become a marijuana grower/seller. Then Earle began "three years in a mysterious vaporization" according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

His 1990 album The Hard Way had a strong rock sound and was followed by "a shoddy live album" called Shut Up and Die Like an Aviator. In August 1991 Earle appeared on the TV show The Texas Connection "looking pale and blown out". In light of Earle's "increasing drug use" MCA Records did not renew his contract and Earle didn't record any music for the next four years. By July 1993 Earle was reported to have regained his normal weight and had started to write new material. At that time a writer for the Chicago Sun-Times called Earle "a visionary symbol of the New Traditionalist movement in country music."

In 1994, two staff members at Warner/Chappell publishing company, and Earle's former manager, John Dotson, created an in-house CD of Earle's songs entitled Uncut Gems and showcased it to some recording artists in Nashville. This resulted in several of Earle's songs being recorded by Travis Tritt, Stacy Dean Campbell and Robert Earl Keen. After his recording hiatus, Earle released Train a Comin' on Winter Harvest Records and it was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album in 1996. The album was characterized as a return to the "folksy acoustic" sound of his early career.

In 1996 Earle formed his own record label, E-Squared Records, and released the album, I Feel Alright, which combined the musical sounds of country, rock and rockabilly. Earle released the album El Corazon (The Heart) in 1997 which one reviewer called "the capstone of this [Earle's] remarkable comeback".

According to Earle, he wrote the song "Over Yonder" about a death row inmate with whom he exchanged letters before attending his execution in 1998. He made a foray into bluegrass influenced music in 1999 when he released the album, The Mountain with the Del McCoury Band. In 2000, Earle recorded his album Transcendental Blues, which features the song Galway Girl.

2000 to present

Earle presented excerpts of his poetry and fiction writing at the 2000 New Yorker Festival. His collection of short stories called Doghouse Roses was published in June 2011 and his novel, I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive was published in the spring of 2011. Earle wrote and produced an off-Broadway play about the death of Karla Faye Tucker, the first woman executed since the death penalty was reinstated in Texas.

In the early 2000s Earle's album, Jerusalem expressed his anti-war, anti-death penalty and his other "leftist views". The album's song "John Walker's Blues", about the captured American Taliban fighter John Walker Lindh created controversy. Earle responded by appearing on a variety of news and editorial programs and defended the song and his views on patriotism and terrorism. His subsequent tour featured the Jerusalem album and was released as the live album Just an American Boy in 2003.

In 2004, Earle released the album, The Revolution Starts Now, a collection of songs influenced by the Iraq War and the policies of the George W. Bush administration and won a Grammy for best contemporary folk album. The title song was used by General Motors in a TV advertisement. The album was released during the U.S. presidential campaign.

The song "The Revolution Starts Now" was used in the promotional materials for Michael Moore's anti-war documentary film Fahrenheit 9/11 and appears on the album Songs and Artists That Inspired Fahrenheit 9/11. That year, Earle was the subject of a documentary DVD called Just An American Boy.

In 2006, Earle contributed a cover of Randy Newman's song "Rednecks" to the tribute album Sail Away: The Songs of Randy Newman. Earle hosted a radio show on Air America from August 2004 until June 2007. Later he began hosting a show called Hardcore Troubadour on the Outlaw Country channel. Earle is also the subject of two biographies, Steve Earle: Fearless Heart, Outlaw Poet, by David McGee and Hardcore Troubadour: The Life and Near Death of Steve Earle by Lauren St John.

In September 2007, Earle released his twelfth studio album, Washington Square Serenade, on New West Records. Earle recorded the album after relocating to New York City, and was his first use of digital audio recording. The disc features Earle's wife, Allison Moorer, on "Days Aren't Long Enough" and "Down Here Below." The album includes Earle's version of Tom Waits' song "Way Down in the Hole" which was the theme song for the fifth season of The Wire in which Earle appeared as the character Walon. In 2008, Earle produced Joan Baez's album Day After Tomorrow. (Prior to their collaboration on Day After Tomorrow, Baez had covered two Earle songs, "Christmas in Washington" and "Jerusalem," on previous albums; "Jerusalem" had also become a staple of Baez' concerts.) In the winter, he toured Europe and North America in support of Washington Square Serenade, performing both solo and with a disc jockey.

On May 12, 2009, Earle released a tribute album, Townes, on New West Records. The album contained 15 songs written by Townes Van Zandt. Guest artists appearing on the album included Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, Moorer, and his son Justin. The album earned Earle a third Grammy award, again for best contemporary folk album.

In 2010 Earle was awarded the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty's Shining Star of Abolition award. Earle has recorded two other anti-death penalty songs: "Billy Austin", and "Ellis Unit One" for the 1995 film Dead Man Walking.

Earle released his first novel and fourteenth studio album, both entitled I'll Never Get Out Of This World Alive after a Hank Williams song, in the spring of 2011. The album was released on April 26, 2011 and was produced by T Bone Burnett and deals with questions of mortality with a "more country" sound than his earlier work. During the second half of his 2011 tour with The Dukes and Duchesses and Moorer, the drum kit was adorned with the slogan "we are the 99%" a reference to the Occupy movement of September 2011.

On February 17, 2015, Earle released his sixteenth studio album, Terraplane.

On September 10, 2015, Earle & the Dukes released a new internet single titled "'Mississippi, It's Time". The song's lyrics are directed towards the state of Mississippi and their refusal to abandon the Confederate Flag and remove it from their state flag. The song was released for sale the following day with all proceeds going towards the Civil Rights organization Southern Poverty Law Center.

On June 10, 2016, Earle released an album of duets with Shawn Colvin, titled simply Colvin And Earle, which was accompanied by a tour in London and the U.S.

Personal life

Earle has been married seven times, including twice to the same woman. He married Sandra "Sandy" Henderson in Houston at the age of 18, but left her to move to Nashville a year later where he met and married his second wife, Cynthia Dunn. Earle married his third wife, Carol-Ann Hunter, who gave birth to his son, singer-songwriter Justin Townes Earle.

Next, he married Lou-Anne Gill (with whom he had a second son) and then his fifth wife, Teresa Ensenat, who was an A&R executive for Geffen Records at the time. Earle then married Lou-Anne Gill a second time, and finally, in 2005, married singer-songwriter Allison Moorer with whom he had a son, John Henry Earle, in April 2010. John Henry was diagnosed with autism before turning 2. In March 2014, Earle announced that he and Moorer had separated.

In 1993 Earle was arrested for possession of heroin and in 1994, for cocaine and "weapons possession".

A judge sentenced him to a year in jail after he admitted possession and failed to appear in court. Earle was released from jail after serving 60 days of his sentence. Earle then completed an outpatient drug treatment program at the Cedarwood Center in Hendersonville, Tennessee. As a recovering heroin addict, Earle has used his experience in his songwriting. Earle's sister, Stacey Earle, is also a musician and songwriter.

Earle is outspoken with his political views, and often addresses them in his lyrics and in interviews. Politically he identifies as a socialist, but tends to vote for Democratic candidates, despite not agreeing entirely with their politics.

During the 2016 election he expressed support for Bernie Sanders, whom he considered to have pushed Hillary Clinton to the left on important issues.

Earle is a vocal opponent of capital punishment, which he considers his primary area of political activism. Several of his songs have provided descriptions of the experiences of death row inmates. He is also pro-choice on abortion, and has argued that rich Americans have always had access to abortions, and that the political issue in the US is really whether poor women should have access. His novel I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive describes the life of a morphine-addicted doctor in San Antonio before Roe v. Wade who treats gunshot wounds and provides illegal abortions to poor women.

Collaborations