
          Steve Earle's Hope on the Highway
          By Orr, JayJay Orr
          Vol. 8, No. 3, 1986, pp. 19-21
          
          Steve Earle has caused a stir in the Nashville music industry with
the release of his debut album, Guitar Town, on MCA records. In
February 1985, I first saw Earle and his rock 'n' roll band, the
Dukes, in the basement of a high-rise residence hall at Vanderbilt
University. On that Friday night he played to a disappointing
turnout. Despite the small draw-fifty or seventy-five at most - Earle
appeared shy and retreating, but engaging all the same. His four
single releases on the Epic label had not achieved any commercial
success, and Earle's performance had a devil-may-care quality. Now he
has signed with the Nashville (read "country") office of another major
label, and Guitar Town, with its fetching combination
of rock rhythms, socially-conscious themes, and pedal steel and
twangin' guitars, has won the attentive ear of this town and the
nation.
          In his first single from Guitar Town, "Hillbilly
Highway," Earle sings in the voice of a character whose lineage has
always answered the call of opportunity. Grandfather left home and the
mines for a job in Detroit; as a young man, father also goes
away-first to college and then to a job in Houston; and the narrator
quits school to learn guitar and become a musician.

          Earle himself left school after the eighth grade for the same
reasons. From his home near San Antonio, Earle traveled around Texas
and Mexico, associating with and learning from older songwriters like
Townes Van Zant (for whom his son is named), Richard Dobson, Rodney
Crowell, and Guy Clark. He put in a stint as a bassist in Clark's
band.
          Earle moved to Nashville in 1974, where he worked at the usual odd
jobs (tennis court builder, billboard hanger, carpenter) while he
nurtured his musical ability in bars, honky tonks, and coffee
houses. He also went through three marriages in pursuit of his elusive
dream to become a successful songwriter.
          In 1982 a small independent Nashville label, LSI, issued Earle's
premier recording, a four-song disc entitled Pink and Black. He signed
with Epic in 1983, and that label released four respectable,
rockabilly-style singles over the next two years.
          During the lean years Earle did score as a songwriter. His songs
were recorded by Carl Perkins and Waylon Jennings, and by younger
artists like Vince Gill and Steve Wariner. Johnny Lee had a top ten
hit with "When You Fall in Love," a song from the early LSI ep, with
help from vocalist Kim Wilson of Austin's Fabulous Thunderbirds.
          Guitar Town appears when Nashville record offices are scrambling to
re-establish an identity that will appeal both to traditional country
audiences and to the record-buying youth market. "Urban Cowboy" chic
has faded, and country music sales figures show a corresponding
decline relative to the years of abnormal prosperity. Country label
executives have gone in search of artists like Gill, Wariner, Marty
Stewart, Dwight Yoakum (with whom Earle is frequently compared), Randy
Travis, Sweethearts of the Rodeo, T. Graham Brown, Rodney Crowell, and
Rosanne Cash, in hopes that the more progressive images of those
artists will help shed the rural, provincial stereotype associated
with country music. Of this crop of new artists only Earle has made an
aggressive charge at the problems confronting blue-collar youth in
rural communities.
          Some of Earle's compositions have a political and 

social
perspective that parallels the recent work of rock musicians Bruce
Springsteen and John Cougar Mellencamp. This might surprise some,
coming as it does from a Nashville artist who, in his MCA biography,
says of his music: "It's country 'cause I talk like this. And it's
country because I write lyrics, and I tell stories, and I record in
Nashville." Political statements by country artists and on Nashville
recordings have often distinguished themselves by their conservative,
reactionary attitudes rather than by any progressive urges. Songs like
Merle Haggard's "Okie from Muskogee," "The Fighting Side of Me," and
"Are the Good Times Really Over," and, more recently, Lee Greenwood's
"God Bless the U. S. A.," and Kenny Rogers's "The Pride is Back," have
extolled the patriotic status quo and made country artists popular
visitors to the White House during the Johnson, Carter, Nixon, and
Reagan administrations.
          Earle maintains a different music tradition, as common as the
penchant for jingoistic themes but seldom acknowledged by those who
would dismiss all country music as right-wing hayseed warblings. Like
recent releases by Hank Williams Jr. ("This ain't Dallas"), Alabama
(~40 Hour Week"), and Dwight Yoakum ("Miner's Prayer"), Earle
champions frustrated working men and women, and disillusioned young
people in anthemic couplets like the one in "Good Ol' Boy (Gettin'
Tough)": Gettin' tough /Just My Luck/I was born in the
land of plenty now there ain't enough/Get/in' cold/I've been
told/Nowadays it just don't pay to be a good ol' boy.
          In "Someday," the interstate highway hides a small town from
motorists bound for Memphis, but it also promises a way out for the
narrator who frets over the narrative possibilities:
          
            There ain't a lot that you can do in this town/ You
drive down to the lake and then you turn back around/ You go to school
and you learn to read and write/ So you can walk into the county bank
and sign away your life.
          
          Earle also writes of the personal reverberations of life in a
changing and uncertain time. "Goodbye's All We Got Left," "My Old
Friend the Blues," "Think It Over," and "Down the Road," (Earle's
closing song in live performances) touch emotional places left tender
by daily anxieties. "Little Rock 'n' Roller" will affect all who have
had to communicate over miles with a little loved one.
          In an interview with Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times, Earle
offered an assessment of the role he hopes his songs can fill:
          "In the end, you either cheer people up [with your songs] or help
them exorcise some problems they have--and people need a bit of both
right now. The mood of the country as a whole is that things aren't as
they are being advertised. Lots of people are going hungry. Even more
have had to downscale their expectations. They are confused. They
remember everything they heard about this country in school and they
wonder what happened to it."
          With the help of a strong band, bright production, and appealing
melodies, Earle's powerful lyrical offerings do cheer and exorcise at
once.
          Guitar Town has won acclaim from pop music's critical heavyweights,
and Earle has toured nationally with another group of critics'
darlings, the Replacements, a hard-edged rock band from
Minneapolis. In his interview with Hilburn, Earle promised that his
next album, "will lean more toward social observation and commentary
than [Guitar Town]." Good news for those of us who hope Nashville and
country musicians can continue to produce music with regional,
cultural, and social importance.
          
            Jay Orr works at the library of the Country Music
Foundation in Nashville.
          
        